Self-opacity

Malcolm-the-not-cynical-enough asks:

What are we lacking right now? Are women who get abortions lacking support systems and help, from pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike?

Or do we lack people who are willing to yell “Repent, for you have sinned!”

One of the main reasons we lack people willing to say, "Repent!" is precisely because of people like Malcolm, who can always be counted upon either to initiate the attack upon the lone voice calling for repentance, or to join in the attack once it is made by another, or, at "best", to shrug their shoulders and say, "Meh! You brought this on yourself" ... and then, they are mystified when they are subjected to the same dynamic.

People don't *like* to be told that they are wrong, that they are in the wrong, and they tend to throw fits when told so (and the moreso the more in the wrong they are). People like Malcolm, while agreeing in principle that generic "people" may be in the wrong, generally can't bring themselves to acknowledge that this specific person is in the wrong when it doesn't directly impinge upon them. And they never quite figure out the reason that (nearly) everyone else reacts in the same way when it does impinge upon them.

Malcolm goes on to say:

If your answer is the same as mine you understand why I’m much more concerned with calling spades murderers rather than victims.

But, that isn't true; he emphatically is not interested in calling spades spades.

What a crudé thing to say

A certain crudé (*) minded indivdual recently wrote:

This [deciding what to think about the current Moslem invasion of Europe, following this successful model (**), and abetted by the rulers of Europe] would all be easier if the people who were pro-massive-immigration could all be sectioned off into particular areas of the country and forced to live among the migrants, while everyone else could have their enclaves to themselves.

What an absolutely shitty thing to say!

What? Gentle Reader doesn't yet understand my point, especially considering that that's just the sort of thing I might say? Ah, well, let's back up a bit.

Back in October 2014, at Victor Reppert's blog, I dissected some assertions by someone using the handle 'Karl Grant', and concluding with:

... You know, Churl, it's too bad we can't make a deal with the Moslems (as if they honor their word, ha!) to chop you first.

Now, the important thing to understand about 'Karl Grant' is that he's not just a leftist, but an apologist for all things Islamic, and especially of the current resurgence of the 1400-year-long Jihad against Christendom. He likes to lie about what is going on in the world today, and he likes to lie about those who seek to call others' attention to what is really happening.

It would be nice if the evil consequences of the advocacy of foolishly wicked policies could be reserved to the advocates. But that's not how the world works, and that's not how sin works -- sin always seeks to push the consequences off onto the innocent.

'Karl' didn't like any of my post, of course. And, being a good leftist ... and practitioner of taqiyyah ... he took no time at all to paint himself the victim of my final comment

So I say something you don''t like and you wish me bodily harm and death? I think your talk about "bloodthirsty, genocidal leftists" is simply projection of your own violent tendencies and fantasies.

Then, later in the thread, after some back and forth with a certain crudé minded indivdual, 'Karl' played the 'to quoque' card

And if we are going to talk about things we would rather point to in this conversation, I would rather point at the sentence where you condemned or criticized Ilion, who is also a self-proclaimed conservative, where he said he would love to hire people to chop me up because I voiced sympathy for a viewpoint he don't like as opposed to pointing at you getting worked up because you felt that I might have unfairly tarred some conservatives with my rhetorical brush. The problem is I am having trouble finding it.

To which the crudé minded individual replied:

Yeah, I think saying 'it's too bad we can't make a deal with the moslems to chop you first' was a shitty move on Ilion's part. I think he'd call it a joke when pressed, but it was a bad joke. Not a serious threat, but the conversation doesn't need that all the same. I criticize it thus.

Why would I call my comment a joke? I *mean* it! It is too bad that the evil consequences of open borders, and especially of open borders toward Moslems, can't be limited to the advocates of destroying the nation. But that's not how the world works.

Anyway, back to the first quoted post -- once again, by his own words, the crudé minded individual condemns himself.


(*) that's a pun, son, from the basic meaning of 'crud' as being 'shit'

(**) which model, by the by, is the one the Mexican government, with the collusion of the Democrats, has been using against the US for many decades

More dishonesty about Free Trade

Vox Day: advocating statism and merchantilism (and, quite frankly, socialism of the fascist variety)

There are four things you need to keep in mind if you are an ardent free trader:

1.The arguments justifying free trade have always been entirely theoretical, not empirical. In this way, they are no different than the incorrect pre-scientific logical conclusions that were subsequently proven to be false by modern science. At the time they were formulated, inexpensive shipping, the free movement of capital, and the mass movement of labor were unknown.

2.The USA historically enjoyed its fastest periods of economic growth under protectionist, restricted-immigration periods.

3.The post-WWII growth was not the result of any trade or economic policies, but a positive application of Broken Window theory. Every other industrial nation had its industrial capacity smashed, so the US benefited from an intrinsic infrastructural advantage for around 25 years.

4.Free trade levels all prices throughout the market. That's why a cashier in Miami gets paid about the same amount as a cashier in Portland. Even if free trade increases the overall amount of global economic growth, in doing so, it necessarily reduces wages and standards of living in the wealthier nations to bring them more in line with the wages and standards of living in the poorest nations.

A Theology of Slut Walks

Douglas Wilson: A Theology of Slut Walks

... Every absurd conclusion is, at some level, a valid derivation from absurd premises, but enough about any given screen shot of the Drudge Report.

Slut walks provide a great example of this. Once we trace the absurdity back upstream, we might learn something about the premises ...

The point of slut walks is ostensibly a simple one. It is that dressing in any particular way in no way justifies rape. Put in a less sympathetic way, it is that dressing provocatively must never be considered a provocation. ...

Slutwalks are also -- like *everything* to do with feminism (*) -- about power. Specifically, they are about demonstrating the power of certain females (to wit: feminists) (*) to compel men, all men, to acquiesce to blatant falsehoods.


(*) for feminism is a sub-set of leftism; and leftism has only the one nail, so to leftists, everything looks like a hammer.

(**) ironically, or not, whatever power feminists seem to have is *only* because certain powerful men find it convenient to give it to them.

Making History

Smitty at The Other McCain: PowerLine Laid Out On Fainting Couch Over Ben Carson USMA Story And Small Arachnid, But Mostly Ben Carson -- quoting 'American Elephant': "So, Ben Carson is now the first black presidential candidate in history to have his college records investigated by [the] media."


Wintery Knight (drawing on Ben Shapiro): Leftist POLITICO lies in order to smear black conservative Ben Carson


By the way, this episode provided Vox Day an excellent opportunity to display his intellectual dishonesty: Your "Get-Out-of-Racism-Free" has now expired -- He quotes Politico, knowing it's Politico, treating it as honest reporting rather than as a lying smear-job, and concludes: "I'm looking forward to hearing that Carson isn't a surgeon at all, but is actually a janitor at Mercy Medical in Baltimore."

Edit: and here is Vox Day doubling-down in a pretense of blamelessness ... you know, just like "social justice warriors" always do.

Is there anything more annoying ...

... than a guy who walks around the office whistling?

Well, maybe the gal who is always ordering everyone to Smile!

Arguing with Lewis

A very good essay from Douglas Wilson: Principalities, Powers, and Pecksniffs --

... It turns out that overweening conceit in rulers requires a strong theocratic restraint.

If there is a court of appeal past our human government, then in principle I have admitted theocracy. If there is no court of appeal past them, then I have just made them god. Having made them god, I discover that I am still in a theocracy, but instead of a loving Father, the theos of this system is corrupt and grasping, mendacious and low, and full of flatulent hubris. Requiring government to remain modest and within the bounds of sanity is therefore one of the most profound ethical requirements that has ever been promulgated among men.
...

Why are we so afraid of theocracy? What might happen? Might we go on a rampage and kill 50 million babies? Yeah, that would be bad. Better not risk it. Might we set up a surveillance state, with camera clusters pointed in every direction at all the intersections? Right — theocracies are terrible like that.

The real reason why our current rulers want us to react violently whenever we hear the word theocracy is that petty gods are always jealous of their position, and dread any talk of a Lord who rose from the dead.

There is *always* a "god of the system"; and if that god is not the Living God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, then perforce it will be something that is opposed to God ... and to human liberty.

Lydia McGrew being Lydia McGrew

... or, in other words, acting the bitch because she can get away with it.


I'm reposting this here, because I don't expect it to survive there --

^ Having seen Lydia McGrew in action, more than once, I don't believe a word of what she is asserting about what she has deleted from Mike T's posts.

For instance, consider this post which she didn't "edit" ... and her response and characterization of it --

Mike T: "The activists are mainly SJWs from what I read. Don't offer them any words of wisdom. They need to get mugged by reality. That is just as true of the women as it is the men."

Lydia McGrew: "Bag it. No gloating over evil acts on my threads, even if they happen to clueless people and _you_ think they "had it coming." Not gonna allow that kind of stuff around here."

But, of course, her characterization of what he wrote is not just incorrect, not just false, but a lie. Either that or she's too stupid to read, and we all can see for ourselves that she's not stupid. Those are the only two options in this particular circumstance -- either she's stupid, or she's intellectually dishonest. The third (and last) potential option, ignorance, does not apply in this case, as everything he said is right there.

Now, back up just one post above Mike T's post I've quoted here --

Lydia McGrew: "Actually, before those predictions [that after European nationalists have dealt with the Moslem invasion, they may well turn on Christians, because many so-called Christians are *aiding* the invasion] come true, Mike T. (if they do), I anticipate that the foolishly kind Christians may get a nasty surprise when they are harmed by the very people they are trying to help. I strongly suggest that anyone going to "migrant camps" to help the poor refugees leave the women behind, that's for sure. And go armed if possible."

She should denounce herself. But she won't; she's a hypocrite.

And I was right: she deleted that criticism-and-demonstration of her high-handedness.

Look at her hypocritical whining later in the thread --

Lydia McGrew: "I gotta love how Bedarz restates my careful references to Middle Eastern Christians' possible support for Hezbollah as "not holding to the Zionist line." ..."

edit:
To those persons (number unknown, somewhere between 1-8) who bounced over to this blog post from WWWW before Lydia McGrew deleted the two comments I'd made to her post criticizing her high-handed behavior, might I suggest refraining from commenting on her new threads for a while? Of course, for her to learn any lesson from such an action, nearly everyone who comments on her threads would need to refrain from commenting, and that's not likely to happen.

In Defense of Christendom

Bret Stephens at WSJ: In Defense of Christendom

h/t: Edgestow

Curling Up Under the Blanket

Douglas Wilson: Curling Up Under the Blanket

We live in a generation that is totalitarian in principle, having accepted all the basic totalitarian premises. Denying the Lordship of Jesus Christ drives you to those premises — for if Jesus is not Lord, then there is a vacancy that men will always want to fill. ...

We started by believing, as we ought to have done, that every man had a right to his own cabbages. We have ended by believing that every man has a right to his own truths. That ends with goons coming from the Department of Agriculture to seize the cabbages, and not one minister of the gospel in ten can explain how all such events are connected.

Providence - Unblinded Eyes, an Uncracked Head and Timely Passers-by

Malcolm the Cynic recently wrote a post he called The Hand of Providence, wherein he describes a harrowing drive during which he might reasonably have expected to get himself killed several times over, and for which a person with a spirit of gratitude (broadly lacking in this age) naturally gives thanks to God for averting all the things that might have happened.

This post is about a few such recent incidents which happened to me, for which only gratitude is appropriate --

As I may have mentioned a time or two, a have an old house that I've been restoring (for about half my life). I haven't done much work on it for the past decade, what with not having time when I had money and not having money when I had time, and not having a reliable helper.

Last July, the neighbor woman who had tackled to punks who had B&E the house the Friday before Memorial Day introduced me to a young fellow who has since been helping me on the weekends. So, just for that, I'm grateful.

On the first project we worked on, I might well have put my eyes out, which would have made it rather difficult to continue earning my living, to say nothing of finishing the project.

I have a compound miter saw, which I've had seemingly forever (and which, thankfully, was passed over in both break-ins, probably because it's so heavy). For most of its life, I've used it simply as a chop-saw; but on that particular day, I wanted to make mitered cuts. To make a long story short, due to inattention, I had the saw blade and back guide-plate set on a collision course. So, on the first cut, the blade started cutting into the piece of wood, and then hit the guide-plate .. (part of) which turned into shrapnel, several pieces of which hit me in the face. Perhaps an angel tipped off my sub-conscious, 'cause my eyes were tightly clenched shut even before the shrapnel hit me in the face. I might even have had my left hand in front of my face before the shrapnel hit, but I'm not positive whether it moved before or after I was hit (in favor of the before, there were a couple of hits on the back of the hand). Also, a couple of the blade's teeth came off, but none of those hit me; I expect that those might have cut deeper that the shavings of the guide-plate.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I might well have broken both arms, or my neck ... and been paralyzed or killed ... but the worst of it was that an earlobe got cut.

It had been threatening to rain all day, and it finally started in the mid-afternoon. So, we put away the tools and I took my helper home. By the time I got back to the house, it had all blown over and the sun was out. It hadn't even rained all that much.

So, since there was still several hours of light left, I decided to continue with the work I could do without help. We had just started screwing down the first piece of floor decking (tongue and groove OSB; I really dislike T&G, but that was all I had found in the thickness I wanted). So, I finished that, and got the second piece done. With the third piece, it was time to engage the T&G. Man! I *wasted* a good two hours fighting with that, and never did get it properly seated. I had my accident in the middle of all that.

What happened is that I stepped on nothing and discovered, yet again, that I don't float very well. When everything came to a stop, my head was about 9 1/2 feet lower that it had been just an instant before. My hands hit the ground first, the right taking the brunt. Then my right shoulder ... and head ... hit the ground, and then it was over. I was, of course, wildly disoriented. I recall thinking something along the lines of, "Man, my head sure is heavier that you'd expect", as though my head slamming into the ground with such force were due to its weight.

After the initial pain subsided enough that I could think, I found that other than brusing, the worst of the damage to me was a gash in my right earlobe, and that my wrists were a bit sore.

There are so many horrible things that might have happened: the stick that cut my earlobe might have got the eardrum ... or an eye; one or both arms might have been broken; my shoulder might have been mangled; my back or neck might have been broken; I might have been paralyzed (and then laid there in pain upside down till my helper showed up the next morning); I might have died.

What can one do but thank God for the Hand of Providence, which seems so often to protect us from so many of the consequences of our own carelessness?

Last Saturday, I decided to rent a small backhoe for the day; and I certainly wish now that I hadn't. Besides the expense (and the rest of the tale), it really wasn't all that useful. I think it might have been cheaper, and certainly more efficient, to hire someone to come up with a real backhoe.

So, I got out to Home Depot as soon as they opened, and bought a hitch for my truck and rented the backhoe. I got it back to the house and unloaded before my helper get there. As I had an appointment in Ashland (in the next county), I unhitched the trailer, and left soon after he arrived.

Since July, the weekends have been really good with respect to the weather; however, last Saturday was an exception. Not too long after I'd left for Ashland, my helper put away the tools and went home, as the threat of rain had become all too real.

But the time I returned, it was more a misty drizzle than rain-rain; though it kept at it for the rest of the day. So, I put on an old nylon coat and hopped on the toy backhoe. I had hoped I could just use the front-loader to move the dirt-pile, but that just stalled the engine. Did I mention that this backhoe is mostly just a toy?

About 4:00, I decided I'd had enough; I was cold and soaked, and the drizzle was getting heavier. I didn't have to have the backhoe back until 8:00 the next morning, but I figured there was no point in keeping it over night. This meant I needed to get it back by 6:00, when the tool rental office at Home Depot closed.

I dragged the trailer all the way around, to make hitching it easier. Man, it was heavy! Then, the backhoe wouldn't move! It started fine, but every time I tried to move, the engine died. So, I wasted about 15 minutes between calling the rental guy at Home Depot (the main guy was already gone), and the number of the company who actually owns the equipment. No answer on that.

Turns out, the last time I'd moved the machine and then turned the seat around to use the backhoe itself, the seat had stayed up. When I then turned the seat around to drive it to the trailer, it was still up too high. I'd noticed that, but I couldn't get it to go down; it finally dropped down on its own about the fourth or fifth time I got into the seat. I suppose there is a pressure sensor under the seat to prevent it moving unless the seat is in the correct position.

So, I got the machine cleaned up, and secured onto the trailer, and set off to return it. By now, it was 5:30. No sooner had I got onto the public street (my property is on an alley, rather than a two-way street), than the hitch I'd just bought that morning came undone! I haven't been able to find the pieces, so I don't know whether the receiving pin broke, or whether it was simply that the cotter pin had fallen off, allowing the receiving pin to work its way loose.

In any event, the trailer's tongue hit the ground ... and the bumper of my truck. I haven't even made the first payment on that truck (*)!

So, it's 5:35, and I need to get across town by 6:00. I'm cold and wet, and the rain is getting more serious. And I'm utterly helpless (and in mental pain -- Oh! my new truck!) Fortunately, a guy driving by had seen it all happen, and stopped to help me. He had a spare pin which he gave me (which I'm thinking is more robust than the one that came with the hitch), and he directed me backing the truck to re-hitch the trailer.

I got back to Home Depot at 5:55. It's a long time since I've been as glad to be rid of something as I was to be rid of that machinery!

Then, on Sunday afternoon (the next day), my helper and I went out to Lowe's to get more materials. Among other things, I needed some 14-foot 2x10s. Realistically, these are too long to haul on that truck, as it doesn't have a full-length bed. But, with enough weight in the bed over the 14-footers, it's doable. This time, I didn't have enough weight in the bed.

Just as I pulled out into the street, everything fell off the truck. So, there I am, blocking half the traffic on a very busy street. A young fellow who was trying to leave the Lowe's lot right behind me stopped and helped us reload the truck. The two of us could have done it, but it sure went quicker with a third set of hands.

Two helpful strangers in two days, right when they are needful! What are the odds, these days?



(*) A couple of weeks ago, one of the tires (which I'd bought last November) on my old truck died at 65 mph. So I bought a new(er) truck. ;)


====
Edit: 2015/11/10
"Whoa! You are certainly giving your Guardian Angel a good workout!"

It's true!

Last night, I drove to Mansfield after work to work on the house a bit (and to set a tarp over a floor I'd decked over the weekend, as the weather forecast called for rain today ... which actually started while I was there working).

At one point in the evening, I was moving a 14-foot 2x6 from the lumber pile to the cutting station, and I nearly walked down the stairs backwards! It may be worse than it sounds, as there is presently a foot-wide gap between the stairs themselves and the floor, and that gap is what I almost stepped into.

I can't help but wonder whether an angel gave me a little push toward safety, because it really did feel like I was tipping. What I mean is that for a brief moment, at the same instant that I realized what was about to happen, it really did feel as though I had already lost my balance and had already started the backward fall.

Misreading the Constitution

We Americans have a tradition of long-standing, going back at least to 1803, of misreading the Constitution ... even as we pretend to revere it. The particular misreading I wish at this time to bring to Gentle Reader's attention is the stubborn and persistent misreading of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment: for many of our current "immigration" problems -- which is to say, the fact that we are being invaded and that our rulers are aiding and abetting this invasion -- are rooted in this misreading.

Here is the text of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment -- "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Of late, in explaining how the "anchor baby" phenomenon came about and attempting to explain to Americans that the Constitution does not require us to attribute citizenship to the offspring of foreigners just because they happen to be born on American soil, several commentators have focused on the subordinate clause of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment ... all the while overlooking the verb.

I call to Gentle Reader's attention the precise wording of the first sentence as compared to the second (and subsequent, here unquoted) sentences.

The first sentence declares that a certain class of person -- previously denied to be citizens -- are citizens of the US, and of the state in which they reside. That is, the effect of this sentence was a one-time deal -- it applied only to certain persons then living, and it does not apply to anyone now living.

In contrast, the second sentence (and subsequent, unquoted sentences) is ongoing -- "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States ..."

The purpose of the first sentence of the 14th Amendemtn was to explicitly overturn and repudiate the Dread Scott decision and to incorporate this repudiation into the Constiturion itself (*); it was not to redefine what 'citizen' means.

The first sentence does not say, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, shall be citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." The first sentence is not on-going, as the second is.

(*) Congress actually has the authority to overturn most recisions of the federal courts by mere legislation -- for instance, Congress could invalidate both the Roe v Wade and the Obergefell rulings tomorrow, were the congresscritter so minded, and there is nothing the supreme Court could do except to say, "Yes, sir!"

So that people can see them

Douglas Wilson: In Which I Paint With Some Bright Yellows --

First, whenever we get to that elusive and ever-receding “hill to die on,” we will discover, upon our arrival there, that it only looked like a hill to die on from a distance. Up close, when the possible dying is also up close, it kind of looks like every other hill. All of a sudden it looks like a hill to stay alive on, covered over with topsoil that looks suspiciously like common ground.

So it turns out that surrendering hills is not the best way to train for defending the most important ones. Retreat is habit-forming.

This brings us to my second goal this morning, which is to highlight the principle. ...

...
But I am not trying [to] equate anything here — I am simply trying to illustrate how a believer’s conscience ought to work if he is employed by a government that tries to sin grievously through the instrumentality of a godly magistrate. This is just how I paint illustrations, with bright yellows and gaudy greens. I do that so that people can see them.

Douglas Wilson: Benedict and Beza Options

But that, though a nice statement of the problem, does not answer the problem. We need a solution to the impasse created by political polytheism, which is what under-girds our incoherent system of pluralism and diversity. Schizophrenia doesn’t work for cultures any more than it does for individuals.

So all these questions can be answered, I believe, by emphasizing something that all politically-engaged Christians should get tattooed on their frontal lobes — facing in, so that they can see it all the time.

Political process is not neutral. Administrative process is not neutral. Procedures are not neutral. Constitutional law is not neutral. Nothing is neutral. Everything we do corporately in the body politic is an expression of our foundational faith. That faith will either be the true faith — what I have been calling mere Christendom — or it will be an attempt to build a great skyscraper civilization on the foundation of our watered-down secular concrete.

The “rule of law” is not some “pure neutrality,” an ethereal gas that enables a bunch of members of different faiths and religions to bond together in the same society. The rule of law is actually a codified expression of certain aspects of our Christian inheritance. It is part of our legacy and heritage for a reason. It came from somewhere. It grew and developed in some countries and not in others for profound religious reasons. The rule of law has no evident authority apart from the authority of a transcendent God.

There is *always* a "god of the system", and if that god is not The Living God, then it's going to be some idol ... and there is going to be at least one demon inhabiting the idol, just waiting to feast on human souls.

Michael Egnor: Christian county clerk sent to jail for her opposition to gay marriage

Michael Egnor: What's the difference between a clerk not enforcing gay marriage law and a president not enforcing immigration law?

Michael Egnor: What's the difference between a clerk not enforcing gay marriage law and a president not enforcing IRS law?

Michael Egnor: Why are the President's myriad and persistent refusals to enforce law treated as discretionary, but a clerk's refusal to issue a marriage certificate deemed worthy of jail time.

Michael Egnor: What Judge David L. Bunning got wrong

Stupid bitch doesn't (even want to) understand men

Daily Mail: UK's National sperm bank has just NINE registered donors as boss plans to challenge men to 'prove their manhood' -- She hopes to appeal to men's vanity in order to attract sperm donations

Yeah. I'd really like to "prove my manhood" by causing a child to be conceived, so it can be aborted for being the "wrong" sex, or having the "wrong" eye color, or can have its life ruined by some lesbian if she doesn't kill it before it is born.

One thing the modern awash-in-feminism woman never seems to want to learn is that women have no power to shame men unless at least one of the following is true --
1) the man personally respects the particular woman attempting to shame him;
2) the point about which she wishes to shame him is one about which another man could shame him merely by lifting an eyebrow.

And the one thing the modern awash-in-feminism woman adamantly refuses to do is to earn the respect of men.

Karen Straughan

Karen Straughan (video): Why do MRAs bring up the draft?

I've watched of few of her videos (*) recently; she's mostly sensible ... for an 'atheist' and a pro-abortionist.


(*) And I *hate* videos; for in most cases, whatever information they may present could be presented in writing with far less expenditure of my time (to say nothing of bandwidth).

'The Donald'

I wonder how many people who refer to Trump as 'the Donald' even know how that (by now, way overused) nick-name came about?

By their own metaphor

By their own metaphor, 'atheists' are just assholes

Refanging The 10th Ammendment (updated)

K T Cat: Refanging The 10th Ammendment

Though, as Mr Cat's commenter, Tim Eisele, points out, it's not that the 10th Amendment is inadequate or ambiguously worded, it's that the bureaucrats and politicians -- anf the People -- don't want to abide by the Constitution, including the 10th.

Here is my contribution to K T Cat's thread --

I think that one of the biggest reasons, and perhaps the biggest reason, that the current (and collapsing) behemoth is an anti-liberty behomoth is that people -- even senators and supreme Court (*) justices -- simply don't understand the Constiution, and mostly never try to rectify the lack. It's sort of like the case of the Bible ... everyone has one, and no one reads it.

The nearly universal misunderstanding of the Constitution starts in civics class, wherein we are taught falsehoods about the Constitution which a simple reading of it ought to dispell.

For instance, one of the first things drummed into us in civics class is that we have a federal government of three "co-equal" branches. Now, this claim is false in two ways: it's false by the Constitution (that is, it is fase de jure), and it is false by how the federal government actually operates (that is, it is fase de facto).

De facto, our rulers are various judges within federal courts. And just below the judges are the "permanent government" within the bureaucracy, which is ostensibly answerable to the chief executive.

De jure, the Constitution established the *Congress* as the supreme branch of government.

Another civics class myth is that the Constitution establishes an "independent" judiciary (which is "co-equal" with the other branches). It does nothing of the sort: the Constitution makes the federal courts, and specifically the supreme Court, creatures of the Congress -- the Constitution gives the Congress the authority to declare that almost every matter of law is outside the jurisdiction of the supreme Court (and thus all federal courts): so, for instance, if Congress were so minded, it could simply enact bills overturning both Roe and Obergefell and include provisions declaring these matters to be outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

Another civics class myth is that the Constitution grants the power of "judicial review" to the supreme Court, and thus to the federal courts under it. The Constitution does nothing of the sort; the Court's exercise of "judicial review" is an unConstitutional usurpation going back to 1803 -- John Marshall's power grab appealed to the then-current partisan needs of both the Federalists and the Democrats, and so the politicians cooperated [with the judges] in violating the Constitution ... as they have been doing ever since.


Isn't it odd that so many of the myths we are taught in civics class have the effect of making us blind to blatant violations of the Constitution? Really, it's not all that odd -- the tone of our nationalized education was set in the Progressive Era, and the Progressives were all about a stealth overthrow of the Constitution.


(*) interesting tidbit -- the Constitution never mentions any "Supreme Court", but only a "supreme Court"

Edit 2015/09/01:
The reason the "Bill of Rights" are amendments to the Constitution, rather than written into the original document as presented to the States for Ratification, is because at the Constitutional Convention itself the argument (*) prevailed amongst the Framers that if a "Bill of Rights" were explicitly written into the Constitution then over time Americans would forget that necessarily that "Bill of Rights" could list only a very small number of their rights. In the wider American society, this argument didn't prevail; and, in fact, a number of the States made their ratification of the Constitution conditional upon a "Bill of Rights" being presented to the States as amendments for further ratification.

So, this is *why* the 10th Amendment is included in the "Bill of Rights", and why it is worded as it is worded. The Constitution as originally presented to the States for ratification gives the federal government *only* the powers and authorities explicitly enumerated in the document. That is, the original document implicitly reserves all other powers and authorities to the People or to the States. So, in keeping with the rationale for not including a "Bill of Rights" in the original document, the 10th Amendment was written to make explicit that all non-enumerated powers and authorities are reserved to the People or to the States.

(*) And, as history has shown us, Hamilton, Madison and the others were right: Consider merely the current "Gay Wedding Cake" non-debate --
Here we have "gay" little fascists using the violent power of the state to attempt to compel others to approve and celebrate their choice to live lives of deviant perversion. Now, no government anywhere on earth has the authority to so compel its subjects. Yet, how are Americans trying to protect themselves from this illegal and immoral usurpation of their own rights? Why, by meekly looking for some wording in the Constitution which can be used as a basis to claim that on this particular point their inherent rights as human beings and as citizens take precedence over the (illegal and immoral) desire of other persons to enslave them.

A people who *really* believed themselves to be the inheritors of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" would say, simply: "Go the Hell! You don't have the *right* to tell me to do this."

Remember: there is no such being as "the government"; it is not "the government" that is deciding to use the threat of violence-unto-death to compel so-called citizens to participate in "gay" "weddings" whether they wish to or not. Rather, it is specific actual human beings making this decision.

So, just as the Framers feared, we Americans have degenerated to the point where we automatically behave as though those who wish to use us for their own ends have the right to do so and that *we* bear the burden of proof to justify that we have this or that right as an exception to that general rule. The whole point of the Constitution implicitly, and the 10th Amendment explicitly, is that the reverse is true -- *we* have the rights without needing to justify that we have them, and *they* bear the burden of proof to justify any and all attempts to impose upon us.

Who stands where on the victimization totem pole?

GayPatriot: "So, we had to purge all Confederate Battle Flags because Dylann Stormdoor was a southern white supremacist; can we please ban that horrible rainbow flag now? Or does gay privilege trump white privilege?"


Douglas Wilson: Pretty Sure It Is Not You

And a Canadian??

Trigger Warnings: An "anti-feminist"

Short answer: No

Question: Was the 'War Between the States' about slavery?

This is not *new* information that Mr Sensing presents.

Pretty much sums it up

Millions Severed from Got No Secrets to Conceal

'Science!'

Douglas Wilson: 3 Reasons the Campaign on Planned Parenthood is Winnable -- Pastor Wilson shares a short description of some of the 'Science!' being done on murdered babies. He gives the description in plain English and in sciencese (personally, the sciencese affected me more than the plain English)

The results of the above research, incidentally, were published in Science. That particular vile experiment was done in Finland, but it was funded by “the Lalor Foundation in Boston,” the “New York State Department of Mental Hygiene,” and, get this, the “Association for Aid of Crippled Children,” also located in New York.

My mother was used as a human guinea-pig -- here in America, in the 1930s -- in ways not too different from what the pre-Nazis and Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s. AND, it was funded in large part by the Shriners. Now, I'm confident that the rank-and-file men who were Shriners had no idea that the monies they raised to help crippled children were being put to such perverse ends; but the people at the top, the people making the decisions, the people working hand in glove with the "Progressives" in Indiana's government and its medical corps, knew.

How will 'gay' mirage affect *your* marriage?

One of the favorite non-arguments of the proponents of "gay" mirage -- that is, when they're pretending that they are willing to try to get what the want through democratic means, and accept the consequences when the demos says, "No, thanks" -- is to pose the rhetorical question: "How will 'gay' [mirage] affect or harm *your* marriage?" And, of course, the approved, albeit false, answer is, "It won't!"

Here, Mr and Mrs America, is one of the ways that "gay" mirage is going to harm *your* marriage -- since it is impossible that a woman is a 'father' or that a man is a 'mother', and since it is also impossible that the leftists will acknowledge that marriage exists only between one man and one woman, the "solution" to this dilemma will be to remove the words 'Father' and 'Mother' from birth certificates, replacing them with 'Parent A' and 'Parent B'.

So, thanks to the judicial imposition of "gay" mirage upon the nation, once this particular logical implication works its way through the courts, you will no longer legally be your children's mother or father; at best, you will be 'Parent A' or 'Parent B'.


Eventually, even the word 'parent' will have to be scrubbed from birth certificates, for it still whispers, a bit too loudly, the truth.

Pervertitarians never rest

Alexander Boot (from 2015): German government says incest is best

LifeSite News (from 2007): German Government Publication Promotes Incestuous Pedophilia as Healthy Sex Ed

Christian Telegraph (from 2008): Christians stopped sexual depravity of German kids

I think "stopped" is probably too strong a word; "delayed" probably more accurately captures the nuance, for pervertitarians never rest in their quest to pervert all good things.


Now, Gentle Reader has been around the block a time or two. One knows, from repeated experience, that the very people who are continuously promoting this sort of thing -- the very human termites who are intentionally gnawing relentlessly at the roots of our civilization, which is the very thing that makes our comfortable lives possible -- will point to the fact the the German government was successfully shamed into withdrawing this particular publication and then say, "Ah-ha! You conservatives are just fear-mongering!" And the fence-sitters, the people who don't want to see what's right under their noses, will say, "Yeah! What's the big deal? It all woked out."

But, the point is, as Mr Boot put it in an email response to me, "what's staggering here isn't the dates, and not the fact that the booklets were eventually withdrawn, but that the government of a Western, formerly Christian, nation could have produced them in the first place."

The other enormities he mentions in the article are more recent -- because the pervertitarians never rest in their quest to pervert all good things.

And, in the meantime, with respect to Germany, it is still illegal, as per laws left over from the Nazi era, to try to remove one's own children from the open sewer that is "public education".

Does Gentle Reader recall the case, from just last year, of the Romeike family? This is a German family that fled to the US, seeking political asylum, to escape imprisonment by the German government for refusing to send their children to the sort of state-approved cess-pits that would "teach" them that parents ought to diddle their kids, so that they won't "be ashamed of their bodies." And the Obamanation was working with the German government to force the family back to Germany, to have their children stolen from them and to be imprisoned for daring to object.

The last I read of the case, the family had been granted "indefinite deferred action" status -- or, to translate that into English: "this case is presently too 'hot' to deport them back to Germany, so let's decide to not decide anything just yet; see if people forget about them, then we'll decide to decide."


Quoting Mr Boot's article:

For religion isn’t all about what people do on a Friday night or Sunday morning. It’s also about the way man defines himself.

If a father sees himself as the creature God made in His image and likeness, then he’ll raise his daughter to be proud of her humanity, not her vagina.

He’d try to instil in her certain eternal truths that can be best absorbed in a state of innocence, the longer-lasting the better. He’d try to teach the little girl that life has a profound meaning, and her genitals aren’t the place where it can be found.

If, however, a man believes that, when he dies, he turns to fertiliser and that’s it, then life to him can have no meaning - or rather the process of life becomes its own meaning.

Deriving as much pleasure out of every moment from the earliest possible age becomes the ultimate desideratum. In fact, the very definition of pleasure has to be pushed downwards, ideally all the way down to the crotch.

So why wait until the girl grows up and, God forbid, marries, reactionary as such a possibility may sound? Why waste the valuable years between 1 and 3, when she can receive hands-on tuition in what her clitoris is for? No reason at all.

Such is the ledger sheet of our much-vaunted progress, ladies and gentlemen. On the credit side, children operating computers with nothing short of wiz-kid dexterity. On the debit side, fathers encouraged to masturbate their one-year-old daughters.

You can't have "just a little bit" of sin -- as individuals, and as societies, either we must reject sin and perversion, root and branch, or we must become sin and perversion, which is to say, death. The choice before us is the same choice it has always been: life or death. Choose one, because you can't have both.

Dedication

The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit

Render Unto Caesar

Douglas Wilson: Children of the Rainbow -- "As Voddie Baucham put it memorably, if you render your children to Caesar, don’t be surprised when they come back Romans."

People frequently quote the verse (*), "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" without thinking about the context.

Now, for sure, the overall context is that some Pharisees (and partisans of the Herodian dynasty) were trying to set a trap for Christ: they say only two answers to the question they posed him, both of which they could spin to his condemnation. His answer was to expose the question's false premise on which rested the dilemma by which they thought to trap him..

However, *that* is not the context to which I wish to draw Gentle Reader’s attention, but rather to a sub-context of that overall context.

What did Christ ask them? He asked, “Whose image does this coin bear?” What he didn’t ask explicitly - for in the context of people who live and breathe the text (even if not quite the spirit) of Scripture - it is always implied: “Whose image do you bear?”

So, here is how they understood has answer to them: “Here is a coin; it is marked as being the property of Caesar. And here is you, who are marked as being the property of God. So, if Caesar demands what is his, give it back to him. But do not give him what is God’s.”


(*) and frequently, just the first half; I think we can expect this frequency to increase in the near future


Edit 2015/07/05:
The Other McCain: What Education Teaches

No Truce With the Left

Daniel Greenfield: No Truce With the Left

There comes a time when every conservative thinker tries to find some common ground with the left in some area. Today it's criminal rights and the headlines have Rand Paul denouncing the racist justice system while Grover Norquist and the Koch Brothers join with the left to back their reforms. As usually happens, the conservatives or libertarians turn out to be the useful idiots of the left.

Liberals have a long history of being the left's useful idiots. It's only fair that libertarians get a turn.

...

To understand the left, you need to remember that it does not care about 99 percent of the things it claims to care about. Name a leftist cause and then find a Communist country that actually practiced it. Labor unions? Outlawed. Environmentalism? Chernobyl. The left fights all sorts of social and political battles not because it believes in them, but to radicalize, disrupt and take power.

The left does not care about social justice. It cares about power.

That is why no truce is possible with the left. Not on social issues. Not on any issues.

The left is a drunk in a bar trying to pick a fight with you. Trying to convince him that you didn't disrespect him, put something in his beer to make him dizzy or make his feet so heavy won't work. There's no 'agree to disagree' possible here. He's picking a fight with you because he wants a fight.

The left does not care about Bruce Jenner. It does not care about gay rights, equal pay, police brutality or even slavery. Its activists 'care' about those things a great deal right now, but they could easily be persuaded tomorrow to be outraged by telephone poles, shredded wheat or people in green sweaters.

They care mainly about emotional venting and exercising power over others. It's the same phenomenon witnessed during the Salem Witch Trials, the French Revolution or any other mob scene. Except the individual elements of the mob are on social media and have a hashtag.

The outraged social justice warrior was laughing at tranny jokes a few years ago. Now he's ready to kill over minor verbal missteps. A few years from now he'll be laughing at them again.

On the bright side

On the bright side, with our rulers presently embracing (*) and pushing "gayness", it seems there is finally a way for a man (I use the word advisedly in the context of the linked story) to prevail in "family court"


(*) Give it some time -- after the leftists start putting us Christians in death-camps, they'll start putting the "gays" in there with us.

I especially liked the last one

The Sacred Cow Slaughterhouse Some Fights You'll Never Win

Rue Britannia!

Jihad Watch: UK: Imam accused of recruiting for jihad group doesn’t have to wear electronic tag — it breaches his human rights

Happy Magna Carta Day!

Mark Steyn: The Field Where Liberty Was Sown -- "I liked it better the old way. Real rights are like Magna Carta: restraints on state power. Too many people today understand the word "rights" to mean baubles and trinkets a gracious sovereign bestows on his subjects - "free" health care, "free" community college, "safe spaces" from anyone saying anything beastly - all of which require a massive, coercive state regulatory regime to enforce."

eXtreme Gammon

This morning, quite by accident, I learned that one of my co-workers (*) has written a mobile app/game (**) for backgammon -- eXtreme Gammon


Ah! Here is the mobile version


(*) he's a furriner -- a Frog, in fact! -- but let's not hold that against him. Or, not too much, anyway. ;)

(**) after looking over the linked site, I think I misunderstood him about it being a smart phone app. Perhaps what he'd meant is that it has been recently ported to those platforms.

Every path leads to the same destination

Vox Day: The Devil's own --

It is not uncommon for people to ask me why I treat atheists, particularly those of the militant or evangelical variety, with such open contempt. The reason is very simple. The only way they can be reached, the only way they can even begin thinking rationally about Christianity instead of thoughtlessly reacting to it, is for their pride to be broken first. Since their pride tends to revolve around their intelligence, it usually requires a higher intelligence to break it and I happen to be reasonably well-equipped in that regard.

It's not knowledge that keeps men like Phil from submitting to the Most High, to the Creator God of the Universe, it is pride in the independent consciousness that they possess as a gift from the very tyrant they refuse to serve. As an arrogant man myself, I recognize that fierce and independent pride when I see it. I even admire it, to a certain extent. But I also know its futility, and worse, its sheer pointlessness.

Does the jar demand the potter admire its beauty? Is the jar foolish enough to be proud of its existence separate from the very mind that conceived it, the very hands that shaped it and brought it into being? Does the jar so lack perception that it fails to grasp it can be unmade as easily as it was made by its maker?

In what, O jar, is your petty pride?

How strange it is that those who refuse to grovel [bow] before God so readily bow [grovel] before other men and genuflect before some of the most foolish ideas of Man ever conceived. And how pointless, when we know that one day every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord. Serve freely or defy as you see fit, because every path leads to the same destination, submission before the Almighty.

Other than his choice of wording in the sentence I "fixed", this analysis of the pious (and cynically self-serving) myths about their commitment to Reason! that 'atheists' use as rationales for their God-hatred is pretty spot-on.

The pressure seems too much

It seems that the pressure of freeing one's mind of the evils and lies of leftism may be too much for some to bear. Of late, Bob Prokop seems to be trying to get free of the falsehoods to which he has devoted so much of his life and effort. And, of course, given human nature, and the nature of belief-systems, and the nature of leftism in supplying its adherents with hefty doses of self-righteousness, one does expect relapses.

It appears that for B.Prokop, the proverbial straw prompting him to try to de-leftify himself has been the epiphany that even though Catholicism, Inc. has faithfully acted the good little bitch to Progressivism (i.e. American Leftism) for well over a century, in their present seeming cultural triumph, this batch of leftists have as little use for, or respect of, The One True Bureaucracy, or of Roman Catholic persons who happen to be Christians (in contrast to the Kennedys and Pelosis and Bidens and such-what), as any other batch of leftists has ever had.

First, let's examine an example of intellectual dishonesty involving someone who is not B.Prokop, so that one may more easily recognize for what it is the example that does involve him --

Over at Victor Reppert's blog, in the Marriage legal and moral thread, B.Prokop had posted this:

"making a judgement of the moral character of the wedding participants ... is the issue that I have been saying matters most"

I think this is what frightens me the most about this whole debate. People like Doug seem perfectly ready (and even eager) to employ the full weight of state power to compel others to not only act in certain ways, but also to think in proscribed fashions. The above quote is crystal clear. The pro same sex marriage side wishes to make disagreeing with them a thought crime, punishable by the loss of one's job, business, livelihood, whatever it takes.

And you think this is improbable? That "it can't happen here"? Well. Over on Ilion's website, he links to a news story about a Canadian jeweler who cheerfully and professionally did everything his lesbian customers wanted. Yet they still threatened action against his business solely because he did not approve of what his customers were doing. So Doug is right. This has nothing to do with cakes, etc. Read the quote at the top of this posting again. It's all about thought crime.

In response, concerning lesbians' subsequent progressive-mob attack on the the Christian jeweler, I wrote:

I suspect that the sexual pervert fascists did this on purpose: that they intentionally ordered custom-made "engagement" rings from this jeweler, intending all along to raise the progressive mob against him to demand a refund ... after he had gone to the expense of buying the materials and doing the labor to make the rings.

And, as sure as night follows day, some lying leftist "social justice warrior" needed to pipe up

What's next - jet fuel can't melt steel beams? There was a second gunman on the grassy knoll?

Which is rather amusing, when you think about it: the fool's examples of "crazy conspiracy theories" to which he wants to liken what I said are the sort that leftists love to love, and to spread.

Now, anyone who has *read* just a couple of the public news items about the particular case -- to say nothing of all the other cases in which sexual perversion fascists and other "social justice warrior" fascists conspire to ruin the livelihoods, and lives, of persons who will not agree to pretend that two dudes butt-fucking equals a marriage -- understands that there is no "crazy conspiracy theory" involved in what I wrote. And, moreover, those who have read a couple of public news items about the Canadian sexual perverts attempting to ruin the livelihhod of the Christian jeweler understand that my use of "I suspect" was just me using understatement, as I do from time to time.


So, if Gentle Reader has grasped the essential dishonesty of the fool, 'John Doe', trying to liken what I'd written to some "crazy conspiracy theory", let us move on to B.Prokop attempting a similar move (in his case, in two parts).

Victor Reppert has another recent post, called An ethicist's nightmare

There are ethical problems with some research. Let's take, for example, selective breeding of human beings. The issues surrounding racism are made a lot easier by the fact that there is really no such thing as a superior race. But, if we started breeding superior human beings, then there would be a superior race in reality. Then what would our duties of the superior race be to the inferior race? That would be an ethicist's nightmare.

But a certain famous scientist keeps playing around with the idea.

I made two comments to Mr Reppert's OP --

comment #1 " The issues surrounding racism are made a lot easier by the fact that there is really no such thing as a superior race."

Oh, silly! There are any number of "superior race(s)" ... it all depends upon the metrics one is using to define or delineate "superior".

Admittedly, my comment could have been clearer had I quoted Reppert's next sentence. In the sentence I quoted, he says that there is presently no such thing as a "superior race". In the next (and unquoted) sentence, he says that in the future, there could be such a thing as a "superior race", were eugenicists (and 'Science!' worshipers in general) to have their way. My response is to point out that, no, there is no difference at all between now and this imagined future with respect to the existence of a "superior race".

comment #2 "Then what would our duties of the superior race be to the inferior race? That would be an ethicist's nightmare."

It would [NOT] be "an ethicist's nightmare" nightmare because "ethics" is about coming up with rationales to "explain" how it is that immoral behavior is really moral, after all.

Races don't have moral duties to races. Individuals have moral duties to individuals, and those don't change just because one's race is superior according to this metric, rather than that.

Ah-ha! B.Prokop -- who is still a leftist at heart, and who is really fighting to hold onto his leftism -- apparently imagined he had found -- or could manufacture -- a "Gotcha" moment

What are your metrics, Ilion, that would indicate the existence of a "superior" race in the Real World today? I don't know of any.

Superior cultures, yes. But races? Can't see it.

Now, even if Gentle Reader doesn't yet fully understand that I do not play that game, B.Prokop surely knows it by now.

I replied --

Do you (singular and plural) practice at this? Is there some special class one takes to learn to un-read what another has written so clearly?

Do you remember the last time you beat your wife, B.Prokop?

See? In two different ways, I had told B.Prokop that he was barking up the wrong tree (and that I wasn't going to play that game).

And, so, of course, being a not yet recovered leftist, B.Prokop had to play another popular leftist game: "I'm a Special Snowflake and It's All Always All About Me!" --

It would have been sometime before she died, literally in my arms, with our daughters weeping at the foot of her bed, from pancreatic cancer some 6 years ago. Care to apologize for that remark, Ilion?

That ain't never gonns happen, and he knows it; for I apologize only if I have done something wrong. And someone else's decision to invent an insult where there is none is not *me* doing something wrong.

Shoot! Someone else even tried, round-about, to explain it to him --

Your wife may have been a poor topic for Ilíon's question, but I think the point he was trying to make was that your question about what metrics he would use to determine which race is superior is leading, and it misses his point. I wouldn't take it personally.

And, of course, everyone knows that the question, "When did you quit beating your wife?", or variations on it, has nothing to do with making "your wife" the "topic for [the] question".

But, of course, B.Prokop is still a fool (and is resisting freeing himself of his long-cherished foolishness), and so he *cannot* admit his error, or even just let it drop quickly down the memory-hole --

I did [take it personally], and he needs to apologize - abjectly, and now.

Ain't never gonna happen ... and everyone knows it ain't.

A fool for all seasons

William Vallicella, 'the Maverick Philosopher', is a fool. And his foolishness in rooted in his refusal to acknowledge -- indeed, even to critically examine the question (*) -- that we human beings can know that the Creator is; and that, in fact, we cannot *not* know that the Creator is.

Consider these recent pronouncements --

William Vallicella: The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

... And now we notice a very interesting and important point. To be a liberal in the old old sense (a paleo-liberal) is, first and foremost, to value toleration. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism. (Morris Raphael Cohen) But why should we be tolerant of (some of) the beliefs and (some of) the behaviors of others? Because we cannot responsibly claim to know, with respect to certain topics, what is true and what ought to be done/left undone. Liberalism (in the good old sense!) requires toleration, and toleration requires fallibilism. But if we can go wrong, we can go right, and so fallibilism presupposes and thus entails the existence of objective truth. A good old liberal must be an absolutist about truth and hence cannot be a PC-whipped lefty.

Examples. Why tolerate atheists? Because we don't know that God exists. Why tolerate theists? Because we don't know that God does not exist. And so on through the entire range of Big Questions. But toleration has limits. ...

Now, aside from the fact that we *can* know that God is -- that in fact, we all do know it already -- the reason to tolerate God-deniers has nothing to do with knowledge or ignorance of the reality of God.

By Vallicella's rationale for tolerating them, should the majority of humanity come to accept the truth that we human beings can, and do, know that God is, it would then be “right” to cease to tolerate the God-deniers amongst us. You know, like they do to us whenever they get their filthy paws on the levers of governmental force. And the reason they *always* persecute us is precisely because their metaphysical commitments provide no reason to refrain from doing it.

William Vallicella: Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

So I am quite puzzled by Ryan's claim that the existence of God is contradicted by much of what we know to be true. I would like him to produce just one proposition that we know to be true that entails the nonexistence of God. The plain truth of the matter, as it seems to me, is that nothing we know to be true rules out the existence of God. I cheerfully concede that nothing we know to be true rules it in either. Pace the doctor angelicus, one cannot rigorously prove the existence of God. One can argue for the existence of God, but not prove the existence of God. By 'argue for the existence of God,' I mean give good arguments, plausibly-premised arguments free of formal and informal fallacy, arguments that render theistic belief reasonable. What I claim cannot be done, however, is provide rationally compelling arguments, arguments that will force every competent philosophical practioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.

2. Ryan also claims that there is no evidence for the God hypothesis. This strikes me as just plain false. There are all kinds of evidence. That it is not the sort of evidence Ryan and fellow atheists would accept does not show that it is not evidence. People have religious and mystical experiences of many different kinds. There is the 'bite of conscience' that intimates a Reality transcendent of the space-time world. Some experiences of beauty intimate the same. There are the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God. Add it up and you have a cumulative case for theism.

The atheist will of course discount all of this. But so what? I will patiently discount all his discountings and show in great detail how none of them are rationally compelling. I will show how he fails to account for obvious facts (consciousness, self-consciouness, conscience, intentionality, purposiveness, etc.) if he assumes that all that exists is in the space-time world. I will expose and question all his assumptions. I will vigorously and rigorously drive him to dogmatism. Having had all his arguments neutralized, if not refuted, he will be left with nothing better than the dogmatic assertion of his position.

Look at this, the last paragraph especially: right there, the fool *has* proven that atheism is false -- which is to say, contrary to his continuous insistence that no one can either prove or disprove the reality of God, *he* has proven, right there, that God is.

But he refuses to see it, for he is a fool: he values something more than he values truth. And one of the things he values more that truth is "discussion and debate" (as in the title of the first linked post)


(*) his characterization of me as a "punk" is a manifestation of his refusal to reason about the matter, pure and simple.

Swimming the Ohio

I had, myself, long noticed the sort of internal incoherency of much of the criticism of Protestantism by many Catholics (and some Orthodoxen) of which Wilson speaks.

Douglas Wilson: -- "The charge against the Protestants is that we build no civilizations, and when it is pointed out that we built a very great one, the response is that it is quite a wicked civilization, now that we mention it, full of characteristically Protestant sins. You don’t ever do this, and besides, you do it so badly that it blackens the sky above us.

In short, we are not being critiqued — which we, being sinners, could stand a lot more of — but are rather being steered, which we could stand a lot less of. We are being gamed. If we teach no church history, we are Gnostics. If we teach a distinctively Protestant approach to church history, we are bigots. It turns out that the only solution to these internal contradictions lies on the other side of the Tiber, or the Bosporus. No, no, I reply — it lies on this side of the Ohio. And if you never thought of the Ohio in religious terms, then maybe that’s your problem."

His name is 'Bruce'

Add me to the list of "haters" (and, should the leftists have their ultimate way, imprisoned or executed for it), for I will never pretend that Bruce Jenner is a 'she' nor that his name is 'Cairlyn'. He is a very mentally (and spiritually) disturbed man, but a man -- a male human being, however unmanly -- nonetheless.

The Other McCain: War on Human Nature: The Celebrity Fantasy Dress-Up With ‘Caitlyn’ Game


Isn't it odd that in Leftie World, as Ben Shapiro tweeted: "Your biological sex is completely mutable, but your sexual orientation is completely immutable." (Of course, this holds only so long as the leftists find "gays" to be useful. When "gays" are no longer collectively useful to the left, they'll be putting them in the death camps, right along with us Christians)

Also, isn't it all rather odd that the very people who like to congratulate themselves on being "the reality-based community" are so very against reality?


Edit:
Walt Heyer: "Sex Change" Surgery: What Bruce Jenner, Diane Sawyer, and You Should Know -- "Bruce Jenner and Diane Sawyer could benefit from a history lesson. I know, because I suffered through “sex change” surgery and lived as a woman for eight years. The surgery fixed nothing—it only masked and exacerbated deeper psychological problems."

Pray again for Ken Miller

Lydia McGrew: Pray again for Ken Miller -- If you're not already aware of the situation Mrs McGrew is discussing -- which has been on-going for several years -- please do read the linked post.

Marriage legal and moral

Victor Reppert has (yet another) post concerning the anti-debate in the US concerning same-sex mirage. Among other things, it's exploring a typically libertarian version of surrender to the leftists on the issue. In this post, I intend to expand upon the response I posted to his blog.

Mr Reppert's (new) post is called Marriage legal and moral --

Some people would argue for a distinction between the legal acceptability of same-sex marriage and its moral acceptability. Consider the following case: a man leaves his wife and three kids, and runs off with a Playboy bunny half his age. He divorces his wife, and goes down to the courthouse to get a license to marry his new girlfriend. The courthouse won't ask any questions about whether he was moral or not in starting this relationship which began as an adulterous affair. They just check to see if his divorce is final, and if it is, they issue the marriage license. But if a photographer who knew about how the relationship starter, and who believes in the Seventh Commandment (Thou shalt not commit adultery) was asked to photograph the wedding, would such a photographer be reasonable in saying "I recognize that you are getting married legally, but I can't be part of the celebration of your new union, given what I know about how you got together. Sorry, please find another photographer."

(Interestingly enough, the above case seems to be one of the stronger reasons in support of same-sex marriage, since it points out that in heterosexual cases like this one, the government doesn't hand out licenses based on what they perceive to be moral or not, either on religious grounds or on any other grounds).

If that is reasonable, then could someone who object morally to a same-sex marriage do the same thing, since they are being asked, really, to be part of the celebration of something they don't feel right about celebrating?

My posted response was:

The (ahem) argument given above begs the very point at question. Moreover, it commits one to a slippery-slope that can only end in the destruction of the institution of marriage.

But then, that it the whole point of "gay" mirage.

Concerning Mr Reppert's scenario of adultery and divorce and re-marriage -- now, aside from the inconvenient fact that it is more frequently the woman who torpedoes a given marriage, the other fact is that the ubiquity of divorce in present-day America (and Western civilization as a whole) is a direct result of our collective decision to refuse to fight against the former leftist assualt on the very meaning of marriage, via "no-fault" divorce ... which is to say, divorce-on-demand.

Indeed, in the "bad old days", there were men who behaved shamefully toward their wives as in Mr Reppert's scenario -- Charles Dickens comes to mind. But, it was not "socially acceptable", and *everyone* thereafter looked askance at such a man, even if they didn't say anything to his face.

As an example: my paternal grandmother had been married four times (the other, three: I know a bit about the costs of divorce). Her first husband died, leaving her a young widow with two children. She remarried and they had a son. Then she discovered that her "husband" was married to another woman, so she divorced him, to make it "legal". He died soon after, and she married my grandfather; they had two sons (the elder died in infancy) ... and then she divorced him (my father told me that his older sister used to stir up trouble between his parents; but it's also a fact that my grandmother was not an easy woman to live with, and so she was probably very stirable). When my father was nine, his parents were going to remarry (I think my aunt was herself married by then); they had the marriage license already. But then my grandfather died of pneumonia (he was 59/60, she was 44/45). Sometime after that, my grandmother married for the fourth time ... and thus we called her "Grandma Brown", and similarly did not call my mother's mother "Grandma Brown" due to her own final marriage.

Now, I want to draw Gentle Reader's attention to something that will seem very odd to persons having been reared in the present-day anti-Christian "no-fault" divorce culture: my grandmother did not re-marry until her previous husband -- even though she had divorced him, or even when the "marriage" hadn't been a real marriage in the first place -- had died.

Now, don't take this as that my grandmother was some sort of holy Christian. Rather, our culture was so informed by Christianity that even non-Christians lived the public/social aspects of their lives in accordance with Christianity. And, according to Christianity, a marriage is the permanent union of a man and a woman, ending only by the death of one of the spouses, for it is a "type" of the promise of our union with God --and "long-term relationship" is emphatically not a Christian concept.

Even as recently as 1936, even the King of Great Britain wasn't free simply to marry a woman with two living husbands; this is how "socially unacceptable" Christianity had made divorce, in contrast to the pagan Romans after they had become so morally decadent that they could not maintain their own republic.

This is what we, as a civilization, have already given up -- have already willingly destroyed -- in choosing to have our ears tickled by the lies of people who have always intended the utter destruction of the institution of marriage ... and the marginalization of the very foundation of our civilization, which is Christianity.

(Interestingly enough, the above case seems to be one of the stronger reasons in support of same-sex marriage, since it points out that in heterosexual cases like this one, the government doesn't hand out licenses based on what they perceive to be moral or not, either on religious grounds or on any other grounds).

As seen above, the argument implied here is a bit disingenuous. Moreover, until quite recently, "the government" didn't license one to marry; rather, "the government" legally acknowledged what Christianity said had or had not happened (this is why my grandmother's second "long-term relationship" was not a marriage, despite the license from "the government").

Let us look at something I have written several times, in various places. These are the requirements for entering a valid marriage, one that is both moral and legal, and upon which the laws in all the polities of Christendom had been based until quite recently --
0) A marriage is the publicly recognized exclusive life union between two human beings for the primary purpose of:
a) forming a new family-unit;
b) thereby domesticating their sexual activity for the benefit of society -- and of the individuals themselves -- as untamed sexual activity is destructive, both to the individual and ultimately to society as a whole;
c) and creating a stable environment for the rearing the the new human beings who are the natural result of the sex act;
d) and thus establishing just who is responsible for the up-bringing of those new human beings;
1) Therefore: a marriage may be contracted between two, and only two, human beings:
1a) one male;
1b) one female;
2) both parties must be free to contract a marriage; that is, neither party is already married;
2a) both by what a marriage is, as in 0) above, and by this requirement, a marriage involves the promise of sexual exclusivity;
3) the two parties may not be within a prohibited degree of biological or familial relationship to one another;
4) the two parties must mutually consent to the marriage;
5) from which it follows that the two parties must be legal adults, legally competent to consent to a marriage;
5a) or, if not yet legal adults, must be of some minimum age and must have the approval of their legal guardian.

DO NOTE: in no wise do these requirements prevent persons afflicted with homosexual desire from marrying -- the point being that the leftists' primary charge against marriage in the present phase of their centuries-long war to destroy marriage is a deliberate lie. But then, The Lie has always been the preferred tool of leftists in their continual war against what is.


Now, consider the above tendentious argument for homosexual "marriage" in conjunction with the above given requirements for, and definition of, marriage.

Clearly, in order to pretend that a homosexual "marriage" is a real marriage, we must pretend that sub-items 1a) and 1b) are not the first requirement of a marriage. Moreover, as homosexual "unions" do not, and cannot, result in the issue of children, then most of the sub-points of 0) must be removed from the social meaning of marriage. Similarly, as homosexual "long-term relationships" are emphatically *not* about sexual exclusivity, then item 2a), and indeed the very definition of marriage as an "exclusive life union", must be denigrated, even moreso than has already been done via "no-fault" divorce.


But, if sub-items 1a) and 1b) can be removed as requirements for a real marriage, why cannot requirement 1) be removed entirely? Who says that a marriage may be contracted between two, and only two, persons? Hell, who says that a marriage may be contracted only between persons?

And -- as everyone knows ... despite that some of us have (leftist) political reasons to lie about the matter -- we are already seeing people "marrying" animals and inanimate objects and multiple "partners".


Why cannot requirement 2) be removed? Who says that a marriage may not be contracted by a person already married to someone else?

And -- as everyone knows ... despite that some of us have (leftist) political reasons to lie about the matter -- we are already seeing people advocating that polygamous "marriages" and "open" "marriages" are just as real as real marriages.


Why cannot requirement 3) be removed? Who says that a marriage may be contracted only by two persons who are not within a prohibited degree of biological or familial relationship to one another?

And -- as everyone knows ... despite that some of us have (leftist) political reasons to lie about the matter -- we are already seeing people advocating that incestuous "long-term relationships" may be just as validly marriages as real marriages.

Gentle Reader may recall that I have "predicted" that once the meaning of marriage has been deliberately destroyed in the name of a false "equality", we will be seeing people "marrying" their heirs, so as to evade estate taxes.

Already we see a case of an adoptive 'father' "marrying" his adoptive 'son' -- and the whole point of the adoption was "estate planning".

What? You say that these two men were not *really* father and son, despite that they had obtained a state-issued document stating that they were, in fact, father and son? But, then you turn around and say that, now, they *really are* man and husband, simply because they have obtained a state-issued document (as forced upon the polity by unelected and unaccountable judges) stating that they are, in fact, married to one another?

So, which is it?

If the issuance of the document of legal adoption really did make these two men father and son, and if the issuance of a marriage license really did make them married, then we *already* have the legal precedent of a publicly acknowledged, incestuous "marriage".

If the issuance of the document of legal adoption did *not* really make these two men father and son, then by what token does the subsequent issuance of a marriage license really make them married?


Why cannot requirement 4) be removed? Who says that a marriage may be contracted only by two persons who willingly consent to the marriage? Who says that the "marriages" that ISIS commits upon captured women are not real marriages?

And -- as everyone knows ... despite that some of us have (leftist) political reasons to lie about the matter -- we will soon be seeing people advocating this very thing here in America.


Why cannot requirement 5) be removed? Who says that a marriage may be contracted only by two persons who are adults, possessing the legal capacity to consent to the marriage? Who says that the "marriages" that ISIS commits upon captured girls are not real marriages?

And -- as everyone knows ... despite that some of us have (leftist) political reasons to lie about the matter -- we will soon be seeing people advocating this very thing here in America: both by Moslems and by NAMBLA types.



Recall, the argument from Mr Reppert's original post, and my posted response to it --

(Interestingly enough, the above case seems to be one of the stronger reasons in support of same-sex marriage, since it points out that in heterosexual cases like this one, the government doesn't hand out licenses based on what they perceive to be moral or not, either on religious grounds or on any other grounds).

The (ahem) argument given above begs the very point at question. Moreover, it commits one to a slippery-slope that can only end in the destruction of the institution of marriage.

But then, that it the whole point of "gay" mirage.

And recall, after listing the requirements for contracting a real marriage, I had pointed out that in no wise do these requirements prevent persons afflicted with homosexual desire from marrying.

Just just as, per the argument Mr Reppert presented in his post, The State does not refuse to issue a marriage license (subsequent to his divorce) to the adulterous couple, neither does The State -- nor ever Christianity, for that matter -- enquire whether, for instance, the male party to a marriage would rather "dip his wick" in "strange flesh".

Real marriage has never been prohibited to homosexual persons, and the rule has always been the same for everyone: one man, one woman. What? Are we going to pretend that heterosexual men(/women) have been permitted to "marry" other men(/women), and that only homosexual men(/women) have not?

So, redefining the requirements for, and meaning of, marriage is *not* a matter of "equality before the law". For there is not, nor never has been, any legal, or moral, prohibition of homosexual persons marrying.

The truth is, "gay" activists do not *want* to marry: they are leftists and they want advance the leftist project to destroy marriage. The current strategy of the leftists is to define marriage out of existence.

So, the issue is not "equality before the law" with respect to marriage. Rather, the point at dispute is "what is marriage? what is its purpose? what are its requirements?"

Now, we already have answers to those questions, and have had for thousands of years: those answers are the foundation of our very civilization. The leftists are disputing those answers. Therefore, as they are disputing long-settled, and indeed fundamental, matters, it is incumbent upon them to show that the answers we have are wrong.

The sort of argument Mr Reppert presented in his post does not even attempt to show that the answers upon which our very civilization is built are wrong; such arguments simply assume the long-settled answers are wrong: question-begging.

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If we, as a society, insist upon pretending that the leftists, in general, and the "gay" activists, in particular, are not intentionally and deliberately lying about the matter, then we will be cooperating in the lie. And we will find, and in not too many years, that what we have agreed to is the total destruction of marriage; which was the leftists' goal, all along.

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If that is reasonable, then could someone who object morally to a same-sex marriage do the same thing, since they are being asked, really, to be part of the celebration of something they don't feel right about celebrating?

This is dangerous ground for "liberals" (i.e. "soft" leftists) and most "conservatives" (i.e. "soft" "liberals"): for to reason in this manner may eventually lead one to a certain unwelcome, yet correct, conclusion: namely that our "anti-discrimination" laws are both immoral and unConstitutional. That is, such "laws" are illegal, with respect both the moral law and to the very basis and legitimacy of the American government.