The Intricate Web

Over the past few weeks, there have been several events in my life that seem to be unified under a central theme. Of course, I say “seem to” because it could just as easily be my predilection for pattern recognition at work. Either way, I think it worth noting.

First, I had a conversation with someone who had said that Libertarian Free Will enabled us to make promises and keep them, because we are the ones who determine whether or not we will keep our promises. In response, I said (slightly edited):

Except that you're not the one who determines that. Even on your own terms, you are only part of what determines that. For instance, if you promise to meet someone at 5, you might be delayed by traffic. The car might break down. You might run out of gas. You might have a heart attack en route. As James says:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil (James 4:13-16, ESV).

Since I know you believe the Bible, and since I know you think the Bible teaches LFW, then clearly you should agree that even under LFW, you are still not the one who determines whether or not you keep your promises.

The response that I received back was that there were two different types of promises, and some of them could be kept completely under our control. The example given was that a person could decide to forgive or not to forgive someone. Ultimately, the claim was, you could make a promise when it “only includes your own actions and efforts” because those do not need “Lord willing” with it.

I responded by pointing out that everyone is connected in an intricate web, and even the decision to forgive or not to forgive another person can have drastic consequences. Take a married couple. If a husband chooses to forgive his spouse for a sin she has done, their relationship can blossom and grow; if he chooses not to forgive her, then the relationship can become bitter and lead to divorce. This one choice to forgive or not to forgive obviously includes more than one person’s actions and efforts, because everyone is connected. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a scenario where the difference between forgiving and not forgiving a spouse could be the difference between a future child existing and a future child not existing. In the case of a divorce, then presumably both spouses will have other relationships too. Supposing both remarry, the person they remarry are now married to people they otherwise would not have been married to. The ripple effect can be enormous. What if the child the couple would have had would have cured cancer? Now millions of people die who otherwise would not have died.

Because of the intricate, delicate web of connectivity between all human beings, it is impossible for us to say that any choice we do is made in isolation. Which brings me to the second aspect.

John Lafayette Girardeau

http://www.thisday.pcahistory.org/2015/06/june-23-2/

The high price of unilateral disarmament

http://www.gunowners.org/news06182015b.htm

Just a speck of dust

We all are of the same stardust. We are all going to live and die on the same planet, a Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of space. 

In that long-ago moment I was paralyzed by self-doubt. I am just a little kid standing on a beach. And, that beach is a one of many beaches on a planet that turns out to be, in the cosmic scheme of things, pretty small — a speck really. Furthermore, my home speck, the Earth, is just a speck orbiting a star that really, considering all the other sand-grain-numerous stars, is just another speck in the galaxy of stars. The galaxy, in turn, being another speck, among galactic specks. I am a speck on a speck orbiting a speck in the middle of deep spacey specklelessness. I don’t matter at all.

http://time.com/3882613/bill-nye-graduation-speech-rutgers-university/

Death of God by Poison

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2015/june/death-of-god-by-poison.html

Dylann Roof is a victim of circumstance

Assuming that Dylann Roof is convicted, how should he be punished? I think he ought to be executed. But that's because I'm a knuckle-dragging Christian who gets his morality from a Bronze Age book. Compare that to the more enlightened perspective of atheism:

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Indeed, and “punishment” in the U.S. often involves retributive punishment based on the notion that the criminal simply made the wrong choice.  Retribution, in turn, rests on some notion that criminals have free will. We know that this philosophy is strong in the U.S. system, for when criminals are thought to have offended in circumstances when they couldn’t choose right from wrong (mental disability, for instance) or weren’t able to choose right from wrong (a brain tumor that makes one aggressive), they get lighter sentences, often involving more rehabilitation and hospitalization.

But to a determinist like me, no criminal has a choice about what to do, so all should be treated as victims of their circumstances. This would eliminate retributive punishment, and perhaps make our system more like Norway’s.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/why-is-norways-prison-system-so-successful/

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html

Trauma memories

One way atheists routinely attack evidence for miracles is to claim that eyewitness testimony and memory are notoriously unreliable. In light that of that stock allegation, it's striking to read evidentiary appeals like this:

Witnesses report Roof sat with attendees of the prayer meeting for an hour before he turned his gun on them. Three men and six women were killed. Three people survived. 

One woman, who said she was as cousin of the church’s pastor, Sen. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, told NBC News late Wednesday night that the shooter reloaded five different times and told a survivor...
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2015/06/charleston-church-shooting-was-about-race-not-religion/#sthash.iUutcQwC.dpuf

Keep in mind that this was an extremely traumatic event. But haven't we been told that makes testimony less reliable? For instance:

People’s memories for traumatic events are – like their memories for more mundane events – easily distorted. Importantly, memory distortion for traumatic events appears to follow a particular pattern: people tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, a phenomenon referred to as “memory amplification.” 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4337233/ 

That presents a dilemma for atheists: they can't discount eyewitness testimony and memory in general without discounting the testimony of observers who witnessed the shooting.

Conversely, they can't vouch for the testimony of observers who witnessed the shooting without conceding that eyewitness testimony and memory can be trustworthy.

I think there are two reasons that atheists are so credulous in reference to this incident:

i) They want to be seen as champions of civil rights. Siding with blacks. Opposing racism.

ii) They want to establish that the crime was racially motivated rather than religiously motivated. The testimony of observers who survived the attack helps to establish that claim–especially initial reports, before we had additional incriminating information (e.g. Roof's "manifesto").

Gag rule on homosexual health hazards

http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen2/15b/DrChurch-BIDMC/index.html

Yes, You Can Correct People Who Are Grieving

Justin Taylor recently put up a post about the Charleston shooting. Among other things, he posted the popular video of people associated with the victims pronouncing forgiveness to the shooter. Below is a response I just wrote in the comments section of the thread. You can read the thread to get the context I'm addressing:

Celebrating A Holiday You're Fundamentally Undermining

I wonder how many of the pseudo-legislators on the Supreme Court who have decided to invent a fake Constitutional right to same-sex marriage are celebrating Father's Day today. I suspect all of them are. And they're probably celebrating it in a traditional manner, which is inconsistent with the most common arguments for same-sex marriage. Bringing up the Father's Day context of the Supreme Court ruling, whichever direction that ruling takes, is a good way for opponents of same-sex marriage to frame discussions of the subject.

When gov't thinks Americans are the enemy

https://www.aclu.org/blog/dhs-wants-contract-access-database-innocent-drivers-locations

Are the police an occupation force?

http://insiderlouisville.com/metro/communities/opinion-in-a-free-society-we-are-entitled-right-or-wrong-to-criticize-the-actions-of-public-servants-including-police/

The view from outside the bubble

Abolish Human Abortion

Please take this question seriously. It is not asking whether or not your local church does any good at all... It's just asking you to consider whether or not your local church is playing an active part in the abolition of human abortion. 

If you took your local church and duplicated it a thousand times over, would that effect the practice of child sacrifice at all, or would it only increase the purchase of Christian books and Pews? 

– T. Russell Hunter

Please take this question seriously. It is not asking whether or not your local abolitionist-only church does any good at all... It's just asking you to consider whether or not your local abolitionist-only church is playing an active part in the abolition of euthanasia, female genital circumcision, sex trafficking, child prostitution/child pornography, &c.

If you took your local abolitionist-only church and duplicated it a thousand times over, would that effect the practice of euthanasia, female genital circumcision, sex trafficking, child prostitution, honor killings at al, or would it only increase the purchase of AHA gear? 

Putting the past in the past

i) Whenever there's a crime like the Chas church shooting, you always have social commentators, including some evangelicals, staggering under a white guilt complex, who treat the reader to the de rigueur, push-button history of antebellum slavery and segregation. They think contemporary whites are supposed to atone for the sins of dead white men.

ii) There's always a conspicuously lopsided aspect to this exercise. When a black commits a hate-crime against a white victim, the same social commentators fall strangely silent, or even excuse it.

They don't blacks should feel black guilt for Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe. They don't think Chinese youth should feel "yellow guilt" for the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. They don't think American Indians should feel "red guilt" for one tribe massacring another tribe. Should Japanese youth do penance for the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking?

iii) Frankly, this is playacting. Projecting yourself into the past–as if as if you and your contemporaries lived back then. But that's just a flight of the imagination.

iv) In many ways the past might as well be fictional vis-à-vis of our relationship to the past. It's like my Viking forebears who conquered Normandy in the 10C. Yes, I'm causally linked to them and that event in a very attenuated way, but that's not my world. That's long gone. I might as well be reading a novel or watching a movie. 

We're talking about the remembered past. It's the influence of memories. And that's circular. It feeds on itself. 

v) Finally, all this vicarious guilt and vicarious repentance is bad theology. 

That's what the Day of Judgment is for. It's not incumbent on the living to apologize for what dead people did to other dead people. That's so cheap and easy and meaningless anyway. 

There are things that happen in this life, things that happen in the past, that can't be fixed in this life. It's too late to repent or adjudicate in this life. Too late to restore what was lost. The culprits are long gone. The victims are long gone. But that's what Judgment Day is for. There's a day of reckoning. 

So there's a point beyond which we need to put the past in the past. Commit the issue to God. Leave it in his hands. It's not our responsibility to repent for the dead. 

10 questions

I'm going to comment on this post:

http://www.atheistrepublic.com/blog/casper-rigsby/ten-questions-biblical-literalists-cannot-honestly-answer

In critiquing atheism, one approach is to pick on the highbrow atheists, viz. Graham Oppy, Theodore Drange, Jordan Sobel. That's attacking the strongest version of atheism.

However, the average atheist doesn't operate at that level. The atheists you run across on the Internet are generally like Casper Rigsby. Even though he's inept, he's representative of the garden-variety atheist.

Moreover, these are stock objections to Christianity, so it's sometimes worth responding to atheists like him, since that's a more realistic sample group:

There are certain questions that no biblical literalist can answer honestly. This isn't to say that they can't answer these questions at all, but only that any answer they give is either an evasion of actually answering the question, or the answer is absolutely fallacious.

The way he frames the debate is prejudicial. He doesn't define a "literalist." And he attempts to discredit intelligent answers in advance as "evasive." In other words, if you give an intelligent answer, if you qualify his crude formulations, that's "evasive." 

Criminalize guns, decriminalize drugs

Many people who support the criminalization of private gun ownership are the very same people who support the decriminalization of hard drugs. 

The case for decriminalizing hard drugs goes something like this: The "war on drugs" is an abject failure. Not only a failure, but counterproductive. Criminalizing drugs created a black market for drugs. It fueled organized crime, viz. drug smuggling from Latin American drug cartels–as well as domestic production (e.g. meth labs). It created a police state apparatus (e.g. SWAT teams; no-knock raids). And it had a disparate impact on minority communities. Minorities are more likely to be arrested on drug charges.

And I think that characterization is factually accurate. The question is whether the alternative is even worse. Both criminalizing and decriminalizing hard drugs will have dramatic tradeoffs. 

But the purpose of this post is not to debate the pros and cons of that issue. Rather, this is my point:

The same argument which liberals use respecting the criminalization of drugs applies to the criminalization of firearms. 

Now, gun-control advocates really want a national gun ban, along with gun confiscation. They don't admit that upfront. Rather, they pursue an incremental strategy. But restricting gun ownership to the police is their ultimate goal.

Suppose they got their wish. Suppose they succeeding in passing a national ban on private gun ownership (not to mention confiscation). What would be the result?

Wouldn't the predictable result parallel the "war on drugs"? It would create a black market for contraband firearms. So long as there's a demand, there will be suppliers to cash in on that lucrative market. It would foster organized crime. Gun traffickers. It would have a disparate impact on minority communities–where gun-related violence is rife. And it would expand the police state. 

The Better Angels of Our Nature

In the wake of the Chas church shooting, we have the predictable demand for gun bans. 

Steven PInker wrote a book that's very popular among secular humanists: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Pinker's book has many critics. But let's assume for the sake of argument that his trajectory is accurate. Guns didn't even exist for most of human history. So, according to Pinker, at the very time when you have far more violent deaths (percentage-wise), you had zero access to guns. By definition, there could be no gun-related violence before guns were invented. Conversely, violent death has gone down at the same time access to guns has gone up. An inverse ratio between gun-ownership and violent death.

I'd add that even if you disagree with Pinker's dubious stats, it's still the case that human history was enormously violent long before the advent of guns. Mass murder doesn't require guns. Massacres were committed far and wide without gun access. 

Gun bans and police brutality

Whenever you have an incident like the Chas church shooting, the preexisting anti-gun lobby springs into action. It's just like atheists who repeat their stale arguments about the problem of evil every time there's a natural disaster. 

I'd just like to make a little observation. On the one hand, these are people who don't think private citizens should own guns. Guns should only be in the hands of the police.

On the other hand, many of these same people decry police brutality. But in that case, they don't think the police can be trusted with firearms.

Moreover, if the police have a monopoly on guns, that will embolden them to be even more abusive to a disarmed and defenseless citizenry. 

"Collective racism"

But the deeper sin of the collective racism of our country that supports and nurtures killers like Dylann Roof... 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2015/06/jon-stewart-on-the-charleston-shooting-sort-of-like-a-prophet/

Unfortunately, Enns fails to enlighten the reader on how our country's collective racism supports and nurtures killers like Roof. 

If that's the explanation for killers like Roof, what's the explanation for the Columbine killers? Or Timothy McVeigh? Or Ted Bundy? Or the Green River Killer? Or Jeffrey Dahmer. Or the black mother (Hyphernkemberly Dorvilier) who doused her newborn with lighter fluid, then burned it to death?

Is a collective ideology behind these acts? Why is that the first explanation we should reach for? Whatever happened to personal accountability? Why not say some people are just plain evil? Really evil?

Sometimes a culture or collective ideology can foster violence. We see that connection with Islamic terrorism. But that's because there's a pattern. It's not just isolated incidents or lone wolves. 

Likewise, the KKK was a terrorist organization–manned by Democrats–that supported and nurtured killers like Roof. But that's before the KKK was defanged. 

Does modern-day SC generally or Chas in particular suffer from "collective racism?" SC has an Indian-American governor. A black Republican senator who handily beat out white opponents, despite a majority white electorate.

The 10-term mayor of Chas is a Democrat. From 1982-2005, Chas had a black police chief. 

What was the collective racism that allegedly nurtured Roof? Suppose he was influenced by Stormfront. That's hardly the face of systemic or institutional racism. Rather, that's a group on the margins of society. 

In all likelihood, the system will charge Roof with nine counts of capital murder. 

The Confederate flag

Every time you have an incident like the Chas shooting, there's the predictable call to get rid of the Confederate flag. I'll venture a few personal observations:

i) I have ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War. My great-grandfather, who fought with the Union, used to horrify my father with war stories about how he and his comrades used the black cooks as target practice if they didn't like the chow. And that was the side that liberated the slaves.

I've lived in the Deep South. I generally feel closer to my Southern relatives than my Northern relatives. But I grew up in the North.

I think I'm just Southern enough to understand how some white Southerners feel about the Civil War and the Confederate flag without feeling the way they feel about it. 

ii) The Confederate flag means nothing to me. And flying the flag can be tactless or provocative. 

Certainly there are times when we should resist conforming to other people's feelings. That becomes tyrannical. But it depends on whether or not this is a worthy cause. 

I think the Confederate flag can become an idol. It's the wrong way to make a statement. It's too tainted to be a useful symbol. 

iii) However, I think both sides make this more important than it really is. Both sides take it way too seriously. 

The problems facing the black community aren't related in any way to some people who fly the Confederate flag. It becomes a diversionary tactic. A debate over empty symbolism that deflects attention from real problems and real solutions. 

Moreover, it's a futile debate. Although one can (and should) prohibit state agencies from flying the Confederate flag, one can't prohibit private individuals from doing so. It's Constitutionally protected free expression.

iv) I'd also like to venture a few observations about the Civil War. I think the Civil War had many villains and few heroes. And I apply that to both sides of the conflict. From what I've read, Lincoln was a tyrant. He posed a threat to democracy. He suspended habeas corpus. He imprisoned newspaper reporters who criticized the war effort. Likewise, Gen. Sherman went onto become a notorious Indian killer. 

On the other hand, Robert E. Lee was a cruel slave master. And even though the South could rightly complain about Northern oppression, that complaint was offset by Southern oppression of the black population. 

v) The best argument I've read for the Southern cause goes like this: imagine you're a Southern farmer. Not a gentleman farmer. Not a slaveowner. You have enough land and livestock to support your family. 

The reason you fight the Union is not for ideology, not to protect the institution of slavery, but to protect your family and your livelihood. If your part of the world is invaded, if that threatens the life or livelihood of your dependents, you have a right and a duty to fight back. Even if the overall cause is unworthy, even if the invaders have a worthier cause, your first priority is to protect and provide for your dependents.

I think that's a legitimate argument so far as it goes. However, it cuts both ways. It justifies slave revolts. And it justifies slaves collaborating with Union forces. Slaves can invoke the same principle in reverse. They are defending their own interests.