Red States Mooching Off Blue States While Carping about Big Government

My dear Monte (you’ll find him in the blogroll under Christians Worth Knowing) made this excellent post.

Please Don’t Divorce Us! Stand Up for Love (and Sign this Letter)

Look at these lovely, loving people and tell me they don’t have the right to pursue happiness like anyone else.

Go to this link and add your name to this letter to the Supreme Court.

We, the undersigned, share President Barack Obama’s view
that for too long, issues of LGBT rights have been exploited
by those seeking to divide us. It’s time to move beyond
polarization and live up to our founding promise of equality
by treating all our citizens with dignity and respect.”

Yet, on December 19, 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal
Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality
of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of 18,000
devoted same-sex couples solemnized before Prop 8 passed.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on
March 5, with a decision expected within 90 days.
We, the undersigned, ask that the Court enforce the equality
promised to each of us by our constitution and invalidate Prop
8. So doing will protect all loving, committed couples in
California — including the 18,000 who said “I do” last year –
and prevent the initiative process from being a tool for
stripping vulnerable minorities of precious constitutional rights.

As Americans who believe in the rule of law and fundamental
civil rights, we know that Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal
Defense Fund’s shameful attempt to nullify equal protection
and all these bonded unions will be condemned in the eyes of
history. We know that, ultimately, love will prevail, no matter
how hard they try to fight it.

Thanks again, Nan.

Plato’s theory of forms – modern, dynamic and important

Empathy with Plato’s Theory

Plato was one of the great philosopher’s of all time. His theory of forms held tremendous sway over people’s thinking for quite some time. Traces of Platonic idealism can be found in Christianity, Islam, Hegel’s dialectic, Marxism as well therefore, Kant’s moral imperative, and modern scientific pantheism. Regardless of our taste for the fruit of the branches of Plato, it’s impact on our culture and history, and therefore its influence on our daily lives, cannot be denied. It therefore would at least be prudent to have some understanding of this philosophy. I will be rephrasing Plato’s philosophy in new and sympathetic language. This is in preparation for an in depth study of Plato’s dialogs and the Republic which I am just about to begin. Therefore, this is not an academic study with a great deal of rigor, for that will come later, but instead it is an attempt to paint the most sympathetic portrait of Plato’s reach into the modern mind.

I find the most fruitful place to begin a discussion of the modern relevance of Plato is with the concept of Platonic love. Contrary to popular belief, Platonic love would not necessarily be love without sex, as it can, in fact, be quite passionate and sensual. Rather, let us imagine a little fairy tale . . . A long time ago, in the a misty kingdom of medieval France, there was a young prince deeply in love with a young maid of the stables. They met for passionate stolen embraces in the moonlight by the stables and promised eternal love, till death do them part. Of course, the prince’s father, the king, had no desire for his son’s future to be squandered on a lowly maid, and had slated his son to marry the daughter of a powerful ally. The king had the maid arrested and sent to jail in Spain. He told his son that she had been arrested after stealing money from the church and running away with a male thief who was, no doubt, her lover as well as her accomplice. He did this so that his son would feel that she no longer loved him, and furthermore, that she never did. The maid was told that the prince was the one who had her falsely arrested, so that she could never blackmail him. So she believed then that the prince did not love her, and he never did really. Let us say that on the way to Spain, pirates hijack the maid’s caravan. Upon joining with the pirates she has many high adventures. In both lover’s minds, the love burns strong despite a lack of faith, despite fluctuating circumstances and severe trials. Nonetheless, the maid-now-pirate one day takes a ship with the prince aboard. Somehow or another everything is reconciled, love is apparent again, and the maid becomes queen and they live happily ever after. This sort of love, that persists despite fluctuating circumstance, the appearance of destruction, and false opinion that it is no more or never was, is Platonic love. As you can imagine, the united lovers can have quite passionate sex, and yet the love is still Platonic. The love is seen as eternally true.

Parmenides was a Greek philosopher who believed everything was eternal and change was an illusion. He believed this primarily with the motivation that in order for there to be truth, change and error had to be deceptive. Heraclitus was another Greek who believed that everything was in a constant state of flux, and that there was no truth. Plato very much wanted to believe Parmenides, but he feared Heraclitus was right. His compromise was to believe in truth and eternity outside of the moment of now, ever in flux. This is why Platonic love is true love outside of the influence of the storms of the temporary in our fairy tale above.

Plato often uses science and math to explain his theories. Let us look at natural law. Scientists write equations of motion, or quantum mechanics, or gravity or particle physics. Just looking at Newton’s equations, we can say that the motion of billiard balls on a pool table follows Newton’s laws. And it does to a very close degree. But because of friction from the cloth, and air resistance, and the balls not being completely elastic on collision, the real behavior of the balls will not follow Newton’s laws in the real world. For example, the cue ball when struck will not roll on forever with inertia, but will stop. Nonetheless, we say that Newton’s laws are the true reality, the abstraction that is the pure and true reality. This is the case with every natural law. As Plato pointed out, every mathematical object, whether a circle of geometry or a law of motion, is a bit of an abstraction, an idealized form. In the real world, no circle or wheel is ideally round. Nonetheless, when scientists speak of the formation of our universe, the big bang, they will pull out various equations of physics to explain how something came to be out of nothing. Even if the universe expands and contracts in cycles, natural law is used to explain how something comes to be out of the nothings that are pauses between the in-breaths and the out-breaths. Natural law, the totality of ideal forms, is conceived as preceding being or as constituting a ground or basis of being. When Plato says an apple or a horse is a sort of reflection of the ideal forms, he means that the object before us, the horse say, is a reflection of the constituent ideal forms, the relevant laws of chemistry, physics, and biology, that organize and determine matter. Furthermore, we can determine these ideal forms, natural law, by investigating the world with our intellect and our reason.

Plato would say that the ultimate ideal behind the ideal forms, this magical process of a mind, embedded and arising from matter by a determination of the forms (the guiders of the universe), that can itself perceive a world of kaleidoscopic shadows of being, themselves reflections of the same ideal forms, is the mystery of mystery, the ideal of ideals, or simply, God. God is therefore to be understood by using reason and observing the natural world to ferret out an understanding of the laws that bind up our reality into a cohesive whole. It is the philosopher’s religious practice to use reason and nature to understand the nature of the eternally true, God. Plato would say the part of us, conscious but apart from momentary sense or fluctuating circumstance, the part that can glimpse the eternally true in nature by reason, is, in fact, immortal. This magic of seeing the universal is as immortal as the universal and eternal that it sees in the mind.

Regarding politics, Plato often wondered how to understand the eternally true characteristics of a state. Any state, while it persists, in other words, what is eternally true about a persisting state, is that it is defended well, and not degraded. Furthermore, Plato thought some knowledge of the true and the path of knowledge would have to be known to those who led a state through dark hours. If not, the state would not persist through adversity. He also realized that all states would therefore have some way for the guardians, those who safeguard truth through the straits of momentary confusion of values and mob madness, to control the mass, the forces of erratic decision making, irrational populist wish fulfillment, etc. Even here in America, the compliance with the view of the state against momentary lapses in obedience is enforced with media propaganda, legislation, and physical force. Plato identified the naked factors inherent in any state in the Republic.

I think the above helps give some credence to the need to take Plato’s thought seriously, if nothing else as a departure point. Furthermore, I think it makes clear how modern concepts of truth and scientific inquiry owe their allegiance to Plato and his Pythagorean roots. Also, I think it shows how many movements in modern politics from Marxism to Republican Democracy have their origin in Plato’s thoughts about the state. Lastly, the Muslim and Christian longing for heaven, paradise and God are Platonic ideals in mythological garb.

No Free Speech in India

Here’s an article about a writer and her publisher being held for “offending the religious feelings” of Muslims (which is apparently a crime there) for an article in which she wrote “I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a ‘Prophet’ who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.” The title of the piece is “Why Should I Respect These Oppressive Religions?” Personally, I think that’s a good question.

I understand Muslims’ desire not to have thrown in their faces the fact that Mohammad was a pedophile and a genocidal maniac. And I understand India’s desire not to stir up their Muslim population, considering their tendency to violence when their religious feelings get hurt. But they’ll never progress as a democracy if they don’t embrace the concept of free speech. If someone can’t handle hearing someone else point out the problems with their religion, they need to examine their beliefs more closely, not silence the offending speaker.

It’s high time the fundamentalist Muslims of the world got their heads out of their collective asses and joined the present, rather than clinging to their past. There’s a reason Muslim countries are among the poorest, least developed places on the planet, and that’s the way in which they suppress dissent. New ideas, so necessary for progress, can’t flower in such a climate. Not to mention the fact that they cut off half (the female half) of their population from participation. That’s a lot of brains to leave out of the problem solving.

Some Muslims actually fantasize (the evidence of this litters the internet) that one day Islam will cover the globe, so we all may as well just give in to it. They don’t understand how great it is to live in a place where we are free to use our minds, and to speak our minds. We’re not going to give that up to go back to some medieval era when the church and the state were one (we experienced that already, when Christianity was as oppressive as Islam is now, in its own adolescence). Instead, if they don’t give up on the idea that they’ve got a firm grip on the truth and some divine mandate to shove it down the world’s throat, they’ll find their religion stamped out like a brush fire. The more they resort to violence and repression, the more opposition they’ll find among the world’s free thinkers. Already the events of 9/11 caused in this country public discourse, with writers like Sam Harris, questioning the validity of religious belief. With any luck, with their continuing idiocy, they’ll cause the death of religion altogether.

Jesus and Mo: More Comic Relief

Here’s another great source for comic relief I’ll be adding to my blogroll. Too much.

Religion: Nothing but Emotional Self-Image

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how emotional and irrational our religious and philosophical choices are.  While it’s rather well-known that faith is supposed to be an irrational leap, I intend to show that many rationalist positions are adopted for emotional reasons as well.  I will start by talking about my own thoughts and choices on religion as a way of illustrating the degree to which I am starting to understand how all such choices are very much emotional or psychological in my opinion.

First of all let me say a few words about atheism, pantheism and deism.  Theism is supposed to be the belief in one or more gods.  The problem is what is meant by god.  Most of the time, if people are having some sort of conversation about god, they mean a personal, intelligent god who can intervene meaningfully in human affairs – the traditional Judeo-Christian God.  In this sense, all pantheists, deists and agnostics may be said to be atheists.  A pantheist believes that creation is part of or all of god, and god is force or energy inside creation not outside.  An agnostic believes that human beings cannot know rationally whether or not there is a god, though they may have an irrational leaning or preference one way or the other.  An atheist believes there is no god, but does not specify how this knowledge is reached.

I want to talk a bit about deism.  Deism is basically the belief that god began the process of creation with natural law and then let it be.  The other main reason for deism historically has been to undermine any respect for revealed religion, and as a rebellion against the organized revealed religions.  Revealed religion is when some person, a prophet, reveals a list of sayings supposedly from god more directly than other people who try to intuit god’s will.  Revealed religions create dogma, a priesthood, and the potential for hypocrisy, which is obedience to the sayings for appearances’ sake only.  Deism believed if there were a god, and he were the creator, then any man could look into nature, the creation, and understand god, the creator.  And that man’s scripture lay in the study of the natural world, and that by understanding the laws of nature one could obtain knowledge about the will of god.  Many of the founding fathers of America were deist.  In addition to denying the political power of the church, deism encouraged in the founding fathers a love of science and a belief in natural rights, which became the foundation of modern political liberty.  Unitarians, early freemasonry, and other groups are fairly deistic in approach.

Pantheism is the belief that god is everywhere.  This may go as far as Spinoza to believe that the universe is one large being.  I will point out one or two issues I have with pantheism to show how it’s a little different than deism.  In the sense of seeing the body of nature as the body of god, it is very similar to deism.  It is not too surprising that scientists who weren’t deists (like Newton) were often pantheistic (like Steven Hawking and Einstein).  Either way, peering into nature becomes a religious or sacred activity, like peering into god.  However if you look at early pantheistic formulations like Spinoza, you can start to feel the difference.  Spinoza thought that man had thought because god has thought, and man has the thought of god strewn about his natural body, leading to consciousness, as this god thought was strewn all over the universe, the body of god.  The only problem with this reasoning is that big living stuff, like whales, should be smarter than humans, and crazy hippy arguments aside, that’s just not so.  Brain size and intelligence are related to some degree, but it is really the convoluted cerebrum of man that actually gives rise to consciousness.  In other words, thought is not distributed as a purple thought-goo strewn throughout the universe, but arises in accordance with god’s scripted natural law when certain complex information-structuring processes are present, like a highly wrinkled and organized cerebrum.  However, a good many poets (like Jeffers) and poetic scientists (like Einstein) require the immanence of god in pantheism for aesthetic reasons.  Especially in the case of poets like Jeffers, having the face of god in the mountain, the breath of god in the wind, is more suitable for poetry than having god in the equations of plate tectonics or air dynamics.

I personally find deism the most rational of the god-related beliefs.  In fact, one would be hard pressed to understand much scientific talk without deism.  For example, one can read all the time in a science magazine, “The universe comes from a large explosion called the big bang.  Now we are going to look at a time line from 30 seconds before the big bang, before there was anything, to a point a few minutes into the early universe.  30 seconds before the big bang, quantum physics allows that a particle may appear into a vacuum from nothing, causing an explosion . . . “  It is very interesting to talk about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle about position and momentum before there is any stuff to be in any position or have any momentum.  In this sense, science acts like the laws of physics are eternal before there is anything to have laws.  Pure physical materialism would say this and that happens because that is how the elemental stuff, quarks, muons, etc fit together.  In theory, any physics is possible with the right constituents to the universe.  But science instead states that only certain types of material universes are possible because of these logical necessities (laws of physics) that precede any stuff and limit the potential worlds that can come to be.  That linguistically implies an order to the universe before there is any stuff or physical material.  This is Aristotle’s god, the philosopher’s god, the prime mover, the fixed point on which all that happens is based.

So then what is atheism.  Atheism is the denial that god exists.  If this conversation occurs in the context of the traditional monotheistic god, then deists, pantheists and physical materialists are all atheists.  Agnostics may be undecided, or just maintain that man can’t decide rationally, but nonetheless have made a decision themselves on other grounds, for or against god.  So you can be an agnostic theist, or an agnostic atheist.  Similarly, one can be not-agnostic and an atheist, like Richard Dawkins, and believe that there is no god and that this is a rational and demonstrable conclusion.

Now I would like to deviate for a minute and talk about Islam, which I like very much.  Basically, Islam believes that there is one personal god, who created the universe.  Furthermore, Muslims believe that this god sent messages to prophets over time, Jesus, Moses, etc, but the message to Mohammad was the last and most perfect.  The essence of that message, as in the Quran, is that there is one god, who created the world, and who will one day wrap it up in the day of judgment, resurrecting the dead and rewarding them with eternal paradise or punishing them with eternal hell.  It is very similar as you can see to the Jewish and Christian spiritual time-lines and has the same vision of the aim of human existence.  The difference from the Jews is the focus on belief and resurrection, rather than a detailed set of laws.  The difference from the Christian is the denial that god has any partners, equals or children, and the denial of a need for blood sacrifice for salvation, rather just a submission to god’s will (Islam in fact means submission).  In this way I see Islam as a more logical or stripped down version of the monotheistic religions.  If I were to be religious I would probably be a Muslim.  It would still require that I swallow two large impossibilities for me: 1) an all powerful being who can go outside the laws of nature, that I can relate to outside of nature, and 2) the resurrection of dead for eternal justice.  Now I’ve often wondered why I am attracted to Islam.  If I swallowed those two irrationalities, how could I say the addition of god’s bleeding son be any more of a stumbling block?  What do you get culturally by adding a Jesus?  Well, Western scientific progress and progress in political freedom seems to flow more easily under the non-coercive form of Christianity than the more medieval Islam (though that could be more a result of the relative ages of the religions than anything in their dogmas).  Also, the treatment of women seems better under Christian rule.  But from a logical point of view accepting 3 crazy ideas is no different than accepting 2 or 1.  And why would I prefer the irrationality of Islam to the irrationality of my own Catholic background?  Is it some sort of unconscious intuition of the Arab (Lebanese) blood that makes up a lot of me but was hidden in my family history as an English line Solomon?  Is there a reason for my tendency to sympathize with the Arabs versus the Jews in conflict, or to be curious about polygamy as a social institution when it doesn’t really work for me in fact?  Is it some sort of rebellion against my parents, against their being so normal, that makes me reject Christianity but leaves me free to embrace other irrationalities like Islam or Buddhism?  I know some friends who go through a troubled youth, and then a return to Christianity represents a reconciliation with their parents and an end to immature rebellion.  Well, I can’t see doing this, but it seems to be on the surface a healthy process.

And a word or two more about the imagined benefits of Christianity or Islam regarding political freedom.  The main reason for our political freedom is actually our deist founding fathers.  While they may have been Christian deists, it is the deist part that gives us the love of science and technological progress that made our young country strong.  It is the deism and disbelief of revealed religion that gave us artistic freedom and the separation of church and state.  It is deism and the concept of natural rights that arise out of the conception and observation of human beings as part of a natural human family regardless of borders, creed or color that gave rise to the west’s much lauded human rights.  Since atheism in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union never gave rise to such ideals or freedoms, it is not logic and reason that brought forth such ideas, or that irrationality or religion has a stranglehold on hampering human progress, but that commitment to human freedom and progress actually required commitment to the more fertile spiritual ground of deism.

I therefore harbor a great love of deism, because I love the freedom I experience.  I have always wanted to be a Freemason because of this love of America and its freedoms, but been held back by the requirement of belief in god.  I believe I also like seeing myself as a hero fighting successfully, triumphing against the odds, against a powerful evil.  I think this is why I like Islam, so I can see myself as a mujahadeen, a warrior perhaps of my Arab self against the Russian side of myself?  I also like to see myself as a founding father.  You can see this emotional tendency based on temperament, myth and allegory to see oneself a certain way revealed in the spectrum of religious and philosophical choices I allow myself, and then see how we all rationalize like hell to make it seem chosen and logical afterwards.  Let’s look at Richard Dawkins.  Here is a man who claims to be rational.  Yet he spent a bunch of time and money recently trying to get atheist posters on London buses.  He also does as many mental gymnastics as any Christian trying to avoid pantheism or a scientific deism to keep true to physical materialism without fatalism.  In a sense, he for reasons rather curious to me, has defined himself emotionally as anti-God-belief and then recruited all his powers of rationalization to bear upon this act.  But there is nothing rational about spending this much time or energy attempting to control people’s emotional fantasies about how they want to be seen by themselves and others.  And the preacher, whether atheist, Christian, or Muslim, is solving the same problem as his congregation while he speaks.

This is what I meant to show in the first place.  The older I get, the more I think religion or life-philosophy is nothing but the images of the self and other by which you live.  This is probably how many deconstructionist critiques get started, when you’re left not believing in reasons or any substance to the language of religion’s debate, you are left only being able to ask psychological and phenomenological questions like, “Where did this belief come from in the believer’s life experience?  How does it affect the behavior of the person to believe this?  And does it work, does it do what such beliefs are supposed to do?”

This has been written because Honestpoet and I have recently begun interacting at a social network where the individual’s profile includes information regarding religious preference. We wanted to be able to put the same thing, and while I’m an atheist, Honestpoet is an agnostic (though with an atheistic or pantheistic bent). After exploring Unitarian-Universalism, we have today found something we can both embrace:

“Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of reason and logic and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma.” Wikipedia

Even this choice betrays its own emotional motive, of course, the desire not to be yoked with dogma, and not to have to eschew logic and reason as a basis for belief. But that’s nothing, really, for which anyone should feel ashamed.