Jesus is a real living person.
The reality of Jesus is not just an article of faith. It’s a testable hypothesis!
Well, what are you waiting for? Take the test! I did. (Yes, take that as a warning …)
Category Archives: Philosophy
How many legs does a donkey have if you call the tail a leg?
[Reprised from SOLO, March 2008. Does calling a civil union a gay marriage make it a marriage?!]
The gut notion of objectivity is captured in an anecdote from the life of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and a political colleague were discussing how to get a policy across and the colleague suggested labelling the policy in a certain way; they happened to be near a donkey and their dialogue went like this:
‘Sir, how many legs does this donkey have?’
‘Four, Mr. Lincoln.’
‘And how many tails has it?’
‘Why, just one, Mr. Lincoln.’
‘Tell me, sir, what if we were to call the tail a leg; how many legs would the donkey then have?’
‘Five, Mr. Lincoln.’
‘No, sir; for you cannot make a tail into a leg by calling it one.’Saying doesn’t make it so.
Lloyd Reinhardt, Warranted Doability
God is a Trinity, so is Man.
St Paul. (2Thes5vs23)
“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the comming of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
St Paul clearly teaches that we are more than mere Material beings, more than mere machines.
We are Not Robots! We are not Computorised Automations!
Politics and the English Language
Politics and the English Language is an essay written by George Orwell in 1946.
Here are some excerpts.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying … And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and … one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright,
I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.
Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say
In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that
than to say
I think.
If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.
This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. … There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could … be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible … to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.
If you’ve read this far, then you’re probably chomping at the bit to start applying Orwell’s rules for writing—and thinking!—in clear, fresh, plain language.
Here are a couple of sentences from a well-known political writer.
Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting abstractions into concretes, or, more precisely, into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units.
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to reverse engineer them into plain English.
[Model answers are here.]
The serpent-windings of utilitarianism
Judicial or juridical punishment (poena forensis) is to be distinguished from natural punishment (poena naturalis), in which crime as vice punishes itself, and does not as such come within the cognizance of the legislator. Juridical punishment can never be administered merely as a means for promoting another good either with regard to the criminal himself or to civil society, but must in all cases be imposed only because the individual on whom it is inflicted has committed a crime. For one man ought never to be dealt with merely as a means subservient to the purpose of another…
[W]oe to him who creeps through the serpent-windings of utilitarianism to discover some advantage that may discharge him from the justice of punishment, or even from the due measure of it, according to the Pharisaic maxim: “It is better that one man should die than that the whole people should perish.” For if justice and righteousness perish, human life would no longer have any value in the world.
What, then, is to be said of such a proposal as to keep a criminal alive who has been condemned to death, on his being given to understand that, if he agreed to certain dangerous experiments being performed upon him, he would be allowed to survive if he came happily through them? It is argued that physicians might thus obtain new information that would be of value to the commonweal. But a court of justice would repudiate with scorn any proposal of this kind if made to it by the medical faculty; for justice would cease to be justice, if it were bartered away for any consideration whatever.
– Immanuel Kant, The Science of Right
[Reprised from SOLO.]
Honest Ex Atheist Anthony Flew… Fan of St Paul, and Christ.
This is now.
(Suppose, for the sake of argument.) God created the heavens and the earth … the sun, the moon, the stars, the skies, the land, the seas … the plants, the animals … and mankind. All in the space of six days! (By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.)
How did he do it?
To some it may seem presumptuous even to ask how God went about the business of creation. But mankind is a curious creature. His inquiring mind wants to know. Humans (some of them) thirst for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. That’s why we have philosophy and science and why, today (thank God), we live in a technologically advanced age. The gains in scientific knowledge made since the Enlightenment are nothing short of stupendous.
And now we know.
We now know, for example, that the several references in the Old Testament to God “stretching out the heavens” refer to the metric expansion of space which is a key feature of Big Bang cosmology. We now know that the Universe had its origin in a moment of creation some 13.75 billion years ago.
Let it be said, however, that cosmology is a better example of human ignorance than human knowledge. We’re still in the dark about so many of the fundamentals. Dark matter and dark energy are aptly named. But in other branches of science we know a great deal more. We know so much, in fact, that we can, and do, “play God”. To illustrate this point, here is a recent news headline.
In First, Software Emulates Lifespan of Entire Organism
We’ve mapped the human genome. We’ve mapped the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium and run software simulations of the entire organism. We’ve even constructed artificial life (assuming, of course, that a virus can truly be called a living thing), building it from scratch in a laboratory, one RNA molecule at a time. And this is only the prelude to what is to come.
We know how animals (albeit, very small ones) are made. We know how they work. We can simulate them. We can even build them ourselves.
Where am I heading with this? Actually, this post is for my co-blogger, Tim. God made animals, but he also made the human mind. I anticipate that one day we will find out how the human mind is made. We’ll run a simulation of a human mind on the powerful computers of the not-too-distant future.
The time is short.
That was then.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning —the first day.
And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning —the second day.
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. ” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning —the third day.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning —the fourth day.
And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning —the fifth day.
And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. ”
Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food. ” And it was so.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning —the sixth day. (NIV)
So goes the (main) Biblical account of creation. Implausible? Perhaps so. But no more so than the atheistic alternative.
I love the theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory of evolution (or the modern evolutionary synthesis, as it’s called these days) is a monumental intellectual achievement. It’s a thing of great beauty and power. Modern biology would be lost without it. (So, too, would modern atheism!) Nonetheless, as creationists never tire of reminding us, the theory of evolution is only a hypothesis.
I’ve studied biology. I’ve studied the philosophy of biology. I understand both the theory of evolution, and its philosophical implications. But most people don’t. (Most people haven’t read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.) Ayn Rand didn’t understand the theory of evolution. Or, she understood it well enough, and didn’t like its implications. I suspect the latter. Her one-time lieutenant (and lover) Nathaniel Branden recounts
I remember being astonished to hear her say one day, “After all, the theory of evolution is only a hypothesis.” I asked her, “You mean you seriously doubt that more complex life forms — including humans — evolved from less complex life forms?” She shrugged and responded, “I’m really not prepared to say,” or words to that effect.
Not prepared to say? Isn’t that evasion, Miss Rand? Surely not!
I have serious doubts about the theory of evolution. Because it has serious flaws. (I don’t like its implications, either.) Fatal flaws? I’m really not prepared to say.
How can a Good God exist when there is so much Evil in the world? (Part 4) Interlude.
Tyndale. Myrtred for Translating The Bible into English.
It has taken me several weeks to start writing this 4th part .
I have been stricken with a nasty does of the flu, and also had to take care of my baby boy, whom is likewise afflicted. This affected my ability to focus. And on top of this I have also been pondering how best to proceed , not from lack of material, but how best to systematically present it.
Now that I am over the worst of this Bot, the time for procrastination is over and I will now attempt to build upon the previous posts.
And I must say those previous posts have laid down some very important foundations, and moved the subject onto the heart of the matter.
The difficulty with moving forward is that are at least three main streams of thought which must flow together, and this tests my writing skills.
All hope of keeping this series brief is now in vain.
Those who seek to avoid the just judgment of the Almighty are legion.
They may all attempt divers means of escape, yet they all may be classified as belonging to one club.
The Club of Infidelity.
The members All argue that the Bible ought not to be believed to be the perfect and inerrant word of God.
They attack the existence of God.
They attack the reliability of the biblical claim to be Divine revelation.
And on top of a myriad of other angles, They attack the Moral character of the God it professes to Reveal.
And this series of blogposts is attempting to Defend the character of the God of the Bible, yet it is important to understand that this argument is but one sector of an all round assault on the veracity of the biblical claim to be the infallible word of God.
It is therefore absurd to attempt to discuss this subject of the character of the Biblical Deity in isolation of this greater question.
Now what is both interesting, and very important to appreciate about the above truth is that it separates those who, like myself believe the Bible is 100% reliable, from everyone else.
And thus the Bible believing Christian must be distinguished from those Christians who don’t believe the Bible is 100% reliable.
It is interesting to understand that the attacks upon the veracity of the bible do not merely come from outside the church, ie from atheists and heathens, but that Many/ most Christians have themselves come to accept many of the arguments which undermine faith in the trustworthiness of the scriptures, and thus have join ranks with the atheists and heathen in attacking the Bible believers position.
Furthermore not only do many so-called Christians think the Bible believers position is intellectually untenable, they relish the Idea with as much fervor as the infidel, and for the very same reasons.
Ie They don’t like portions of the scriptures, and seek to justify their rejection of them as authorotive with as much fervor as the infidel.
The main cause of this Christian Apostasy is that they have succumbed to the ‘Logic’ of the rationalist attacks on the trustworthiness of the scripture, and character of the God it describes.
What more this Rationalist skepticism is what hold sway in most of the centers of learning.
Bible believing Faith as I hold has been in retreat for over a century, and with the progression of atheist Materialism there has been a century of Anti-biblical rationalism so that my type of faith is now very rare in Academia, and very unpopular in general.
By shear force of numbers my position is today considered ‘Unenlightened’, Backward, and Barbaric… especially by contemporary Schooled Christian Intellectuals.
And of course the ‘Educated’ will always peer downward at their pitiable ‘uneducated’ fellows like myself.
Thus it is against the weight of the world that my faith must contend, and It is in a pond of utter contradiction and confusion which I must swim.
Why do I bother?
Because to my mind nothing less that the whole Christian faith is at stake, and the hope of Salvation via the Gospel as well!
All this, in my mind hangs upon the veracity of the Bible and it’s accuracy in respect to the character of God.
And to Defend the faith I must thwart the False dichotomy that Faith and Reason are opposites.
Accepting this false dichotomy Academia seek to present my bible believers position as mere superstition… and imply reason, (and all the arts of Learning) are squarely on their side.
And so it is under this incredible weight and ferocity with which faith in the trustworthiness of the Bible is assailed, that has caused the majority of Christians to surrender it, and to even go on the offensive… on the side of infidelity. And by doing this they will today swear by Heaven they are doing Gods work and are defending Christianity… from the block heads like me who trust the Bible!
Thus it may be thought the height of arrogance and futility on my part to dare defy such a universal army!
For Christs sake Tim Nobody believe the Bible anymore!
Not even the Christians are on your side!
Surely Tis a display a suicidal Fanaticism!
A testament to the impregnability of superstitious Ignorance!
Modern evolutionary Psychologists might reason that I, (along with most of the most the Religious whakos of the ages) suffer a deranged mind… a collection of perversely stupid genes…etc
Satan laughing spreads his wings.
It was by getting Adam to doubt God’s character and word, that he convinced his to disobey God and bring Death and separation from God upon himself and his offspring.
It is in the wisdom of apprehending this fundamental error that I refuse to abandon those precious pages which introduced me to my God and Saiour!
I stand upon the Rock!
I defy the Storms of infidelity.
Though the tempest Roars, my position is not moved.
My reputation means nothing.
What matters to me is my testimony to my Children, friends and loved ones, and that when I stand before my God that in some measure my life has made a difference for truth, righteousness, and salvation of the lost.
Though many ‘Credentialed’ fellows will attempt to smear me as being Anti-intellectual …anti-schooling, and therefore dismiss me with a wave of the hand… that is more a testament to their utterly caged minds, and vested interest in maintaining the charade that their schooling gives them a status above ‘rude amateurs’ like myself rather than a valid criticism. It is an Ad Hominem attack, and certainly is not a rebuttal.
I know the power of the rationale which underpins my faith.
It is powerful enough to endure every Fiery dart of Satan and infidelity.
It is my deepest hope that I can transmit this wisdom onto my children, and anyone else who seeks to know God.
“I have written to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.” 1 john 2:14)
“Let God be true and every man a Liar” Saith I. (Rom 3:4)
“And he [Abram] believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness..” Gen 15:6
“ Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away” (Mat24:35)
“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman who needeth not to be ashamed; Rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim 2vs15)
The word of the Lords are pure words,as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever” (Psalms12:6,7)
“We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:” (1 Peter1vs 19)
“ Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
(2Tim4vs2-4)
In this series I can only present a tiny fraction of the Biblical doctrine about trusting Gods word over Atheist Rationalist doubt, I hope it is sufficient to cement my contention that the moment the Bible is believed to be 100% true that this will force many Christians to re-evaluate their faith in respect trusting in the goodness of God…in spite of the apparent difficulties involved with believing a Good God could destroy the world by flood, or condemn the wicked to eternal damnation.
When presented with the truth… will they still worship God, or will they be exposed as fundamental Infidels and haters of the Lord God, and instead prefer to maintain their position beside Dawkins and others who call Christ and the Father, Moral monsters?
I know by taking the side of infidelity in attacking the word of God All such Christians have sold the farm. I find their convoluted intellectual wranglings which attempt to incorporate the ideas of infidelity into a bastardized/ watered down version of Christianity to be a pathetic exercise in futility. The Infidels laugh along with Satan at the pathetic Christians who today endorse such things as The Theory of Evolution, and do backflips attempting to suggest things like Noah’s flood were never intended by God to be believed as literal. What these fools don’t appreciate is that they have already abandoned the high ground! The forces of Darkness are advancing.
Only a Revival in Faith in the trust worthiness of the Bible can stop the slide into the abyss.
All right then.
I think I can now get back to business…
Tim Wikiriwhi
Killing Whales To Save Them (Part 1)
I got this in my email today.
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The proposition that South Korea could begin so called ‘scientific’ whaling is an international outrage, ACT Leader John Banks said today. “Like Japan, it remains ludicrous that they believe you need to kill whales to save them,” Mr Banks said. “This thinking is as lamentable as it is obscene. “It should be condemned and stopped before it even begins,” Mr Banks said. ENDS |
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Animals have rights. Yes, even feral conservatives like John Banks.
This PR may seem like one out of left field to some, but John Banks has a long history of campaigning for animal rights and supporting animal welfare legislation. It may seem that he and (former) Green MP Sue Kedgley make strange bedfellows, but a SAFE media release in (pre-election) October last year had this to say.
Greens Lead the Way against Colony Cages
If the nation’s three million caged hens could vote, the Greens and Act’s John Banks would be ruling the roost come this year’s election, says leading animal advocacy organisation SAFE.
Outgoing animal welfare spokesperson and Green MP Sue Kedgley, announced yesterday that her party will pledge against cruel colony cage systems and Act Party candidate, John Banks, also says he will pledge his personal support to help caged hens.
…
I say (and I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular), good on them both. Many libertarians are conflicted about animal welfare legislation. They think such legislation is unprincipled, while at the same time they abhor animal cruelty. I find their arguments, that the way to prevent animal cruelty is through social rather than legal sanctions, feeble at best and unconscionable at worst.
My defence of my seemingly unlibertarian views on the matter of animal welfare legislation is this. Animal welfare legislation is not a moral issue. It is a metaphysical issue.
(Almost) all libertarians I know subscribe to the view(s) that
human beings are individually possessed of certain inalienable rights, which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of … happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers – and only such powers – from the consent of the governed; that all laws legislated by governments must be for the purpose of securing these rights; that no laws legislated by government may violate these rights …
If you believe, as I do, that non-human animals also possess some (limited) rights, then it is within the proper scope of government to secure those rights. Animal welfare legislation is not necessarily unlibertarian. Whether it is or not depends on whether or not non-human animals possess rights. And that is a metaphysical question, not a moral one.