Beard Of Wisdom.com

This discussion with Michael Cook has some good arguments. Among the most interesting quotes:

“I would see Constantine as a necessary precondition for Muhammad.”

“There is a significant difference between the obligations involved in aggressive and defensive jihad. In offensive jihad, provided somebody is doing it, nobody else has to bother. By contrast, with defensive jihad, anybody in the area that’s being attacked by the unbelievers — any adult male has a duty, prima facie, of participating in that jihad.”

[I think the implications of this or the War on Terror are pretty obvious.]

“Now, it’s not just that moderate, wishy-washy liberal Christians in this country don’t believe they ought to hate their parents; even the Christian fundamentalists don’t think they should hate their parents, and yet Jesus said it. I’m sure they have ways of getting off the hook in the same way Muslims can find all sorts of ways of getting off their hooks. The fact it’s there in scripture doesn’t have much predictive value — maybe none at all. So much comes down to the context in which people are doing things with scripture.”

“[Fundamentalism is] not just being pious or zealous, or for that matter fanatical; it’s specifically that you want to go back to the roots of your tradition. There are plenty of people who don’t want to go back to the roots of their tradition; they want the tradition as it came down to them. Hindus are typically like that. Fundamentalism is when you want to go back.”

[Among the more minor issues this raises: does this mean the KJV-Only movement isn’t fundamentalist…just conservative?]

Share This

• Comments (0)

I know this news that’s about a week old, which in this day and age is just about ancient history, but I have yet to really see much that was resolved by the recent break-through in stem cell research.  This NRO article sees this as a vindication of pursuing “ethical science,” and the title of this NY Times article seems to indicate that they think the “stem cell war” is reaching its conclusion.  But I’m not convinced. 

 Oh, of course, the particular issue seems to be resolved–I doubt there will be many people out there campaigning or picketing in order to continue embryonic stem cell research.  Nevertheless, the real issues that made the question of embryonic stem cell research a heated debate are not resolved.

 Let’s face it folks–it’s been nine years since this debate got kicked off.  That’s nine years in which stem cell research was hampered in some way, shape, or form.  Sure, the editors at NRO can say that this break through shows why we can stick to our moral guns while still practicing science, but what about all the research that could have already been accomplished?  What about those people who were unable to reap the potential benefits because the pro-lifers got a burr up our butts about a couple-day-old embryos?  Don’t get me wrong–I think the ban on embryonic stem cell research was the right call to make, but simply because we can do stem cell research without having to destroy embryos right now does not automatically mean that the ban was therefore the right ethical or moral decision back then.  There are legit ethical questions that cut both ways, and in order to have any real resolution to these issues, we’ve gotta address more fundamental questions, such as Which set ethics are right? and Why are the others wrong?

Just for the record, I don’t think you can ultimately do this without talking about who God is, and what he has revealed to us about himself.  I’m not saying that to try and make this merely a religious issue–it’s just to say that if we want to find any answers that are worth their salt, I don’t think we can ignore the religious, theological, or philosophical issues involved.

Share This

• Comments (0)

The most recent PhD comic got me thinking. Conventional wisdom, even among fairly liberal people, seems to be that communism will always fail because people are too greedy to share–call it “the Tragedy Of The Commons,” if you like, or “the Incentive Problem.” But I don’t think this is historically true.

As in the comic, or in The Onion (and again here), the assumption seems to be that Communism establishes a communal set of goods which tempts people to take more than their fair share, so the system breaks down. But can anyone think of a Communist or socialist country in history that has ever managed to accumulate such a set of communal goods to be shared? I can’t. Because in order to get that community stock of goods, you have to confiscate them from their prior owners, which means you have to centralize power and probably use violence. Human nature being what it is, there will always be someone who will hijack this mechanism for his own benefit. [Obvious Cliched Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) So, long before the Tragedy Of The Commons or the Incentive Problem rear their ugly heads, there will be tyranny.

Thus the problem with Communism isn’t that it always breaks down, but that it can never really begin. In this sense die-hard Marxists are right, Communism has never actually existed. But they fail to realize that people are people, and it doesn’t matter how long they fantasize, communism can never work and will always devolve into bloody tyranny.

Obviously Communism is dead, but I think this is still an important point because of the eternal allure of schemes that promise that we can just start over from scratch. We can’t. Everything happens in a historical context, and Communism’s real failing is that it doesn’t recognize this. Communists are so busy fantasizing over how the world will be that they usually don’t give much thought to how they’ll accomplish the preliminary step from the world-as-it-is to the world-with-goods-consolidated. But it’s exactly this step that will end in gulags and unmarked graves, long before the Incentive Problem ever shows up.

Share This

• Comments (9)

I saw this movie tonight with two friends of mine, one active Mormon and one former Mormon. We all agreed that it’s basically anti-Mormon propaganda, since it takes the most negative possible side in the ongoing controversy over the LDS Church’s role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and there’s only one Mormon in the entire movie who’s not a total psychopath. Also, the movie makers apparently think Brigham Young was English, maybe because every good bad guy has to be.

My assumption, even before seeing the movie, was that it would be a thinly veiled allegory suggesting that all conservative religion will eventually end in mass murder. I let my expectations mislead me, because I didn’t figure out the movie’s real motives even after seeing it, although one of my friends did. (No, it’s not a product of the Giuliani campaign.) While I’m sure many people involved in the production, it seems to me including the producer, saw it as a way to warn against generic “religious extremism,” that wasn’t the screenwriter’s agenda. Her website and this interview make it clear that she meant the movie as a conservative Christian attack on Mormonism. Her bias is definitely apparent when she describes Mountain Meadows as “the first act of religious terrorism in the United States”–ignoring not only nativist violence but also the widespread persecution of Mormons before they migrated to Utah. In fact, violence against Mormons gets only a couple passing references in the entire movie, while violence by Mormons is played up to the hilt.

Also, Michael Medved makes two good points: 1) Hollywood won’t make movies in which Muslims are terrorists; and this is explained by 2) Salt Lake City’s not engulfed in riots at the moment, and no one firebombed the theater while I was there.

Finally, I’ve been the only person posting on here for a couple weeks. I’m not posting again until someone else does!

Share This

• Comments (7)

This raises an interesting question: in what way are children not rationally self-interested? How can we justify depriving any of them of their natural rights?

Share This

• Comments (2)

The typical conservative responses to homosexuality often rely heavily upon how “unnatural” homosexuality is. Dr. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for example, posted these comments on his blog (posted July 30):

Our language has reached some important natural limits of meaning. A recent media report considered the increasing number of homosexual couples, both male and female, who are now “having babies.” Well, these same-sex couples are not “having” babies in the sense that language has customarily been used. When a same-sex couple “has” a baby, everyone knows that there is more to the story. A homosexual couple simply cannot “have” a baby the same way that a heterosexual couple can. This is a matter of the natural order and biology, not mere social custom.

And a little later on the same post:

This is a very important observation — and a crucial reminder that the natural order of things has a way of asserting itself in the end. Mr. Young [the author of an article to which Dr. Mohler is responding] wants people to “understand that gays are utterly normal.” And this would mean that the issue “never crosses people’s minds” — that no one notices anything unusual when two men hold hands or if a man says “meet my husband.”

Share This

• Continue reading this post...

• Comments (0)

Crowd: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!Jerry: Today’s guests are here because they can’t agree on fundamental philosophical principles. I’d like to welcome Todd to the show.

Todd enters from backstage.

Jerry: Hello, Todd.

Todd: Hi, Jerry.

Jerry: (reading from card) So, Todd, you’re here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?

Todd: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it’s been nothing but fighting ever since.

Jerry: Why is that?

Todd: You see, Jerry, I’m a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the “I” or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.

Crowd: Ooooohhhh!

Todd: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?

Jerry: So what do you want to tell her today?

Todd: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we’re through. I just can’t go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn’t believe I exist.

Jerry: Well, you’re going to get your chance. Here’s Ursula!

Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.

You’ll have to read the rest of it from here.

Glen Whitman’s Cal State, Northridge page is pretty interesting.

Share This

• Comments (1)