Sage Against the Machine, (Michael Hanby)

(Michael Hanby, reviewing Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth, a snippet)

...no proposal to rehumanize ourselves can be fully satisfying in a Machine culture that is already a regime beyond our control—and, I would add still more emphatically than he does, beyond the reach of politics. Political order is permanently reactive to the machinations of technological order, whose deeds are scarcely imaginable, often to those responsible for producing them, until they are accomplished fact. (Kingsnorth’s own reflections on AI amply illustrate this.) Law cannot legislate what it cannot ­anticipate. Of course, it must be said that if the Christian vision were ever true and actual, it must also be possible, even if the times compel us to experience the presence of the real in the guise of its apparent absence. Kingsnorth could actually do with a little more nostalgia, which longs not for an impossible return to the past but for that glimpse of eternity shared by previous ages. He voices a widespread frustration when he says:

The reality is that most of us are stuck. . . . I can’t feed my family without writing, I can’t write without using the laptop I am tapping away on now, and I can’t get the words to an audience without the digital platform upon which I first published this series of widely read essays critiquing the Machine. I know that many people would love to leave all of this behind, because I often receive letters from them—letters mostly sent via email. But the world is driving them—us—daily deeper into the maw of the technium.

“There is no getting away from any of this,” he says. All one can really hope to do is “give [the machine] the slip” and loosen its grip by creating “shatter zones” in our homes and in our souls, and perhaps in a “Savage Reservation” benignly neglected by the Machine as the forward march of progress renders the savages themselves obsolete. He counsels what he calls “cooked” and “raw” askesis, and through myth, work, story, ritual, and a redoubled commitment to the four P’s, he aspires to “older ways of seeing” in a new historical key. 

We Western people: we have to learn to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbors. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.

Beyond ‘the West’ there might just be another way of seeing. An older way. Beyond the West, we might find Europe. We might find Albion. We might find Cockayne, or Doggerland. We might find the mind that painted the cave walls. We might find hunters and clear rivers and countries and saints and spirits and painted churches. We might find shrines and pilgrim routes and folk music and fear of the sea. We might find ourselves again.

... those who would resist the Machine need to be able to contest the truth of the Machine account of the world, even if the Machine is uninterested in truth or measures truth only by ­success. The rediscovery of “older ways of seeing” also surely entails the rediscovery ... of an older conception of intelligence, that have become largely unintelligible to us. “The name intellect,” Aquinas says in his De Veritate, “arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the ­interior and to the essence of a thing.” But where quantity reigns, where there is neither interior essence nor depth of existence, there is nothing to penetrate or read. Intellect, in the traditional sense, ceases to be intelligible or necessary when what is ­technically possible is the measure of what is true. The world cannot be spared from the “reign of quantity” unless reason is rescued from pragmatic and technical reductions and those “dimensions of reality” we are prohibited from seeing are rediscovered and restored. 

"Your call is important to us" means F.U. we don't want to talk to you...

(From Matthew Crawford substack)

Over the last several years, I realized I was driving around town a lot to take care of little tasks that, in principle, could be done on the telephone, or on the web portal of some business or government entity. The frustrations of entering into that Kafkaesque world of chatbots that are “here to help,” or phone menus that seem imported from some generic template, are such that it is worth taking an hour to drive to the CVS pharmacy, or the DMV, or the UPS store, or some medical practice, and collar a human being. Usually they are able to solve my problem in short order. And increasingly, it seems, they are able to do so because they have some secret trap door that allows them to bypass the public-facing systems that I have to interact with. In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in the same hall of mirrors as you, but the guy or the gal with enough institutional knowledge to be able to thwart the system.

AI will get rid of those people. What then? The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.

Oh sure, there will probably still be a counter you can walk up to, with a very charming robot-lady behind it. Detecting the emotional register of your voice, she will express empathy for your plight. “I understand this can be frustrating. Let me see what I can do.” But this will turn out to be just a creepier version of “your call is important to us,” the real meaning of which is “fuck off, we don’t want to talk to you.”

AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes.

These are labor actions where workers don’t walk out, instead they agree among themselves to scrupulously follow all company procedures to a T. The result is that production grinds to a halt, as intended. It does so because the indispensable lubricant that keeps the system running consists of all the informal accommodations that workers make among themselves, the work-arounds and horse-trading. You need to let Larry stretch his cigarette break out as long as he likes, because Larry is the only guy who can keep that one lathe running true, the one that is the real bottleneck in production. That is because Larry knows the exact spot you need to shim the tail stock with a .002 feeler gauge. (He brings one in his pocket, and removes it at the end of his shift — Larry is wise.) But the rule-book says nobody should modify the equipment without submitting a request through the proper channels. OK, then. Good luck, assholes.

The point is that bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.

The world of AI will a world in which we have gotten rid of all the Larrys. Good luck, assholes.

AI - Dumber Than Your Cat.

(From WSJ article on Yann LeCunn)

...The generative-AI boom has been powered by large language models and similar systems that train on oceans of data to mimic human expression. As each generation of models has become much more powerful, some experts have concluded that simply pouring more chips and data into developing future 

AIs will make them ever more capable, ultimately matching or exceeding human intelligence. This is the logic behind much of the massive investment in building ever-greater pools of specialized chips to train AIs.

LeCun thinks that the problem with today’s AI systems is how they are designed, not their scale. No matter how many GPUs tech giants cram into data centers around the world, he says, today’s AIs aren’t going to get us artificial general intelligence.

His bet is that research on AIs that work in a fundamentally different way will set us on a path to human-level intelligence. These hypothetical future AIs could take many forms, but work being done at FAIR to digest video from the real world is among the projects that currently excite LeCun. The idea is to create models that learn in a way that’s analogous to how a baby animal does, by building a world model from the visual information it takes in.

The large language models, or LLMs, used for ChatGPT and other bots might someday have only a small role in systems with common sense and humanlike abilities, built using an array of other techniques and algorithms.

Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.

“We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart—but that’s not true,” says LeCun. “You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.”

Freedom no more?

(R.R. Reno, Firstthings.com)

How did the land of the free and the home of the brave become a country of disoriented, dysfunctional, anxious, and fearful people? The answer is simple: We have undermined the institutions and authorities that give people solid places to stand. This erosion makes freedom an empty promise.

There’s a hurdle we need to get over before we can enjoy the libertarian’s kind of freedom, the liberty to do as we desire. We must acquire the wherewithal to resist coercion. The promises of freedom are a dead letter if we cannot stand firm and say, “No, I will not do that, I will not be propagandized, intimidated, or suborned.”

The capacity to say “no” rests on the power of a deeply installed “yes”: an enduring affirmation, a fierce loyalty, a burning love. The “yes” anchors our souls to something more solid than the flux of passing wants, more powerful than the threats issued by worldly powers. The “yes” of faith makes us slaves of God, a condition of indomitability, as the martyrs make so evident. There are natural loves that, while lacking the supernatural power of faith, also rivet our souls. I’ve mentioned marriage and parental love. There’s a love of truth as well, and a love of beauty. These and other loves galvanize our souls and make us free.

For two generations, higher education has favored a pedagogy that aims to disenchant the objects of our love. This assault on love contributes to the erosion of freedom. It has not been conducted only by postmodernists in the humanities. Economistic theory and materialism in the natural sciences are pedagogies that promote reductive explanations at every turn. The same process has been at work in society. After abandoning the interests of the working class, progressive activism has worked to undermine institutions of authority that evoke, shape, and deepen our commitments. The marital bond, patriotic ardor, and religious faith: All three have been discredited as “oppressive,” derided as engines of patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia, and other purported pathologies.

"Christianity is essentially corrupt" - Andrew Willard

Snippets from "Let's Fight", June 2022, First Things.

The Christian pursuit of virtue is an unfinished war against vice; indeed, every virtue reflects a vice, because the virtue is acquired only in battle against a lingering vice. We don’t have courage merely in a generic sense. We have courage that has always been at war with our specific, historical cowardice, and as our courage develops, it develops with this cowardice reflected within it. Our courage is aimed at our cowardice. Our war shapes our peace.

What this means is that Christianity is essentially corrupt. Here, I beg the reader take the time to understand what I mean. Christians know they are corrupt. Part of their virtue is that they never stop seeking out and fighting their vice—it is their second nature. This is not because corruption is good. That would be absurd. It is because Christianity is the ever-shifting movement from the bad to the good, and it is only when we are engaged in the struggle for moral reform that we can see the badness of corruption. Only the almost good calls the bad by its name. It is our aiming at the good that constitutes the bad as ­corruption. The pagan is corrupt only from the outside, from the perspective of a third party. The Christian, by contrast, is corrupt on the inside, is corrupt in his own estimation. As John Henry Newman remarked to his congregation, “Your knowledge of your sins increases with your view of God’s mercy in Christ.” Or to quote the Second Vatican Council, the Church is “at the same time holy and always in need of being purified.”

The more Christian an epoch, then, the more we historians find its people talking about their corruption, which is why there are so many sources relentlessly listing Christians’ failures. Historians sometimes misinterpret these sources as demonstrating that Christianity wasn’t really the ethos of society, or that Christianity was somehow competing with rival worldviews. (Among the common people, these worldviews are supposed to have consisted of charming “folkways” that involve harmony with nature, sexual freedom, and herbal ­remedies—whereas the worldview of the elites is supposed to have been a cynical Machiavellianism.) This kind of reading fails to see that the most Christian people are the least Christian people. As long as there are Christians failing to be Christian, there is hope; the alternative is a fading away into surrender, apostasy, worldliness.

 

The Church’s corruption is not limited to the objects of her structures of discipline. Rather, corruption and sanctity are constantly intermingled. This means the objects of the Church’s reform must include the very structures of reform that she builds in order to defeat corruption. These structures are themselves corrupt: The reform requires reform. The Church must double back on herself in a spiral of discipline and grace. Rulers will abuse the Church’s social power; it will be corrupted, it will—at least partially—fail. But that does not make it less essential to the Church.

Even though the Church’s activities against corruption are themselves unavoidably corrupt, they are not futile. As she reforms, she is made more perfect, and so corruption gives way to sanctity. This is a real movement: The spiral of reform is an ascending spiral. The Church moves in an eschatological ascent, but this does not mean that she moves in a linear, Whiggish progression. Corruption is real and is constantly counteracting reform, constantly threatening to drag the Church back down into the world, and to various degrees succeeding. But even such regressions must be understood as the providential settings for new reforms, for a new calling of the Church out of the world—like ­Israel out of Egypt—to build new structures of discipline and form new strategies for sanctity. The his­torian of the Church, then, must have a subtle, patient posture toward the object of his work. He must listen to the Church, hear what she says about what she is doing, allow her both sanctity and corruption in the same movement, see her sin within her more profound dynamic of reform into sanctity.

Christianity’s movement, by contrast, comprehends its own negation (corruption). Christianity denies, ultimately, the possibility of a true binary, of a difference that does not operate within a unity. As Augustine explained, the man hanging upside down by his feet experiences pain only because he belongs to a right-side-up cosmos (he is upside-down). Sin is identified for what it is only within a world that is built to undo sin. There is an irony here: Only human beings are capable of sin, and redemption is the movement into ever fuller humanity. As a saint moves deeper into perfection, he is able to identify his sins more perfectly and resist them. Disordered goods become more obvious and more offensive exactly as goods become more properly ordered. The law convicts us even as grace saves us. In the dualistic modern world, such Christianity can be perceived only as the most profound hypocrisy, as logically absurd and morally reprehensible. Christians always talk about peace, and yet they wage war. They praise holiness, and yet they often sin. They call for reform, and yet they are corrupt. Christians, in short, are foolish bigots. This is what the sophisticates of the Roman Empire saw. This is what our elites see.

Conflict, then, is unavoidable. Christianity has the potential to destroy the world that persecutes it through the sacrificial power that wages war always for the weak and never for the strong. If the Church does not destroy this world, it must join it, through a downward spiral of violence without sacrifice and of suffering without power. Within the Christian dynamic, the martyr and the crusader are part of the same story. But within the framework of the modern mind, the Crusades emerge as grotesque at the same rate that martyrdom becomes incomprehensible. Christianity has become just another bit of the world, another religion, another lifestyle, maybe a good one—as Dickson would have it—but probably not.

The Church is corrupt. If the Church stopped being corrupt, that would mean that she had stopped taking risks, stopped venturing out into the world, stopped fighting. This is an unsettling and humbling thought. But the alternative is to make things simple, to accept the absolutes of the world, to accuse with ease and self-righteousness, to deny both the legitimacy of the crusaders and the holiness of the martyrs in favor of moral certitude. It would be a false solution. Instead, let’s fight.

CRT, Critical Race Theory, a Primer, Definition, and Explanation

A summary from Neal Hardin:

Over the past several years, few ideas have ignited more debate than critical race theory (CRT). Terms that critical race theory uses, such as systemic racism, white privilege, anti-racism, whiteness, and microaggressions, have become common.

Everywhere we look, we see CRT invoked as either something to be feared or something to be loved, something to be endorsed or something to be refuted. It’s a polarizing issue.

And that makes sense, because under critical race theory, there is no middle ground. You are either an “oppressor” or “oppressed,” a “racist” or “anti-racist.”

Racism is wrong. Every person is deserving of equal treatment and respect. But CRT (can) compound the problem.

But what do we need to know about CRT? Where does it come from? Where is it spreading? And how might it affect you and the freedoms you care about?

It’s an exceedingly complex topic, so let’s break it down.

 
What is critical theory?

Critical race theory can, in part, be traced to a field of postmodern academic thought called critical theory. The term “critical theory” was coined by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” According to Horkheimer, the role of critical theory is to critique (hence “critical”) and ultimately change society as opposed to traditional theory that merely sought to describe it (usually in a scientific manner).

Today, there are many bodies of critical theory, including critical gender theory, critical queer theory, critical postcolonial theory, critical intersectional feminism, and more.

Writing for National Review, Cameron Hilditch notes that critical theory was established by “a group of German Marxist thinkers known as the Frankfurt School.” Hilditch writes:

Critical theorists … believe that societies, cultures, and civilizations are almost entirely social constructs … The most important question to the critical theorist is therefore Cicero’s famous “Cui bono?”—“Who benefits?”

Who benefits? Who has power? As Tim Keller helpfully notes, under secular critical theory, “reality is at bottom nothing but power.”

From this understanding of power flows a radical skepticism toward objective knowledge.

James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, scholars who have researched critical theory, write that its proponents reject objective truth, reason, and empirical evidence. Instead, critical theorists assert that only identity and oppression matter.

Critical theory divides society according to whether one is a member of an oppressor or oppressed group or groups. Critical theory’s warped understanding of power and knowledge undermine confidence in the foundations of liberalism: equality, universality, and individual rights.

 
The origins of critical race theory

While many ideological underpinnings of critical race theory came from critical theory, critical race theory originally emerged in the 1970s and ’80s out of a field of legal scholarship called critical legal studies (CLS). As you might guess, CLS also has its roots in critical theory.

According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, critical legal studies looks at how “the law supports a power dynamic which favors the historically privileged and disadvantages the historically underprivileged.”

In other words, CLS posits that laws are inherently biased because they were created to serve the self-interest and to enhance the power of a privileged few. This perspective stands in sharp contrast to the American constitutional tradition, in which the law secures rights equally for all people.

The Conference on Critical Legal Studies was founded in 1977 by legal scholars who had been influenced by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s.

Some of those same CLS scholars would go on to develop critical race theory because they were seeking to explain why the changes in law gained by the civil rights movement on racial issues (such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964) were still being ignored, resisted, or obstructed by many state governments and other institutions.

CLS scholars believed that if a change in the laws were the only thing necessary to achieve equality, then the passage of civil rights legislation should have guaranteed the rights of racial minorities in the United States. But since there were still disparities in outcomes, they believed other institutionalized forces must have been at work.

The “critical” aspects of CRT led to a radical skepticism that there was any real improvement in the first place.

Derrick Bell, considered one of the first and most influential proponents of critical race theory, wrote an article in 1980 in the Harvard Law Review in which he called into question the motives behind the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools. The Supreme Court’s decision should have been celebrated as an example of righting a wrong. Instead, Bell framed it as opportunism, claiming that it was possible only because the interests of the white majority, which he believed were saving face internationally and developing the South economically, converged with the interests of the black minority, which were achieving equal treatment and equal access.

Out of these seedbeds of scholarship for critical theory and critical legal studies grew what we now know as “critical race theory.”

 
One of the most pernicious ways we see critical race theory affecting our society is in our K-12 education system.One of the most pernicious ways we see critical race theory affecting our society is in our K-12 education system.

 
What is critical race theory?

The term “critical race theory” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw at a 1989 conference called “New Developments in Critical Race Theory.” According to Crenshaw, the conference was designed to attract those “who were looking both for a critical space in which race was foregrounded and a race space where critical themes were central.”

The conference explored the intersection of critical theory, critical legal studies, and race. Crenshaw recalls that several themes arose from that first conference, such as “critiques of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, meritocracy, and formal equality.” Many of these themes have continued to define CRT to this day.

With that background in mind, what is critical race theory? To answer that, let’s pivot to two of CRT’s foremost scholars: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

In their seminal work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Delgado and Stefancic write:

“The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

While there’s no one list of principles that all scholars of critical race theory agree on, Delgado and Stefancic lay out several tenets that have come to define CRT:

 
1. “Racism is ordinary, not aberrational.”

One of the most important beliefs of CRT scholars is that racism permeates society, the law, and all institutions. Proponents of critical race theory claim it is the air we breathe and the water we swim in, something so normal that it is “unacknowledged” by most people. To maintain this assertion, critical race theory redefines “racism.”

Racism has long been understood as prejudice and discrimination based on race. But under critical race theory, racism comes to mean any disparity observed along racial lines.

For example, if one racial group is outperforming another group in academic achievement, that is, by definition, racism. The fact that a racial disparity exists is “racism”—regardless of whether it is the result of prejudicial attitudes. This redefinition shifts the emphasis from equal treatment to equal outcomes.

 
2. Interest convergence

As Derrick Bell argued in his article about Brown v. Board of Education, critical race theory asserts that the majority will only secure civil rights for minorities when it serves the majority’s self-interest. In other words, any concept of altruism is thrown out the window.

 
3. Race as a social construct

Delgado and Stefancic write that in critical race theory, “Race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.”

In other words, CRT advocates claim that while groups of people do share certain biological traits, the fact that we group ourselves according to qualities like these rather than characteristics like “personality, intelligence, and moral behavior” demonstrates that race is a social construct.

 
4. Intersectionality

This term was also coined by Crenshaw. Delgado and Stefancic note, “Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.” Therefore, people will experience unique forms of oppression or discrimination based on the intersection of their oppressed identities.

For example, according to this logic, while a black man or a white woman might experience different forms of discrimination, a black woman, based on the combination of her two oppressed identities, will experience unique forms of oppression. The converse is also true. A white man will experience unique forms of “privilege” based on the combination of his privileged identities.

 
5. Unique voice of color

Critical race theory also holds that members of racial minorities enjoy a unique perspective with “a presumed competence to speak about race and racism” in ways that white people, being in the majority, are not.

This perspective involves “story-telling” and engaging in “revisionist history” to develop counternarratives and histories centered on the experiences of minorities rather than majorities. One example of the “unique voice of color” is the 1619 Project, which seeks to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” This also means that society can discount the views of those in the majority simply because of their skin color.

In addition to the principles laid out by Delgado and Stefancic, one final principle common among CRT scholars is a rejection of “colorblindness.” In the framework of critical race theory, the notion of colorblindness serves only to keep white people in a position of power by feigning neutrality in racial issues. As one author put it, regardless of one’s personal attitudes, “racism can be evidenced in the outcome of processes and relations irrespective of intent.” In other words, CRT teaches that a person can still be racist even if they hold no prejudicial attitudes toward another race.

But the implications of critical race theory go beyond race.

As a theory with intellectual roots in Marxism, it’s not surprising that CRT and other critical theories view all Western values—including religious freedom, the importance of the nuclear family, and Judeo-Christian conceptions of morality—as inherently oppressive.

For example, CRT proponents reject American ideals such as hard work or equal treatment under the law because they view them as rooted in oppression. They see those principles as means through which power and privilege are projected throughout society. Such values, CRT concludes, must be reformed, replaced, or overthrown until racial equity (rather than equality) is achieved.

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed that his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Contrary to Dr. King’s dream, in a society dominated by critical race theory, one’s race is the most important aspect of a person’s identity. It determines whether someone is categorized as an oppressor or oppressed.

 
The ideology of critical race theory is already dominating America’s most influential institutions.The ideology of critical race theory is already dominating America's most influential institutions.

 
What are the practical implications of critical race theory?

After reading all this, you might be wondering, “How does critical race theory affect me? How does it affect my freedoms?”

Since CRT rejects principles of constitutional law—indeed, rejects the entire liberal order out of which the U.S. Constitution arose—it cynically casts aside rights like religious freedom and free speech, which were key to advancing the civil rights movement. In reality, free speech lifts people up and leads to justice. But proponents of critical race theory view these fundamental freedoms as more ways for the powerful to oppress the powerless. Since CRT’s adherents characterize opposing views as racist, discussion is not an option. They are prone to resorting to censorship and silencing critics. And CRT’s victims aren’t just conservatives or people of faith.

Delgado and Stefancic also address the pervasiveness of critical race theory:

“Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, and alternative and charter schools.”

This ideology is already dominating America’s most influential institutions, including government, major corporations, and academia.

 
Critical race theory in K-12 education

One of the most (influential) ways we see critical race theory affecting society is in our education system. CRT is informing the trainings that many public-school teachers and administrators receive and the curricula they are tasked with teaching children.

In these schools, students aren’t learning about Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, or Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. And that fact conveniently allows many to deny that critical race theory is being taught in schools at all. But that masks the truth: schools are implementing classroom practices rooted in a CRT-influenced ideology that often masquerades by the name “anti-racism.”

Anti-racism is critical race theory’s answer to racism. While “anti-racism” may sound good on the surface (who doesn’t want to stand against racism?), it actually mandates more racism by treating people differently based on race.

Ibram X. Kendi, a leading proponent of critical race theory, embraces this new form of racism in his book How to Be an Antiracist when he says, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Because racial equity (equal outcomes) rather than racial equality (equal opportunities) is the goal of CRT, racial discrimination is necessary to achieve those outcomes.

In CRT, discrimination and racism become the solutions to discrimination and racism. Ironically, anyone who does not embrace this logic and become an “anti-racist” advocate is branded a “racist.” There’s no middle ground.

This ideology runs directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s own precedent. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” You can’t stop the evils of racism and discrimination with more of the same.

While some supporters of CRT may sincerely seek to address racial inequalities, their methods harm children of all races.

4 steps to destroying the ideals and values of the middle class

[Small snippet of an article by Ronald Dworkin in First Things magazine, link HERE]

"...The Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) method gradually penetrated American cultural life and changed our politics. The effect was first felt in the 1960s, when CBT penetrated the civil rights movement. Notions of self-esteem and personal identity became central to the movement’s worldview, replacing the older emphasis on voting rights and access to jobs and housing. Soon followed the focus on group identity, the belief that racism is both a conscious and a subconscious phenomenon, and the idea that racism’s effects can be invisible—all hallmarks of today’s identity politics.

The transformation of civil rights into a right to self-esteem was only the beginning. Millions of unhappy people, angry about life but impotent to do anything about it, found psychological release through a four-step method reminiscent of CBT. In the process, they changed American politics.

1) In the first step, civil rights activists demanded that all disadvantaged people enjoy a feeling of equality with average, middle-class people. Although the movement was motivated by noble goals, it risked impracticality at certain points. For example, in 1970, the City University of New York lowered its admission standards to give everyone a shot at middle-class success and respectability. Yet rather than raise up disadvantaged and remedial students, the reform simply lowered the college’s academic level, making it harder for anyone to get a good education there.

2) A second step followed. When some disadvantaged people still failed to achieve middle-class success and respectability, they did what CBT encourages. Just as the man who blames an ethic of success for his unhappiness finds relief by smirking at successful people—those who felt aggrieved by their relative lack of success took average, middle-class people down a notch through ridicule. Activists slandered middle-class people to obscure their positive attributes. They belittled middle-class attitudes toward sex and religion, conservative dress, and efforts to become “solid” citizens.

Still, the values of middle-class success and respectability survived, even as some people failed to achieve them. People might have laughed at the life habits that went along with them, but they could not escape the conflict within themselves between their desire for these things and their impotence to get them. 

3) Thus, the third step: To take average, middle-class people down another notch, activists depreciated middle-class success and respectability, calling these things insignificant. In social science, for example, adulthood and maturity ceased to be measured by whether one had a job or a mortgage or was financially responsible—typical middle-class achievements—but by whether one possessed certain psychological traits, such as tolerance and empathy. The social model of adulthood gave way to a psychological model that consisted of values that anyone could possess, including the marginal and disadvantaged.

Activists during this phase did not say that middle-class success and respectability were bad, only that the measures of traditional middle-class success and respectability were bad. Adulthood was still praised—but now a tolerant, empathic thirty-something who dressed in grunge style and played video games all day was considered more mature than a bank executive with a house and a family who lacked the same ethical consciousness. New avenues to middle-class success and respectability opened as a result. Nevertheless, there remained people who failed to achieve any semblance of success or respectability. Their inner tension, manifested in an impulse of resentment, still begged for release.

4) Release came in the fourth and final step, whereby middle-class success and respectability ceased to be good and became evil. Success itself was said to be the product of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia, and impossible to reconcile with the values of inclusivity. The nuclear family, once good, became a manifestation of the evil patriarchy. America’s success as a country became evil; patriotism, once good, likewise became evil. Free speech became an enemy of progressive values. Good manners became evil, as they prevented activists from shouting down the defenders of middle-class respectability. Police who protect life and property—two major bourgeois concerns—went from good to evil. Art that appeals to middle-class sensibilities, ranging from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, went from good to evil—or at least suspect—while art steeped in revolutionary social justice became the supreme good.

Psychologically, the systematic reinterpretation of middle-class values promised a great deal more than the depreciation of middle-class success had: It brought release to millions. Successful and respectable middle-class people, once a cause of pain and envy for others, were now to be pitied rather than respected. They were, if not evil, then at least beset with evils. The disadvantaged and marginal, especially the unhappy among them, were the pure, the elect, and the good.

All that remained was for successful, respectable middle-class Americans to buy into the new values, to poison their own minds, to feel guilty and ashamed of their success and their country’s heritage, to wallow in the morbid and to dwell fanatically on the lives of victims. Many do. Hence the dawn of woke politics, which is perhaps best understood as CBT on a mass scale..."

The ancient O Antiphones of the 7 days preceding Christmas

Dated to about 600 A.D. or so, these seven ancient antiphones are for the each day of the final week of Advent leading to Christmas. The first letter of the Latin of each phrase forms the acrostic, "Ero cras" meaning, "I will be tomorrow".


I – December 17

O SAPIENTIA, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, who comes from the mouth of the Most High (Sirach 24:5),
you extend to the ends of the earth, and order all things with power and sweetness (Wisdom 8:1): come and teach us the way of wisdom (Proverbs 9:6).


II – December 18

O ADONAI, dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extenso.

O Lord (Exodus 6:2, Vulgate), leader of the house of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush (Exodus 3:2) and on Mount Sinai gave him the law (Exodus 20): come and free us with your powerful arm (Exodus 15:12-13).


III – December 19

O RADIX Iesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem gentes deprecabuntur: veni ad liberandum nos, iam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, who stand as a sign for the peoples (Isaiah 11:10), the kings of the earth are silent before you (Isaiah 52:15) and the nations invoke you: come to free us, do not delay (Habakkuk 2:3).


IV – December 20

O CLAVIS David et sceptrum domus Israel, qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris et umbra mortis.

O Key of David (Isaiah 22:23), scepter of the house of Israel (Genesis 49:10), who open and no one may shut; who shut and no one may open: come, free from prison captive man, who lies in darkness and the shadow of death (Psalm 107: 10, 14).


V – December 21

O ORIENS, splendor lucis aeternae et sol iustitiae: veni et illumina sedentem in tenebris et umbra mortis.

O Star who rises (Zechariah 3:8; Jeremiah 23:5), splendor of the eternal light (Wisdom 7:26) and sun of justice (Malachi 3:20): come and enlighten those who lie in darkness and the shadow of death (Isaiah 9:1; Luke 1:79).


VI – December 22

O REX gentium et desideratus earum, lapis angularis qui facis utraque unum: veni et salva hominem quel de limo formasti.

O King of the nations (Jeremiah 10:7) and their desire (Haggai 2:7),
cornerstone (Isaiah 28:16), who reunite Jews and pagans into one (Ephesians 2:14): come and save the man whom you formed from the earth (Genesis 2:7).


VII – December 23

O EMMANUEL, rex et legifer noster, expectatio gentium et salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Dominus Deus noster.

O Emmanuel (Isaiah 7:14), our king and lawgiver (Isaiah 33:22), hope and salvation of the peoples (Genesis 49:10; John 4:42): come to save us, O Lord our God (Isaiah 37:20).

Friedrich Schiller, Ode To Joy, (Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, An die Freude)

An all time favorite, written in 1785, used in Beethoven's final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony in 1824.

 

Freude, schöner Gotterfunken,       Joy, lovely divine spark,
 Tochter aus Elysium,                daughter of Elysium,
 wir betreten, feuertrunken,         drunk with fire, we approach
 Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!         your sanctuary, O holy one!

 Deine Zauber, binden wieder         Your magic reunites those
 was die Mode streng getheilt,       whom custom sternly separates;
 alle Menschen werden Brüder,        all men shall be brothers
 wo die sanfter Flügel weilt.        wherever your gentle wings tarry.

 Seid umschlungen, Millionen!        O you millions, let me embrace you!
 Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!         Let this kiss be for the entire world!
 Brüder, über'm Sternenwelt          Brothers--a loving Father must
 muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.        dwell above the tent of stars.

 Ihr stürzt nieder Millionen?        Do you prostrate yourselves, O millions?
 Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?       Do you sense your creator, O world?
 Such ihn über'm Sternenwelt!        Seek Him above the tent of stars!
 Über Sternen muß er wohnen.         He must dwell above the stars.

 Seid umschlungen, Millionen!        O you millions, let me embrace you!
 Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!         Let this kiss be for the entire world!

 Freude, schöner Gotterfunken,       Joy, lovely divine spark,
 Tochter aus Elysium,                daughter of Elysium,
 wir betreten, feuertrunken,         drunk with fire, we approach
 Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!         your sanctuary, O holy one!

 Ihr stürzt nieder Millionen?        Do you prostrate yourselves, O millions?
 Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?       Do you sense your creator, O world?
 Such ihn über'm Sternenwelt!        Seek Him above the tent of stars!
 Brüder, über'm Sternenwelt          Brothers--a loving Father must
 muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.        dwell above the tent of stars.

What does Capitalism mean to you: Are you 1-5, or 6-10?

(From Edward Fesser blog...)

When people use or hear the word “capitalism,” some of the things they might bring to mind are:

1. The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production

2. Market competition

3. The existence of corporations as legal persons

4. Inequalities in wealth and income

5. An economic order primarily oriented to the private sector, with government acting at the margins and only where necessary

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those things.  Indeed, some of them (such as private property and a government that respects subsidiarity) are required as a matter of natural law.   Eliminating all economic inequalities (as opposed to remedying poverty, which is a very different matter) is neither possible nor desirable.  The concept of the corporate person has long been recognized by, and regarded as salutary within, the natural law tradition (whatever one thinks about its instantiation in modern business corporations).  Socialism in the strict sense, which would centralize the most fundamental economic decision-making, is intrinsically evil.

On the other hand, other people using or hearing the term “capitalism” might have in mind things like:

6. A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention

7. The market as the dominant social institution, with an ethos of consumerism and commodification of everything as its sequel

8. Corporations so powerful that they are effectively unanswerable to government or public opinion

9. Doctrinaire minimalization or even elimination of social welfare institutions, even when there is no feasible private sector alternative

10. Globalization of a kind that entails dissolution of corporate and individual loyalties to the nation-state and local communities.

Now, all of these things are bad and should be opposed on natural law grounds.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely illustrative.  And what it illustrates is that it is unhelpful to talk about either embracing or rejecting capitalism full stop.  The term has too many connotations for that, and needs to be disambiguated.  Hence the sweeping claims often made by both sides in the debate over capitalism inevitably generate excessive heat while reducing light.  When people say “I support capitalism,” they often mean “I support 1-5” but their opponents hear them as saying “I support 6-10.”  And when people say “I oppose capitalism,” they often mean “I oppose 6-10,” but their opponents hear them as saying “I oppose 1-5.”  To a large extent, they talk past each other.

Hope, Anger, Politics, CS Lewis, Seneca, and Acid...

Some snippets gleaned from the March issue of First Things. For some time our political parties have made utter and complete enemies of the opposing party members. I do not belong to either party and neither party represents my ideas and beliefs. But I think the currently prevalent attitudes and pronouncements of politically active people, both politicians and citizens, are outside of the bounds of useful discourse and help nothing. Is there hope for out country to ever be a semi-united nation again? To that question the following clips from various columns in the aforementioned digest maybe have something to say:

"The virtue of hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage: anger with the way things are, and courage to change them for the better."

Hope is a choice we make in the face of suffering and disappointment. Georges Bernanos once described hope as “despair overcome”. Hope has a strength that comes of struggling with doubt and fear."

Like many Americans, I am angry at the way things are. Certainly, patriotism and respect for elected officials are important Christian duties. They’re especially vital in America, where the law, not ethnicity or religion or even language, is the glue that holds us together. Disregard for the law is uniquely toxic in our country."

(America was founded with no place for a king. The law, in the form of the Constitution, sits in the place of a throne for America, and all decisions must comply and fall under its guidance. Without this, America is not what it was founded to be.)

"Anger is the easy daughter. C. S. Lewis warned that the pleasure of anger lies in “the fact that one feels entirely righteous oneself only when one is angry. Then the other person is pure black, and you are pure white.” It’s hard to imagine a better description of the current condition of American politics. In the long run, that’s fatal to national community."

"If our leaders (of both parties) want national unity, then they cannot demonize and punish their opponents. They cannot turn their reverence for the Republic, the law, on and off like a spigot, according to their party’s current agenda. If our leaders want national healing, they need to respect and listen to people they disagree with and don’t like."

"Seneca concluded his essay On Anger with these words: “[Nothing is] great which is not at the same time calm.” Anger untempered by patience and prudence, anger fixed on revenge or vindication of the self, anger not directed to the common good, can only diminish and destroy. Absent love and the interior peace it brings, all of life is conflict, and our faith is empty. Absent love, speaking the truth is not merely useless; it becomes an instrument of self-righteousness and a weapon against others."

"(Two) key points about Augustine’s view of Christians and politics."

"First, Augustine never offers a political theory, for good reason. He doesn’t believe that human beings can know or create perfect justice in this world. Our judgment is always flawed by our sinfulness."

"Second, no political order, no matter how good, can ever constitute a just society. Errors in moral judgment can’t be avoided. Therefore, the Christian needs to be loyal to her nation and obedient to its legitimate rulers. But she also needs to cultivate a critical vigilance about both."

"Hope feeds and grows on the experience of love, the will to persist in that love, and the letting go of anger, no matter how vicious or lunatic the times. Nations rise and fall. Ours has no special immunity. But in the meantime, God and his love for us endure. Strong tremors are shaking our society. If you’re like me, you’re feeling knocked off balance, and you’re casting about for explanations."

"Those on the left spy resurgent racism, xenophobia, and other pathologies, which they assume are radicalizing a populist base."

"Those on the right worry about utopian dreams on the left, which fuel a new totalitarianism. By my lights, these lines of analysis can tend toward hysteria (“Fascism!” “Socialism!”) rather than understanding. They are ... not pathways toward a sure footing in this time of staggering and stumbling."

"(A wise person) once said “Lack of trust is the acid eating everything.” He was not referring to trust in God. He was pointing to the decline of trust in many once-stable authorities. Mistrust runs through public life as well. Trumpian loyalists denounce some Republican senators as “traitors.” They are denounced in turn by respectable conservatives as an emerging “extreme right” that is captive to conspiracy theories." The accusations fly and get more and more entrenched."

"We not only distrust one another. We also have lost confidence in institutions that in an earlier time easily won our loyalty. We should seek people and institutions we can trust. Unlike faith, this trust needs to be partial, not complete. No worldly institution backs up its promises with the certainty of God’s power and righteousness. We are not called to be chumps. Yet we must beware the acids of mistrust and counter them with gestures of loyalty."

(A complete and bitter mistrust of everything outside my own small realm of ideas and those that agree with me will "eat everything like acid")

Pessimism of the West - Snippets from First Things column by R. R. Reno

Some sections I wanted to preserve from the Jan 2021 issue:

Western civilization exerts unprecedented influence. Science commands the intellectual loyalty of elites around the world. Western strands of Christianity have enjoyed extraordinary missionary success in Africa and Asia. Communism—a Western ideology—migrated to China, destroyed its Confucian culture, and over the past generation has evolved into a materialist and technocratic mentality far more indebted to Bentham than to Mencius. Globalization is an American-led project, and it has gone from strength to strength. Yet, at the apogee of the West’s cultural power, we are riddled with guilt and doubts.

...
China poses a threat, but as was the case with early-­twentieth-century Japan, which brought war to Asia in the 1930s and to the United States in 1941, Chinese power today arises from the great extent of its Westernization. The clearest sign of cultural triumph is when one’s adversaries adopt one’s weapons. My fear of Chinese dominance is not a fear of being under the thumb of an alien Confucian civilization. Rather, I see in twenty-first-century China a perverse version of the West: the promise of wealth and security in exchange for submission to ­technocratic control.

What, then, accounts for our gloom? To some degree, it arises from our investments in failed utopias. As the Christian vision of the final triumph of God’s justice and peace was secularized in the modern era, the West gave birth to many vain dreams of reason. Descartes epitomized the “begin afresh” mentality, one that imagined that with sufficient intelligence and goodwill we could demolish the flawed city we had inherited and rebuild it as an impeccable empire of reason. In this spirit, we proclaim that democracies don’t go to war with one another. Or that global trade brings peace. Or that scientific management can eliminate inequality, poverty, and every other social evil.

For a recent football game, the University of Minnesota replaced the players’ names on their jerseys with the words “End Racism.” It was but an instance of today’s desperate ambition. But the modern Western spirit of “eliminationism” is countermanded by reality. Man combines the noble with the base, the grandeur of transcendence with grave defects that can never be eliminated—short of eliminating mankind, which is what environmentalist radicals and population-growth fanatics propose. Nobody was more pessimistic about postwar prosperity in the West than the ardent Marxist. He saw the spread of prosperity as a curse, not a modest blessing. Its meager satisfactions induce false consciousness and delay the revolution that will eliminate all injustices—the only aim worth attaining.

The West is not Marxist, but all of us are affected by the secular utopianism to which Marx gave powerful expression. Why hasn’t the “spirit of progress” triumphed? Even if things get better, utopianism exercises such a powerful influence over our public imagination that we can see ourselves only in the dark light of present (and past) failures. That a single black man should be wrongfully killed by police is intolerable, and society explodes with outrage. That one woman in college should feel pressured to have sex is unacceptable, and we set aside due process. Anything short of perfection is cause for upheaval. We have always still farther to go.

Ironically, modern utopianisms, for all their idealism, are built on drab utilitarian foundations. This, too, contributes to our malaise. Noble acts inspire men. Warm rhetoric stirs hearts. Yet such appeals have no place in the empire of reason. Technocracy operates in accord with the predictable. As a result, the modern West tends to reduce human beings to congeries of interest. We tell ourselves that we are utility-maximizing machines—or, if we are sufficiently postmodern, power-hungry organisms bent on domination.

We often hear about the great sins of the West: ­colonialism, racism, genocide. This litany demoralizes us. But our sense that we are unfit to govern the world we dominate (as we nevertheless do, often without hesitation) stems above all from the low view of the human person encouraged by technocratic reason. We lack a vocabulary with which to articulate freedom’s heroic possibilities. Thus, the singular triumphs of the West seem unmerited, even perverse. We turn to the myth of the noble savage. Multiculturalism denigrates the West while championing anything it imagines unsullied by Western influences. The “non-Western” offers us our best hope for moral and spiritual survival.

John Paul II had a name for the pessimism of the West: the culture of death. It is manifest in the widespread acceptance of abortion, the death-dealing tool by which we prevent new life from interfering with what we take to be our “essential interests.” The same holds for euthanasia, which is often freely chosen to relieve us of life’s final burdens.

These are efforts to wring from life what we can get, rather than accepting life as a gift. The increasing childlessness of adult life in the West is less manifestly death-dealing, but it has a pervasive influence. In Norway, the number of women who had no children by age forty-five went from 9 percent in 1985 to 15 percent in 2017; for men, the percentage went from 14 to 25. To one degree or another, most countries in the West are trending toward childlessness, including the United States.

Children are the future. They are lines we cast forward in time. In children, we are drawn toward emotional investments in affairs beyond our limited years. The children in whom we place our hopes need not come from our loins. Parents have fundamental rights that must be given priority. That said, the public is rightly concerned with the welfare of children, which is why we quarrel over how to educate them. In a society charged with the current of new life, we are drawn beyond ourselves, giving birth to ideas, inventions, and endeavors that outstrip our ­immediate interests as we seek to provide the next generation with things we will not survive to enjoy.

Look around and count the absent children. In 2017, demographers reported the lowest birthrates on record for the U.S. The birth-dearth is unprecedented in human history; it is chosen, rather than imposed by disease and famine. In 2020, the diminished scope of our concerns led us to borrow money from the future to sustain our lockdowns, during which we have suspended the education of children, curtailed their play, and retarded their development so that eighty-year-olds will enjoy a marginally lower risk of dying. Long gone is the Christian horizon of life, which refuses death’s final and supreme claim. We imagine ourselves committed to ideals. Yet the culture of death empties ideals of their power. Frustrated by our inability to confect redemption on earth, humiliated by the disenchanting effects of technocratic reason, and increasingly childless, we’re reduced to the animal imperative of survival.

Is it any wonder that the West is haunted by our perceived inability to make the world more just, more sustainable, more at peace? Perhaps we are unworthy because we are impotent. We have inherited a vital civilization that has captured a great deal of the world’s imagination. But we are becoming, at best, its sterile custodians.

Why Would God Create People He Knows Will Go to Hell?

Why Would God Create People He Knows Will Go to Hell?
By Jimmy Akin

This is a common question, and many have tried to answer it online.

Most of the answers are unsatisfying. They tend to do one of two things:
 

- Say a lot of stuff that doesn’t really address the issue (e.g., discussing why anyone would go to hell and the possibility of salvation)
- Say it’s a mystery

Many of the answers you’ll find spend a lot of words on these two things (frankly, a painfully large number of words), but the first is irrelevant and the second is not very informative.

It’s true that, since God’s mind is infinite and ours are finite, we often can’t give definitive answers about his decisions, so an element of mystery remains.

However, we can often give partial answers—or at least make informed proposals. In other words, we often can do better than saying, “We just don’t know; it’s a mystery.”

I think we can do better in this case.

 

Keeping the Issue Focused

To avoid going off on tangents, let’s make the issue as focused as possible. Suppose there is a person—we’ll call him Bob—and the following is true:

    In his eternal perspective outside of time, God knows that—if he creates Bob—then Bob will freely choose to go to hell.

We’ll also assume that:

- In his eternal perspective outside of time, God could freely choose not to create Bob (i.e., God has free will).
-God is just.
-God is loving and thus does not want anyone to go to hell.

Given these things: Why would God create Bob? Let’s look at some possibilities . . .
 

Possibility #1: There Is a Competing Good

Even if people don’t want something, they may tolerate it for the sake of a competing good.

I may not want the pain of having to get an injection, but I may tolerate it in order to avoid getting a disease.

In the same way, God may not want Bob to go to hell, but he may tolerate it for the sake of some other good or set of goods.

What might these be?

 

a) Free Will (and Love)

An answer that some propose is free will. In other words, God tolerates the decisions of some to go to hell because he wants to preserve their free will—which he does for the sake of genuine love.

Love is God’s most important priority (Matt. 22:37-40), and he wants people to be able to freely choose love. Programmed, robotic “love” would lack something and not be fully genuine. This means he must tolerate the possibility that they will misuse their freedom and reject love.

All that’s true, but it doesn’t really address our issue.

If our starting assumption is true—that God knows what Bob will freely choose if he creates him—then God could simply decide not to create him.

In that case, he could stop Bob from going to hell without seeming to violate his free will. Bob would simply never have existed.

The free will defense thus doesn’t seem to work if our starting assumption is true, so what other possibilities are there for a competing good that would lead God to tolerate Bob going to hell?

 

b) God’s Glory

Perhaps the most commonly proposed answer is God’s own glory. The idea here is that it brings glory to God to have illustrations of his character that actually exist.

Bob’s going to hell provides a concrete example of God’s justice in that God did give Bob the offer of salvation—and Bob freely rejected it. He’s thus an object lesson that illustrates certain aspects of God’s character and brings glory to God.

Many will find this answer unsatisfying. If a human being were willing to let someone go to hell simply for the sake of his own glory, we would say that human was a raging egomaniac.

Of course, God is not a human being. We have only finite value, but God has infinite value, so his glorification would be worth more—even infinitely more—than the glorification of a human.

This would make it more understandable how God might tolerate the loss of Bob’s soul.

 

c) Something Else

It’s also possible that there might be a different good for the sake of which God tolerates Bob’s loss.

The history of the world involves a complex tangle of the billions of interrelated choices people make, and you could propose that—in order to set up the free will decisions of some to go to heaven—God must tolerate the misuse of free will by others.

Thus, God might tolerate Bob’s misuse of free will for the sake of making it possible for others to use theirs properly.

Or, since the universe is vast and we know only a tiny part of it, there might be some other good—perhaps one that we haven’t even conceived of—that justifies God tolerating Bob’s misuse of free will.

While both of these suggestions are possible, they are both very speculative, which means many will find them unsatisfying.

So perhaps we can look at the issue from a different angle.

 

Possibility #2: God Isn’t Being Unjust

One of our starting assumptions is that God is just. In the present context, that means it isn’t unjust for God to tolerate Bob’s free decision to reject salvation.

(You could challenge the justness of anybody going to hell, but that’s a different discussion. Here, we’re assuming that it is just for God to allow people to go to hell.)

In this case, God has genuinely given Bob the offer of salvation, and he has freely chosen to reject it, so God is not being unjust by respecting his choice.

Bob cannot—and, if he’s thinking rationally, would not—accuse God of injustice. God has been fair with him.

Is this enough to resolve our dilemma?

It certainly helps to realize that God isn’t being unjust, but it doesn’t seem to fully resolve the matter.

Our starting assumptions didn’t simply involve God being just. They also involved God not wanting people to go to hell.

So, if we’re not appealing to a competing good that would lead God to tolerate Bob’s loss, why wouldn’t he act on his desire to keep Bob out of hell and simply not create him?

There doesn’t seem to be a good answer to this question. So, while realizing God isn’t being unjust helps, it provides an incomplete answer.

 

Possibility #3: God Is Actually Benefiting Bob

But perhaps God is being more than fair with Bob. Perhaps he is benefiting him by creating him, even though he will spend an infinite amount of time in hell.

Some have argued that it’s better to exist—even in hell—than not to exist at all.

If that’s the case, then God is actually being generous to Bob by creating him, despite his damnation.

And we would know what the competing good is that leads God to tolerate Bob’s misuse of free will: It’s Bob’s own existence.

If it’s better to exist in hell than not to exist at all then that’s why God chooses to create him. Bob will actually benefit!

Whether you find this solution plausible will depend on how bad you imagine hell to be and how great a good you suppose existence to be.

Based on some of the images in Scripture (e.g., hell as a lake of fire; Rev. 20:14-15), many have thought that it would be better not to exist than to go there.

However, the images that Scripture uses to describe the afterlife are accommodated to our present understanding, which is limited by our experience of this life, and they should be read with some caution.

It could turn out that, from the greater perspective the next life will offer, even the damned will see that it is better for them to exist in their current condition than not to exist at all.

Some, even in this life, have made this argument.

 

Possibility #4: God Doesn’t Create Bob

Suppose that it’s better not to exist than to spend eternity in hell. In that case, if there is no competing good that would lead God to create Bob, he might simply not create him.

However, Bob is only a representative of an entire class of people—those who misuse their free will and reject God’s offer of salvation.

In that case, it would seem that God would not create anybody that would reject his offer, in which case hell would be empty.

This idea has been explored by various figures down through Church history, including the recent theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), who discussed it in his book Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

Von Balthasar frames his proposal carefully. Since the Church teaches that hell is a real possibility, he only proposes we may be able to hope (not assert) that hell is empty.

The difficulty for this view is found in various statements in the New Testament that appear to indicate some people actually are in hell (Matt. 7:13-14, 21-23, Luke 13:23-28).

(For a careful analysis of part of this issue, see Cardinal Avery Dulles’s insightful article The Population of Hell.)

 

Possibility #5: Reject the Starting Assumption

If the above possibilities are not fully satisfying, perhaps we should revisit our initial assumption concerning Bob, which was:

    In his eternal perspective outside of time, God knows that—if he creates Bob—then Bob will freely choose to go to hell.

This assumption holds that God knows what Bob would freely choose to do if he existed.

Does God have that kind of knowledge?

Historically, theologians have recognized that God has two types of knowledge:

-Knowledge of all possible things
-Knowledge of all actual things

Both of these kinds of knowledge cover everything past, present, and future.

If God creates Bob and makes him an actual thing, then God also knows what Bob’s actual choice is, which is to reject salvation.

However, suppose that God doesn’t create Bob. What does God know in that case?

By his knowledge of all possible things, God knows from his eternal perspective that it is possible for Bob to accept his offer of salvation. He also knows that it is possible for Bob to reject salvation.

But that doesn’t reveal which Bob does choose because Bob doesn’t exist and never makes the choice.

 

Middle Knowledge?

For God to know what Bob would choose if he were created, God would need an additional kind of knowledge that lets him know what people would freely choose if they are placed in certain circumstances (such as being created).

In the last 500 years, theologians have begun to explore this idea and have named this third kind of knowledge “middle knowledge,” since it seems part way between God’s knowledge of the possible and the actual.

In his book Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Ludwig Ott holds that the Church has definitively taught that God knows all possible things and all actual things, and they are matters “of the Faith” (de fide) (pp. 40-42).

However, he lists middle knowledge as only the “common opinion” (sent. communis.) of theologians (pp. 42-43).

There are a passages of Scripture that one can appeal to in support of God having middle knowledge (e.g., 1 Sam. 23:1-13, Wis. 4:11, Matt. 11:21).

However, there are only a few such passages, and they can be read in ways that don’t require middle knowledge.

There also is an argument to be made against middle knowledge.

 

Omnipotence and Omniscience

Because God is all-powerful and all-knowing, one always should be hesitant to say there are things he “can’t” do or know, but there are limits to omnipotence and omniscience.

Omnipotence means that God can do everything that can be done—in other words, anything that is logically possible. However, it does not mean that God could make something that involves a logical contradiction, where the terms themselves conflict.

For example, God could not make a square circle or a four-sided triangle, because these involve contradictions in terms. They are just nonsense—a kind of word salad that has no real meaning.

Similarly, omniscience means that God knows everything that can be known. However, it does not mean that he knows logically impossible things.

For example, God does not know the shape of a square circle or the shape of a four-sided triangle.

What about Bob’s choice to go to hell?

 

To Be or Not To Be?

If Bob exists, then he freely makes the choice, and God knows it.

But if Bob is never created, then he would never make this free will decision, and God would have to know the outcome of a free will decision that is never made.

“The outcome of a free will decision that is never made” sounds a lot like “square circle” or “four-sided triangle.”

The essence of a free will decision is that it is really possible for a person to make one choice or another when the moment comes. But if the moment never comes, then there simply is no outcome, because the choice is never made.

There is thus a case to be made that “the outcome of a free will choice that is never made” involves a contradiction in terms.

In that case, God would not know Bob’s decision—unless he creates Bob.

 

The Free Will Defense Returns

If middle knowledge involves a logical contradiction, then God wouldn’t have it, and so he would not be able to foresee what Bob will freely choose and refrain from creating him.

To know what Bob will actually choose, God would need to create him.

And in that case, the free will defense that we discussed in Possibility #1 would work!

God would create Bob, see his decision to reject salvation, and the counterbalancing good that explains why God tolerates this is his desire to let Bob have free will so that he can make an authentic choice between love and non-love.

 

Mystery Remains

While “It’s just a mystery” isn’t a satisfying answer, it is true that we can’t always propose a single, definite answer to matters involving God.

However, while his mind is infinite and ours are only finite, we often can at least sketch the outlines of possible reasons he makes the decisions he does.

In this case, I haven’t settled on a final answer to the question we began by posing, so mystery remains.

But we have fleshed out possible reasons that shed light on this question.

Which solution you find most likely will depend on your views of various matters, but at least we can have the assurance that there are solutions.

And that God is just. And that he really does offer us salvation.

Halloween: Everything You Think You Know About it is Probably Wrong

(Taken from Mark Shea's annual Halloween post at Stumbling Toward Heaven)

Every year, somebody stoops down to instruct us ignorant Catholics about the real origins of Halloween.

According to that pop history, it was originally a pagan feast and then the Christians baptised it.

Depending on who you talk to, this proves that a) Christianity is really just warmed over Druidry (according to neo-pagans) or b) the Catholic Church is an evil pagan cult that drove Real Bible-believing Christians underground with their devil-worshiping ways (according to Protestant Fundamentalists).

Thing is, none of that is real.

Sure the ancient Celts of the British Isles had a little festival on 31 October called Samhain.

And it was about as important as Arbor Day. But the feast of All Saints or “All Hallows” had nothing to do with it.

In fact, All Saints was founded by Roman Christians way down in Italy for a practical logistical purpose: the 7th Century Italian Church was swimming in martyrs and saints and every feast day was a day off from work.

Solution: celebrate them all at once and get Italy back to work. So that’s what the pope did–on May 13.

It wasn’t for another century that All Saints got moved to November 1. And that was because it was the dedication day of All Saints Chapel at St Peter’s in Rome (not Britain or Ireland).

Indeed, it was not until a century after this that Pope Gregory IV commanded All Saints to be observed everywhere and not just in Rome.

And so this emphatically Italian holy day (finally!) spread to Ireland.

But here’s the thing: Ireland had already been thoroughly Christian (due to St Patrick) for three centuries by then.

So where does the Day of the Dead vibe come from?

Thereby hangs a tale. You see, about a century and a half later, the jumpingest joint in the Church was the monastery at Cluny (way over in southern France — not Ireland).

And the abbot there added a celebration of All Souls on November 2, which spread like wildfire, resulting in back-to-back feasts for all those in heaven and purgatory.

“Well, hey!” the superstitious Irish fretted, “What are the damned? Chopped liver? What if they get ticked about being stiffed?”

So it became an Irish folk custom to bang pots and pans on All Hallows Eve to mollify the damned.

The Church was not keen on this, but whaddayagonnadoo?

The Irish (alone) keep this up until the 14th and 15th centuries, when the colossal death toll of the bubonic plague gets most Europeans pretty focused on the afterlife, All Souls Day, and customs like the danse macabre, when the French would dress up in costume representing everybody from the pope and the king down to the fishmonger and have a fun time dancing their way to the grave.

Then came two other events: the Reformation and the discovery of the New World.

The Reformation made Catholics the persecuted enemies of the English and the New World made it possible for those persecuted minorities to mix and mingle among English colonists.

So the French and Irish Catholics started hanging out together and marrying each other in 17th-century America. Creepy Irish folk customs about mollifying the damned and creepy French masquerades went together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Protestants brought something to the mix as well: Guy Fawkes Night. Guy Fawkes was the English equivalent of the bogeyman or George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984.

He was executed in 1605 on the charge of being a Catholic Osama bin Laden and trying to blow up Parliament.

Instead of 15 Minute Hates, the crown settled on the wonderfully unifying device of Guy Fawkes Night on November 5, with all the fun of lighting bonfires, running around on a chilly fall night, and partying while an effigy of Guy Fawkes was hanged or burnt so that all Good English Protestants could thank God they were not like those Catholic vermin everybody hated.

And for extra special fun, in England and America in the 18th century, Protestants would put on masks and visit local Catholic houses in the dead of night demanding beer and cakes for their celebration — or else.

When they said “trick or treat!” they meant it.

This got amalgamated to the All Saints/All Souls partying of the Irish and French and by the mid-1800s, a largely made-in-the-USA Halloween was a fixture of American culture.

In short, Halloween is, in fact, as ancient, pagan, mystical, and druidic as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

And where it is most ancient, it is least pagan — and most deeply Catholic–which is why (in non-COVID times) it is a Holy Day of Obligation. Meanwhile, in Europe, until American cultural trends started cramming our customs down their throats, Halloween has never been a thing. Indeed, the irony is that Halloween has only recently started to drift across the Atlantic to the supposed land of its birth.

Europeans tend to see it, not as a resurgence of pre-Christian pagan roots, but as something recent and ersatz–like saying the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland is an authentic account of 17th century seamanship.

Anyway, if you are Catholic don’t let anybody talk you out of celebrating All Saints and All Souls Days with bogus “history” of their supposed “pagan origins”.

And have a fun time tonight!

Without a "mind" there is no music...

Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn't found the place to blow,
It blew to hard, the aim was song,
And listen, how it ought to go.

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.

By measure, it was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be,
A little  through the lips and throat.
The aim was song, the wind could see.

R.Frost, The aim was song

Is "GOD" one of "the gods", and is disbelieving in either the same disbelief?

(Quoted from Marc Barnes)

It seems apparent to me that, if the atheist wishes to disprove or otherwise snub his empirically verifiable nose at the idea of God, he ought to be sure that he knows what the word “God” refers to. David Bentley Hart makes this one of the central propositions of his book “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss,” where he contends that “the more scrutiny one accords [the God Debate] the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any sense at all.”

There is a tendency, for instance, for atheists to believe that God is a god. The best example of this is in the following, oft-heard “arguments” — and I use the term in the haziest possible sense — against the existence of God: ”We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further,” or that tragic, near-mystical exercise in atheistic coyness — “When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

The problem with believing that the God of philosophical tradition is just another type of powerful, supernatural being — akin to Zeus — is that He is not, and no theist can be a theist within his own tradition and maintain otherwise. The successful dismissal of God-as-all-other-gods has all the nonsensical weight of dismissing the existence of a buffalo considered as a planet. The gods are contingent beings. They all have stories of their own creation — something else is always responsible for their existence. They are always popping out of someone else’s head or, if you have the misfortune of being Aphrodite, from Uranus’ detached and far-flung genitals. They are explained by some prior cause.

This is not God. God, if we are going to talk about the same thing, cannot be considered as a contingent being. God, considered properly, is the source of his own existence. He is absolute, which is infinitely, qualitatively different than the contingency of “all other gods,” as it is from all other beings. The Christian has every right to agree with the atheist who refuses to believe in God with the same vigor by which he refuses to believe in Zeus, a fairy or a flying spaghetti monster. For any fairies or noodly phantasmagoria — if they do exist — would not contain the source of their own existence.

Not understanding that this is what Christians actually mean when they say “God” is the primary reason why any one lends any credence to the that pervasive and Reddit-friendly “argument,” that “If God created all things, who created God?” The question only makes sense if we are speaking of a god, a very powerful, but nevertheless contingent being, a being who does not contain the source of his own existence and must be held in being by some other cause. Why then, does the theist posit the existence of an absolute God? Why believe in God and not god?

The average atheistic minded homo sapien – and the average Christian who doesn’t know better — seems to think that theists are proving the existence of a “god who started it all.” The argument goes like this: Every effect has a cause, and every moving thing is set in motion by some other thing, and thus there must be something which sets the first mechanical movement in motion, and — lest we become caught in infinite regress — this thing must be Uncaused, Unmoved, in short, Absolute. If all things are contingent, the first cause cannot itself be contingent, or else nothing would ever have come into existence. If all that ever existed was always contingent upon something else for its existence, nothing would ever exist. Therefore, from the fact of contingent existence, we may reasonably posit an absolute source of existence.

Now I’ll grant that this argument has more than enough weight to give the atheist pause.  After all, the only alternative to positing a first cause is positing some form of infinite regress. And atheists have, with wonderful gusto. The universe always existed, it is but one of an infinitely repeating cycle of universes, an infinite repetition of a Big Bang and Big Crunch, cycling through a wormhole, etc. If the theist questions the reasonable grounds for these theories, atheists generally point to the fact that, whatever poverty of evidence these theories suffer, they suffer no more than the theory of God.

It seems that we are at an impasse. The theist looks at the contingency of all things and posits an absolute which gives all contingent things a starting point — an Unmoved Mover. The atheist looks at the same and posits an infinite universe. Neither position seems to be rustling up any unopposable proof of its truth anytime soon. The theist may rightly ask how, if particular events are caused by an infinite number of prior events, any would ever happen. The atheist may rightly ask why an absolute one which all contingent things have their source has to be “God” in any meaningful sense.

But this first mover  (considered as so many atheists consider it, as an absolute “start” of all things (which, as readers have pointed out, is not how, say, Aquinas or anyone in the theistic tradition would consider it)) is still not God. Every single being in the entire Cosmos has some prior cause, and every single being has some other motion, event, or source that “takes responsibility” for its existence, and this is all well-worn and obvious, but things are not just contingent in their origin. Things are contingent in their current existence. Hart describes this fact well:

    "If one considers the terms of one’s own existence, for instance, one sees that there is no sense in which one is ever self-existent; one is dependent on an incalculable number of ever greater and ever smaller finite conditions, some of which are temporal, and some of which are definitely not, and all of which are dependent on yet further conditions. One is composed of parts, and those of smaller parts, and so on down to the subatomic level, which itself is a realm of contingently subsistent realities that flicker in and out of actuality, that have no ontological ground in themselves, and that are all embraced within a quantum field that contains no more of an essential rationale for its own existence than does any other physical reality. One also belongs to a wider world, upon all of whose physical systems one is also dependent in every moment, while that world  is itself dependent upon an immense range of greater physical realities, and upon abstract mathematical and logical laws, and upon the whole contingent history of our quite unnecessary universe…In short, all finite things are always, in the present, being sustained in existence by conditions which they cannot have supplied for themselves, and that together compose a universe that, as a physical reality, lacks the obviously supernatural power to exist on its own. Nowhere in any of that is a source of existence as such."

All things, in their present existence, are contingent upon innumerable, equally contingent realities for the fact of their sustained existence. I — right here, right now, typing these words — do not hold myself in being. The infinite regress that results from a proposed contingent universe that does not rest on any absolute — this is the same regress we are shot into when we consider, not just the origin of things, but the present existence of any single leaf, electron or baby. It is because of this fact, this poverty, this contingency that pervades our every moment, not just our physical origins, that the idea of God, and not a god, takes hold in the intellect. Hart makes this point clear:

    "One will not understand this line of reasoning properly, however, unless one recognizes that it is not concerned with the question of the temporal origins of the universe; it would make no difference to the argument whatsoever if it should turn out that the universe existed forever and will go on existing eternally, without beginning or end, or that it belongs to some beginningless and endless succession of universes….It might be worthwhile to invoke and old Western scholastic distinction between those causal relations that are “accidental (per accidens) and those that are “essential” or “intrinsic” (per se). The former are principally physical relations (in the broadest sense): transitions of energy, movements of mass, acts of generation or destruction, and so on. In an extended series of such relations, the consequences of a particular thing can continue indefinitely after that thing has disappeared, because all causes in the series are ontologically extrinsic to their effects. The classic example is that of a causal relation between a man and his grandson: by the time the latter is sired the former may have been dead for decades; the first act of begetting was not the direct cause of the second. The relation is one of antecedent physical history, not of immediate ontological dependency, and so the being of the grandson does not directly depend on the being of his grandfather. An example on a grander scale might be Roger Penrose’s postulate of an infinite sequence of universes that always meet at conformal past and future boundaries: even this beginningless and endless cosmogonic cycle would add up to only a causal sequence per accidens… Even if this kind of eternal chain of events and substances really were to exist, it would remain the case that, inasmuch as none of the links in that chain could be the source of its own existence, this entire series od causes and effects would be a contingent reality and would still have to sustained in a “vertical”–a per se or ontological–causality; and this second kind of of causal chain most definitely cannot have an infinite number of links. The ultimate source of existence cannot be some item or event that has long since passed away, like a venerable ancestor or even the Big Bang itself–either of which is just another contingent physical entity or occurrence–but must be a constant wellspring at work even now…The cause of being is not some mechanical first instance of physical eventuality that, having discharged its part, may depart the stage; rather, it is the unconditioned reality underlying all conditioned things in every instant."

A rejection of an absolute first “starting point” is not a rejection of God. It is, if anything, a rejection of the God of Deism, an uninvolved Absolute Domino in a cosmic line of dominoes. The God of theistic tradition, that which we mean by the word “God,” is posited by a reflection on the total contingency of all things, by the fact that no one holds the source of their own current-moment existence, any more than they do the source of their origins. A proposed absolute that results from this reflection would have to be an absolute that is an ever-present source of being, giving existence at every moment, an absolute in which all things live, move and have their being, utterly present in every single contingent thing, at every moment.

This is what the Christian tradition means by “God,” and it is not a claim done away with by the position of an infinite repetition of contingent causes, a repetition that requires a here-and-now source of being as much as it does a temporal origin. To do away with a contingent god is to do away with paganism and several sects of fundamentalism. To do away with a mere mover is to do away with Deism. To do away with the theistic tradition, one needs to confront God.