'Circumcision is one of the oddities of the Royal Family'

The Telegraph: 'Circumcision is one of the oddities of the Royal Family' (myself, I have known about this "oddity" for a number of years)

It is one of the oddities of the Royal Family -- shared by the majority of the English upper classes -- that for many generations they have circumcised their male sons, invariably using a Mohel, the Jewish word for a circumcision practitioner. It was rarely done on medical grounds, nor on religious ones, but was a matter of class.

... Indeed by the time the Duke of Cambridge himself was born in 1982, it is understood that Diana, the Princess of Wales, refused to continue the tradition, in keeping with the then medical opinion that it was an unnecessary procedure whose risks outweighed any possible benefits.

The NHS now tries to guide parents away from the practice and the most recent figures suggest just 3.8 per cent of male babies are circumcised in the UK. This is down from a rate of 20 per cent in the 1950s, when there was a belief, especially among those who could afford to have it done privately, that it was more hygienic. ...

As someone who isn't -- my family haven't been Jewish for a number of generations -- I can assure you that it is. At any rate, I can assure you that it's reasonable to believe that it is.

When I was a little kid, one of my father's means of compelling/teaching me to develop the hygienic habits I'd need as an adult was to threaten to have me circumcised if I didn't develop those habits. Had I had sons, I'd not have circumcised them -- not because I'm one of those fools who call it a crime -- and I'd have used the same threat to teach them to learn to keep themselves clean.

Euler on 'Freethinkers'

Vox Day: quotes Leonhard Euler and adds comments --

As Aristotle did before him, in his Defense of the Divine Revelation against the Objections of the Freethinkers the brilliant mathematician Leonhard Euler observed that there are people who are simply incapable of being reached by reason:

"The freethinkers have yet to produce any objections that have not long been refuted most thoroughly. But since they are not motivated by the love of truth, and since they have an entirely different point of view, we should not be surprised that the best refutations count for nothing and that the weakest and most ridiculous reasoning, which has so often been shown to be baseless, is continuously repeated. If these people maintained the slightest rigor, the slightest taste for the truth, it would be quite easy to steer them away from their errors; but their tendency towards stubbornness makes this completely impossible."

It makes no difference if one calls them rabbits, r-selected, freethinkers, scientists, credentialists, or "people whom one cannot instruct". What they are, in their core, are the lovers of lies, the haters of truth, and they can never be convinced by any knowledge or logical argument because they will literally be damned before they will question, let alone abandon, the dogma instilled in them by their warren.

It is no surprise that the fact that Man's greatest geniuses anticipated them and described them with utter contempt doesn't even give them a moment's pause.

And, by the by, this same applies to most of my "critics" (such as one sees at Victor Reppert's blog (*) ... or a Panda's Thumb, when I still cared enough about "evolution" to criticize evolutionism) -- they are "lovers of lies [and] haters of truth" and they'll be damned if they are ever going to admit that I have reasoned soundly and said the truth.


==============
(*) Consider this, just from today --

Karl Grant:

llion, Have I ever criticized you for rudeness? I don't think so.

Ilíon:

Here ... if you wish, you can wade through the Google results to see whether you have "ever criticized [me] for rudeness" (*). I have more interesting ways to spend my time.

But recall: you spread false tales about me and on the basis of your false assertion about me, call me a hypocrite.

(*) My point has not been that some people have "criticized [me] for rudeness" (**), it is that some people lie about me (and about themselves) and the[n] criticize, in the sense of 'condemn', me on the basis of those lies.

(**) Here is someone merely criticizing me for "rudeness". His criticism is unfounded, it appears to be based on two misrepresentations:
1) that he didn't quite grasp in context what I'd written that he was immediately criticizing;
2) that he had background false knowledge about my "rudeness" based on the lies you people tell about me.

Here is my response to him ... quite opposite what someone who believed your (plural) lies about me would expect, and in fact, quite opposite how you liars would generally respond.

Karl Grant:

Well, somebody has a persecution complex. And no, I did not spread lies about you since you did advocate and defend the of destroying Mecca, a city full of innocent people in a country that is our ally, while at the same time labeling Bob an apologist for mass murder.

I've explained numerous times how it is that 'Bob' -- who calls me demonic *simply* for opposing the leftist slavery he desires to impose on you and me ... and to call that slavery 'Christianity' -- is, in fact, an apologist for mass-murder.

Also, isn't it just like this sort to accuse one of having a "persecution complex" when one objects to the lies they spread about one?

Ilíon:

liars almost always double-down: "Well, somebody has a persecution complex. And no, I did not spread lies about you since you did advocate and defend the of destroying Mecca, a city full of innocent people in a country that is our ally ..."

To quote a great thinker [Ilíon: that is, I'm quoting Karl Grant himself from just a few posts prior], one for the ages, "How stupid can you get?"

I did nothing of the sort, and Karl Grant is a liar.

Even in isolation, no honest person can take the post to which he links as me advocating or defending the nuclear destruction of Mecca.

Moreover, just six posts later in that thread, I said this "Who needs to nuke Mecca to destroy the Kaaba? A barrage of cruise missiles [w]ould do the trick."

And I further said this: "Nevertheless, dest[ro]ying the Kaaba would lead to tens of millions of deaths world-wide, as Moslems begin to slaughter one another."

Any sane, rational, honest person can see that Karl Grant is a liar.

Any sane, rational, honest person can see that while I believe that destroying the Kaaba would be the quickest way to destroy Islam as an existential threat to the West (and indeed to all cultures ... and to all human beings ... in the world), I also recognize and caution that destroying the Kaaba would lead to convulsions in the House of Submission and to the deaths of untold millions of human beings.

======
And, for the record, while Saudi Arabia may have signed treaties with the United States, they are never our allies; their treaties with us are simply taqiyya and hudna in action. And, by their own Moslem "reasoning" [I should have written 'Islamic', rather than 'Moslem'], no denizen of Mecca is innocent; for in rejecting Christianity (and in persecuting Christians) they actively wage war against God, and therefore Christians have the moral obligation to kill them whenever and however possible.

How fortunate for Moslems that Christianity is not Islam.

Karl Grant:

I rest my case.

In other words, it doesn't *matter* to him in the least that I've shown him not only to have been wrong in what he had asserted about me (a couple of years ago), but actively lying in asserting it yet again. For, after all, he does not love the truth.

Gauss .... and me

Question: what is the sum of the first 100 whole numbers?? how am i supposed to work this out efficiently? --

The question you asked relates back to a famous mathematician, Gauss. In elementary school in the late 1700’s, Gauss was asked to find the sum of the numbers from 1 to 100. The question was assigned as “busy work” by the teacher, but Gauss found the answer rather quickly by discovering a pattern. His observation was as follows:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … + 98 + 99 + 100

Gauss noticed that if he was [sic] to split the numbers into two groups (1 to 50 and 51 to 100), he could add them together vertically to get a sum of 101.

      1 +    2 +   3 +    4 +    5 + … + 48 + 49 + 50
100 + 99 + 98 + 97 + 96 + … + 53 + 52 + 51

1 + 100 = 101
2 + 99 = 101
3 + 98 = 101
.
.
.
48 + 53 = 101
49 + 52 = 101
50 + 51 = 101

Gauss realized then that his final total would be 50(101) = 5050.

The sequence of numbers (1, 2, 3, … , 100) is arithmetic and when we are looking for the sum of a sequence, we call it a series. Thanks to Gauss, there is a special formula we can use to find the sum of a series:

S=n(n+1)/2

I had essentially worked out this pattern as a very young child, by third or fourth grade, using its principle to more easily sum rows of numbers. One of my sisters also has always used this arithmetic shortcut (we can't recall whether I taught it to her or she independently discovered it), and taught it to her daughters when they were kids.

When I was in eighth grade, our teacher told us all (both eighth and seventh grades shared a class room) to write down the numbers one through one hundred and then sum them. I started applying my habitual method for summing long rows of numbers (finding '5s' and '10s' in each column) ... and then realized that I could group entire rows by '100s'.

That is, whereas Johann Karl Friedrich "Gauss noticed that if he [were] to split the numbers into two groups (1 to 50 and 51 to 100), he could add them together vertically to get a sum of 101", I noticed that I could sum the numbers in this manner: 0+100 1+99 2+98 ... such that a formula to solve the problem was 50(100)+50. I spent more time double- and triple-checking my reasoning ("Is it really that simple?") than on working out the answer.

Another 'Hail, Satan!' moment

Gentle Reader may recall the recent incident of the pro-abortionists at the Texas Statehouse chanting "Hail, Satan!" in an attempt to drown-out the anti-abortionists singing Amazing Grace.

Via Brutally Honest, here is another 'Hail, Satan!' by pro-abortionists, this time, by direct physical desecration of a Catholic Cathedral in Santiago de Chile. -- "The partial translation of the graffiti in the picture [of a desecrated altar] reads "I sh*t on God", speaking volumes about the soullessness of the people involved."

'She sure shouldn't be going to the press.'

Can you believe the arrogance of these assholes?

Laura Rosen Cohen: The Militarization of American Police

... From the officer:

“I feel bad for her,” Wiggins conceded, finally.

“But at the same time, I had to reasonably believe the bad guy was in her house based on what they were doing.”

"(Louise) Goldsberry wasn't arrested or shot despite pointing a gun at a cop, so Wiggins said, “She sure shouldn't be going to the press.”

Really?

This is where:
   a) militarizing the police;
   b) and letting the police get away with arresting citizens for filming them as they arrest (and/or abuse) other people;
leads, and must lead. But, this isn't the end-point.


edit:
At the same time, while these days far too many police officers have Rambo complexes, far too many police departments see themselves as revenue generators (*). And the individual cop who alerts the public to the quota system in place in *their* town for tickets and/or arrests *always* pays a price.

Here is Bob Parks' take on a recent instance of governmental abuse of the policing power: Police State -- "Now we know why the 911 response times have grown longer over the years. Not just because there may be a spike in crime [Ilíon: if we can trust the statistics put out by various levels of government, the crime rate has been going down for many years] but because more cops are cruising the roads, mining license plates and looking for any reason to hand out tickets."

This particular abuse of government power (I like that, "mining license plates") is the natural working-out of the conjunction of bureaucracy and unionism and "liberalism".

(*) Though, I expect that most of the revenue so generated is plowed back into the police department. Probably to pay for even more unneeded military hardware

If Obama Could Have Been Trayvon Martin . . .

William Vallicella: If Obama Could Have Been Trayvon Martin . . . "then most of us could be the next George Zimmerman."

Exactly. And that's rather the point of Zimmerman being Zimmerman, isn't it?

"Besides, if you could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, what does that say about you? Did you go around thuggishly attacking people, breaking their noses, pinning them on the ground, pounding and grounding, slamming heads into pavements, threatening 'crackers' with death?"

That was my first thought on hearing the Alien's foolish assertion.

==========
K T Cat: Why Race Is The Go-To Excuse "It's because the alternative would be to blame behavior and no one wants to be judgmental."

Of course, another, and perhaps deeper reason, is that there is an on-going class-warfare amongst whites.

'Amongst' may not be the best word to us, as this class-war is being waged by the self-selected elites against the rest of us ... who really have no interest in having a class-war.

In any event, indiscriminate accusations of racism is just a tool these self-selected elites, these "liberals", use in their war against you and me; they don't actually give a damn about blacks, and everyone knows it.

Forget George Zimmerman Watch Out For George Brotherman

Forget George Zimmerman Watch Out For George Brotherman -- a video essay.

h/t 'Smitty' at The Other McCain

I feel rich when I ... spend money I don't have

Douglas Wilson: A Drunk Trying to Make the Next Lamp Post --

... This is another way of saying that every genuine solution to the problems created by our [civiliazational] fiscal irresponsibility will be a form of default. The only solutions now are defaulting solutions.

The only thing we don’t know is what kind of default it will be. The only thing we don’t know is who the unlucky victim of our defaulting will be.

Government does not make wealth. If government has wealth, then this means it was taken. The only way that the government can acquire the means to pay its obligations and debts is by taking it. The only question left before the house is “who will they take it from?” There are a limited number of options.

When a politician says that we cannot allow our government to default on its solemn obligations, he either believes what he says, and is a fool, or he knows what he is saying is false, and wants us to believe that we must avoid Default A, which is what he is really talking about, and must select from defaults b, c, d, and e, which he does not really consider defaults “technically,” because the people who are going to get hosed by them are not part of his constituency.

The government does not make, and in order to have, must therefore take. Here are the basic ways in which such a taking can happen. The government can wage war on other countries, and take from them. The government can raise taxes, and take that way. The government can debase the currency, and take that way. The government can run up a big debt which it finds itself unable to pay, and take that way. And of course, given the realities of the ongoing political circus, the government can stagger between these options, like a drunk trying to make it to the next lamp post.
…
One last thing. I would like to address a few words to those evangelicals [Ilíon: and Catholics, for this perverse foolishness is very strong amongst Catholics, and is, in fact, encouraged by the Bureaucracy that *is* that RCC in America] who have been seduced by leftist economics, or who are in some way flirting with leftist economics. You may have cannonballed into the deep end, like Jim Wallis, or you may just be sidling sheepishly in that direction, with some cover provided by distributist literature. You think that the language of compassion is more biblical, and the idea of communitarian sharing makes you feel warm all over. You think that businessmen who know how to add and subtract are those who are in the grip of mammon-lust. You don’t like the hard lines of clear thinking, and the blinking sums on their calculators do nothing but harsh your mellow.

Do me a favor, and look at Detroit. Look at the failure of all the compassionate nostrums. Look at the collapse of real integrity. Look at the grasping and demented idiocy of the unions. Look at the abandonment of government’s true functions. Look at the wreckage of human lives. Look at the ruin of a once great city. Look at what aching greedlust does. Behold the handiwork of your compassion. [Ilíon: emphasis added]

Look at what mammon in sheep’s clothing can do.

I had almost posted a link to Wilson's essay last night, but then I didn't.

Michael Egnor links to it and adds some comments -- Michael Egnor: "Do me a favor, and look at Detroit" -- "... Detroit is leftism, which is a Christian heresy, incarnated as a city."

I have a neighbor, a young man young enough to be my son, old enough almost to have a grown son of his own. As I understand it, he has never worked a day in his life. He lives off "disability", his "disability" is that he misused drugs when he was a kid.

The title I gave to this post comes from something he said to me some months ago when I had tried to help him make better use of the limited resources at his disposal. Specifically, after I had seen him coming back from a local "convenience store" pushing his lawn-cart with groceries in it, I had thought to take him to an actual grocery store, where the food on offer is more varied and far less costly. This is a high-crime neighborhood, and consequently the prices at that "convenience store" can be expected to be even higher than at most.

Anyway, we never did get to a grocery store (*) (**) ... but I inadvertantly helped him waste a significant amount of money. I mean, this is money I would have considered a significant amount, and my income is greater than that of most Americans; to someone needing to live on $28 per day (if I correctly recall what he once told me), it can only be a very significant amount (***).

Anyway, after I'd fed him at a Chinese buffet, I agreed to go into the mall. ... To make the story shorter, he bought some bottle of cologne for $60 at Macy's.

For me, that was the final straw. I could no longer watch, I could no longer help, him squander money like that. Leaving Macy's, I just made a bee-line for the parking lot.

As we neared my vehicle, he said to me, "I felt rich when I bought that cologne".

And *that* Gentle Reader, is why America is going down the tubes -- as a nation, as a culture, we are willfully expending resources we do not have, for (over-priced) things we do not need, because we (collectively) *feel* rich when we (collectively) waste limited resources, expecially when we can lie to ourselves that someone else is going to pick up the tab.

Why is destroying America, and the West in general, isn't a weak economy. Our ecomonies are weak because we (collectively) are spiritually and morally weak. And we are are spiritually and morally weak because we (collectively) have *chosen* to openly rebel against God, have (collectively) chosen to abandon and denegrate the Christianity that for at least the past 1500 years has given form and focus to our civilization -- we (collectively) hate our Fathers, and we will defy them no matter the cost to ourselves or our children (assuming that we even allow the little bastards to see the light of day, in the first place).

(*) We stopped at Wal-Mart ... to get the money his mother had wired him (which I think equaled about half his monthly "income" from "disability") ... where he spent $18 on some protein drink powder.

(**) Well, we did get to Meijer's, but he didn't shop; he'd supposedly applied there and was supposed to talk to some manager (but she wasn't there on the weekend)

(***) $28 per day works out to about $840 per month. I've lived on that, and not all that long ago. I *know* that it's not abject poverty.

The Minister and the Parrot

Douglas Wilson: The Minister and the Parrot

Barack Obama: If I had a city, it would look like Detroit

Steven Crowder: via Michael Egnor: Barack Obama: If I had a city, it would look like Detroit

This must be Democrat history month

Michael Egnor: This must be Democrat history month -- "... The racial struggle in America is not between those who love black people and those who hate black people, nor between those who love white people and those who hate white people. It is between those who work for a color-blind society on one side, and on the other side those who work for a society in which skin color is the coin of the realm and racial hate and fear are the down-payment on political power."

On 'Liberal' white-guilt condescension towards blacks

Bob Parks: Pundits Lament 'Profiling of Blacks,' But Don't Some of Us Kinda Invite It? -- Mr Parks takes on the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the "liberals" --

While MSNBC and CNN are both vying for the position of being the new "Black Entertainment Television," giving air time to every black face they can find to give an opinion of the "not guilty" verdict in the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin murder trial, the tone of the conversation is reduced to white-guilt condescension towards blacks.

... The Zimmerman-Martin trial was a media concoction that was done for ratings. Any damage done to race relations in this country makes for potentially profitable sequels. ...

Certainly, the leftist media outlets ginned up the case for ratings; but the primary purpose of ginning up the case was to frighten black Americans into turning out to the polls to vote for that illegal interloper occupying the White House.

Michael Egnor: The Zimmerman acquittal was a massive victory for the [Obamanation] -- "It's almost as if the prosecution didn't want to be successful. ... The [leftists] won this case, by losing. Deliberately. The trial was not about law. It was politics, by other means."

'Liberal' 'Morality'

Mark Richards (Oz Conservative): Ch.6 Morality -- this is a long post, and well worth your read.

Though, keep in mind that Mr Richards' desideratum reduces to something very close to fascism, for Mr Richards would subordinate the individual to the group, with the 'group' defined in terms of the ethnos. What I am saying is that, in the end, regardless of his undoubted hatred of leftism, Mr Richards is really a leftist, after all.

Addendum: Now, the thing about the 'ethnos', as about 'society' and even about 'the government', is that it is an anthropomorphic reification: it is a fictional person, but there is no person there, in fact. So, when one tries to reify "the group", so that "the group" may "speak" and subordinate the individual, what one is always doing is trying to subordinate all the individuals of the group to some small number of them.

Boyd Richard Boyd (at 'American Thinker'): The Ethics of Sacrifice, the Politics of Slavery

True conservatism recognizes that the individual and the group both have moral claims on us: that the individual has moral claims on the group, and upon other individuals, and that the group has moral claims on the individual, and upon all individuals. True conservatism is about finding and holding the proper balance between the various absolutisms, any one of which will destroy us, individually or collectively or both. True conservatism can be sought only via morality and justice; ultimately, only via a correct view of man ... and of God.

In the end, everything always comes back to God, which is only to be expected, as God is "the ground of all being" and the origin of all things.

There is an interesting paradox here -- moral absolutists are free to be relativists about everything else, but moral relativists must end up being absolutists about everything ... except, perhaps, sexual activity (*).


(*) and I'm not so sure that, in the end, they must not be absolutists there, too -- Kathy Shaidle has made the cynical and satirical (**) joke that in a few years, the only way that strapping heterosexual men will be able to publically prove they are not closet "homophobes" is to certify that they suck cock. I can see leftism going there ... and all the "liberals" (who are just their sock-puppets, anyway) going right along with them.

(**) 'satirical' in the sense that it's impossible to satirize about what absurdities leftism will toss out, for it always proves your imagination far too limited

Media Bias Of The Day

Bob Parks: Media Bias Of The Day

Victim of North College Hill ‘boredom beating’ has died

Again, had this been the other way around, it would be the source of national media and activist outrage instead of yet another example of having to dig real hard to find out a few pertinent facts…

Part of Mr Parks' point is that you never heard of this pointless and vicious attack a year ago that may ultimately have lead to the death of this man because it does not fit the leftist template/agenda adopted by the "liberal" media.

Now, consider this from the second link supplied by Mr Parks: "Mahaney was attacked from behind and had done nothing to provoke it, Foust said, adding that police consider the attack a random act by the group of 13- and 14-year-olds, who said in separate interviews that they were bored and looking for something to do."

The *reason* for "random acts of violence" of this sort is right there in that statement, if only people will see it. The *reason* that the thugs amongst the black populace of America "randomly" attack whites is because the "liberals" (and ultimately the leftists, for the "liberals" are just their sock-puppets) who dictate what facts may and may not be publicly acknowledged and discussed have given feral "youths" permission to "randomly" attack whites.

100% true ... yet a vile lie

Suppose that someone says, "I had a pretty good day at work today ... the boss came in sober". And suppose that the statement is 100% factually true. And further suppose that the statement is a vile lie.

How can that be? How can a statement that is 100% factually true be nonetheless a vile lie?

Well, consider: what is this person *really* saying? He is saying by implication that it's remarkable that he had a good day at work, and he is saying by implication that it's remarkable that that the boss came in sober, and he is is saying by implication that there is a linkage between the two. That is, he is saying by implication that he doesn't always have a good day at work, AND he is saying by implication that the boss doesn't always come in sober, AND he is he is saying by implication that the second "fact" is among the causes of the first.

But, the boss *always* comes in sober. He is, in fact, a tee-totaler, and has never once in his life been drunk.

My point is that there is more to honesty that simply always making statements that are 100% factually true. My point is that one can indeed lie and slander, one can indeed behave grossly immorally, while always making statements that are 100% factually true.

As I've pointed out somewhere or other, the "best" lies are 100% factual, and the "best" liars *always* speak factually.

And my deeper point is that just as one may be behaving immorally *even as* one is making statements that are 100% factually true, so too, one may be behaving fully morally *even as* one is making statements that are 100% factually false (as, for example, in the famous dilemma of lying to the Nazis that one doesn't know where any Jews are, even as one is hiding a Jewish family in the basement and another in the attic).

Oh, that's nothing

William A. Jacobson (Legal Insurrection): Saturday Night Card Game (Will banning racism be held racist?) -- "... That’s right folks, the Supreme Court will decide whether prohibiting racism is, in effect, racist. ..."

Oh, that's nothing! In the not too distant future, the US supreme court will rule that the US Constitution is "unconstitutional".

On the Supposed Non-Existence of the Self

Vallicella (and Lupo): More on the Supposed Non-Existence of the Self

Peter Lupu e-mails:

In your recent post criticizing Harris' argument against the self (which is already present in Hume) you point out that the argument against the self is lacking. It is lacking, you argue, because from the mere fact that the self is not revealed in certain types of introspective experiences it does not follow that the self does not exist. I agree.

But a stronger complaint can be advanced. Harris (and Hume) must answer the following question: Who (what) is doing the introspection (meditation) which allegedly reveals no experience of the self? I suggest that there is no reasonable candidate for such a role other than the self. And so now an explanation can be given to the puzzle how come introspection does not reveal the self; it fails to do so because the self is inevitably absent from the introspective field in order to perform the introspective function. But the self leaves its own recognizable trail behind; it is the trail of a conscious subject which unifies the various experiences encountered by the introspective self as belonging to the same person. If it were not for this trail, the introspective self would have no reason to think that this toothache and that memory or desire belong to one and the same subject.

I think your searching-for-my-glasses-on-my-nose example illustrates well the point.

It is a pleasure to have Peter as a sort of philosophical alter ego who sees many matters as I do. Here are the main points and I think we agree on all of them.

1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.

2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable. For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity. Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self. A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self. After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience. I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self. But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence. I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable. And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable.

This reasoning may or may not be sound. The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question. For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject. Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness. Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up? Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal! Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man! Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal? No. He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi. For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody. (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.) But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3. When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap. In which act is the hearing of the melody? A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody. For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal) intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1. Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody. But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention. The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion. This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them. Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them. This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object. Therein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

It is also an error of 'materialistic' "reasoning" that, in one way or another, it generally presupposes materialism, which leads to constant category errors by the materialists. At base, behind all the verbiage, Harris' (and Hume's) argument (ahem) against the reality of the self amounts to this: "This so-called 'self' is not a material/physical entity, nor can it be *reduced* to a material/physical entity ... therefore, it doesn't exist."

Real Satanists Want Nothing To Do With Abortion Supporters

American GLob: HILARIOUS: Real Satanists Want Nothing To Do With Abortion Supporters -- the irony, it burns.

Still, it's nice to have the pro-abortionists openly admit that "womens' health/choice" is really just part of the on-going war against Christ.