All posts by Richard
Raining Blood
MMP Review
In the 2011 Referendum on the Voting System, held in conjunction with the General Election on 26 November, the majority of voters chose to keep MMP as New Zealand’s voting system.
This triggered an independent review of MMP, conducted by the Electoral Commission, in which all of us can have our say on any changes we’d like to see made to the way MMP works.
TODAY (5 April) is the deadline for submissions for those wanting to present in person to the Commission. Submissions must be lodged with the Commission by midnight on 5 April.
You can make a quick submission. Or you can make a full submission. To make a quick submission, all you have to write is, e.g.,
I believe that to achieve better representation the MMP threshold should be lowered to 2.5%.
Let’s give freedom-friendly parties such as the ALCP and the Libz a better chance next time. And dissuade people from committing “the ends justify the means” atrocities such as “strategically voting” for John Banks to get Don Brash into Parliament.
In the words of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
What you are about to do, do quickly (John 13:27)
Okay, so that was quoted totally out of context. Never mind. Just SUBMIT! DO IT NOW!
See that bird?
An excerpt from Richard Feynman’s What is Science?
Regarding this business about names and words, I would tell you another story. We used to go up to the Catskill Mountains for vacations. In New York, you go the Catskill Mountains for vacations. The poor husbands had to go to work during the week, but they would come rushing out for weekends and stay with their families. On the weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about nature, and so on, in the process. But the other children, friends of mine also wanted to go, and tried to get my father to take them. He didn’t want to, because he said I was more advanced. I’m not trying to tell you how to teach, because what my father was doing was with a class of just one student; if he had a class of more than one, he was incapable of doing it.
So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those day’s as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, “See that bird standing on the stump there? What’s the name of it?”
I said, “I haven’t got the slightest idea.”
He said, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you much about science.”
I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn’t tell me anything about the bird. He taught me “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird—you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,” and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.
What is Science? was presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966).
Low skilled workers: Go to Hell!
Libertarianz Party leader Dr. Richard McGrath has visited here before … and, judging by the title of yesterday’s press release, I think he must have been reading my series of posts on Hell.
National Party Throws Low Skilled Workers into the Furnace
Monday, 2 April 2012
Press Release: Libertarianz Party
National Party Throws Low Skilled Workers into the FurnaceLibertarianz leader Richard McGrath described the government’s decision to raise the minimum wage as short-sighted command-and-control interference in the economy, and predicted it will cost jobs.
“Raising the minimum wage to $13.50 an hour means anyone whose productivity falls below that level is now even more likely to be laid off,” he said.
“Clearly, Kate Wilkinson would rather have unemployed 16 and 17 year olds sitting at home on their Playstations earning $3.82 an hour on the dole, than earning $10 an hour in training or $13 an hour in a job.”
“This speaks volumes about the priorities and the economic literacy of this government. Like the Labour one before them, they believe it acceptable to consign unskilled kids to the scrap heap by pricing them off the job market, as long as it looks good.”
“If Kate Wilkinson thinks repeated upward adjustments of the minimum wage are just and viable, why doesn’t she lift it to $100 an hour?”
“The Libertarianz Party is the only political party in this country that would help low skilled school leavers and others into work by abolishing the minimum wage, thus allowing a fluctuating jobs market to determine the price of labour.”
“This would create a more transparent relationship between the skill level required for different occupations, the relative overall value of these jobs, and the supply of people willing and able to be employed in them.”
“Without the minimum wage distorting the job market, it is likely that anyone truly willing to work would be able to find a job commensurate with their talents and abilities.”
“Minimum wage laws cause false signals to be generated about the worth of various occupations, which is cruel and misleading for low skilled people who wish to work. My party is saddened to see National going down the Muldoonist road yet again.”
Libertarianz: More Freedom, Less Government
www.libertarianz.org.nzDr Richard McGrath
Libertarianz Leader
Phone: 027 322 2907
Email: richard.mcgrath@libertarianz.org.nz
Throwing low skilled workers into the “fiery furnace” like weeds (Matthew 13:42) is exactly what National’s decision to increase the minimum wage amounts to. In effect, National is telling low skilled workers: Go to Hell!
I prefer the new-fangled “trash” to the old-fashioned “fire” metaphor. Of course, it is the National Party and their wealth-destroying poverty-trap-perpetuating minimum wage laws that should be consigned to the waste-basket of history, not the State-forsaken low skilled workers.
Thanks, Richard, for one hell of a press release!
Lost Keys
Hell in the Teachings of Jesus (Part 2)
This is the tenth in a 13-part series wherein I give you Hell, a little booklet by the inimitable Dr. Jeff Obadiah Simmonds.
Another text used to prove the existence of hell as a place of suffering is where Jesus referred to a place of misery where there would be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 25.30). Jesus was contrasting those who are in “the Kingdom of God” with those who are excluded from the Kingdom and mourn their unfortunate situation. We tend to project the Kingdom of God into the after-life—”the Kingdom of God” means “heaven,” and therefore those who are weeping and gnashing are therefore also in the after-life, but deprived of entry into heaven, and are therefore in hell.
I would see things somewhat differently. The Kingdom of God exists where-ever God’s rule is manifested. Obviously God’s rule is manifested in heaven, but the purpose of Christ’s coming was to bring this rule—the Kingdom—to earth. The Kingdom of God is therefore not something we enter when we die, but when we submit to God’s dominion by becoming the disciples of Jesus. Those who are outside this dominion are deprived of life and meaning and will suffer. The picture which Jesus presents in His parables are not necessarily of judgement in the after-life.
Jesus taught the coming of this Kingdom—an invasion of God’s rule into this world—in which the rich and powerful would be deprived of wealth and power. In that day, says Jesus, they “will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 8.12) while those who are currently marginalised will sit down to feast in God’s great banquet. But this is not a picture of what will happen when we die, but when this world is transformed by the Gospel and the Kingdom.
As such, the image of weeping and gnashing does not provide evidence of eternal torment of the wicked in hell.
However, some of these “weeping and gnashing of teeth” texts do seem to refer to the Judgement. But here the image of burning fire is used. In the parable of the weeds, for example, Jesus speaks of the wheat being brought into God’s barn, while the weeds are “tied in bundles to be burned” (Mt 13.30). Again, while judgement by fire may be read as an eternal torture in hell, it may more reasonably be read as a metaphor of judgement and destruction—weeds are not subjected to eternal burning, but are thrown into a fire so that they may be consumed and be no more. However, Jesus explains this parable and says that those who cause sin will be weeded out of His kingdom and the angels will “will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 13.41-42). The question is whether the weeping and gnashing constitutes conclusive evidence that those thrown into the fire will be consciously tortured for all eternity.
Will the wicked weep and gnash their teeth while they are being consumed by fire—a short-lived pain which ends in their destruction, or shall we assume that Jesus is speaking an eternity of torture? The Scripture is ambiguous in that the case can be argued either way. I would suggest, however, that the image of fire as destruction tips the scales in favour of an annihilationist interpretation.
A similar parable occurs in Mt 13.47-50. The judgement is compared to the separation of fish caught in a net. The unrighteous, who are “thrown into the fiery furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” are compared to unkosher fish which are “thrown away”. The point that inedible fish are destroyed, like the weeds, and not subjected to enduring torment again may point in the direction of destruction, and not torment, of the unsaved.
Annihilationists say that the annihilation of the wicked is eternal—this sentence will never be reversed. As such, this extinction of being is eternal punishment.
What are you?
In a footnote to his paper God and Objectivism: A Critique of Objectivist Philosophy of Religion published in JARS, Stephen Parrish says
I find it difficult to ascertain exactly what Objectivists believe about the mind and the body. They reject substance dualism, yet also reject any sort of reductionism. It seems to me that their view of the mind-body relation is a sort of nonreductive physicalism. In this view, what really exists is matter—specifically, the brain, and the mind supervenes on, or is realized by the brain. This means that the mind does not exist apart from the brain, but cannot be reduced to it, by which it is meant that it cannot be totally explained in terms of the physical makeup of the brain. Writes William Thomas (n.d.a) on the mind-body relation:
What we call the mind is the set of capacities to be aware, to perceive the world, to think about it, to feel, to value, to make choices. How do these capacities arise? In many respects, the answer to that question must come from science, not philosophy. But everything we know indicates that they are the product of biological evolution and that they depend on our physical sense organs and brain, as well as on the many other support structures that the body provides.
Even the above, is not all that clear and could be interpreted in terms of either property dualism or nonreductive physicalism. I think that the latter fits in better with the overall picture of reality that Objectivists espouse. Actually, the mind-body problem is another area in which Objectivists need to work. …
Get to work, Objectivists!
Tell me, do you accept or reject substrate independence? Substrate independence is the claim that
conscious minds could in principle be implemented not only on carbon-based biological neurons (such as those inside your head) but also on some other computational substrate such as silicon-based processors.
In other words
what allows you to have conscious experiences is not the fact that your brain is made of squishy, biological matter but rather that it implements a certain computational architecture.
Do you accept or reject this claim?
[Cross-posted to The Third Watch.]
More Orr
In my post on Monday last week I featured Mark Hubbard’s letter to the editor of The Press re Ken Orr of Right to Life re voluntary euthanasia. This was Ken Orr’s reply.
In reply to Mark Hubbard, we don’t own our lives – they are a gift from God. We are the custodians of that gift. The foundation stone of a civilised society is the social contract that we have that requires us to respect and protect the lives of every member of the community from conception to natural death. Our laws should uphold that social contract. The taking of a life is a grave injustice. There is no human right recognised by any United Nations Convention that would permit doctors to kill their patients or assist their suicide. Parliament would be in dereliction of its duty to society by violating this social contract and legislating to allow for euthanasia. Advocates of euthanasia are asking the rest of society to accept the collective guilt for taking of life. Euthanasia would result, as in Holland, in many others being deprived of their lives without their consent.
Let’s take a closer look.
we don’t own our lives – they are a gift from God. We are the custodians of that gift.
I already fielded this one. Your custodianship of your life means that voluntary euthanasia is acceptable under some circumstances, viz., those circumstances under which it is desirable.
You don’t own your life. God does. Your life is God’s property and He’s entrusted it to you. You are His servant. … God gave me – not you, not anyone else, and most certainly not the state – custodianship of my life. So it is up to me what I do with it.
And here’s what Ken Orr has to say on his website.
Euthanasia is allowing doctors to kill their patients or to assist in their suicide. This is not a religious issue, as some might suggest
So why mention that our lives are a gift from God in the first place?
The foundation stone of a civilised society is the social contract that we have that requires us to respect and protect the lives of every member of the community from conception to natural death. Our laws should uphold that social contract.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the foundation stone of a civilised society is the social contract, and assume that this social contract is worth more than the paper it isn’t written on. What’s in the contract? Not a requirement to respect and protect the lives of every member of the community, but a requirement to respect and protect the right to life of every member of the community. There’s a world of difference between a right to a thing, and the thing itself.
Advocates of euthanasia are asking the rest of society to accept the collective guilt for taking of life.
I can’t see how Orr came to this conclusion. Collective guilt? What about individual freedom and personal responsibility?!
On his Right To Life website Ken Orr quotes from a press release on euthanasia from the Inter Church Bioethics Council.
Ethically, there is a significant difference between actively/assisting in killing another person and withdrawing (or with-holding) treatment so that the person dies as a result of their illness.
In both situations the intent of the action is critical. In forms of euthanasia, the intent is to relieve suffering by killing. By contrast, when treatment is futile and is stopped or withheld, palliative care given by skilled professionals who address the pain and suffering caused by terminal illness, provides the best means to respond compassionately to terminal illness and suffering. The intention here is to address the many needs of the suffering person and their family, and to enable a dignified pain-free death. Another ethical consideration is that health care professionals are trained and trusted to promote health and well being and provide appropriate treatment for the living and dying. They are trusted not to cause death.
and also says
At the outset, we should define what is euthanasia. Euthanasia is allowing doctors to kill their patients or to assist in their suicide. … Euthanasia is not the withholding or withdrawing of treatment from a patient who is in a terminal condition when that treatment would be futile or burdensome. It is also not euthanasia for a doctor to administer medication for the purpose of pain relief to a patient when it may also have the effect of shortening the patient’s life; this constitutes good palliative care. The objective is to relieve pain and suffering, not shorten the life of the patient.
Dying and in pain and wishing you were gone? Ask your doctor “to enable a dignified pain-free death.” Insist on “good palliative care”!
Euthanasia by stealth.
1 Timothy 6:20-21
Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith.
Grace be with you all. (NIV)