You can talk all night.
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(Photo taken at 5:52 this morning.)
May 2, 2020
At the Sunrise Café...
You can talk all night.
(And do any shopping you might have through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.)
(Photo taken at 5:52 this morning.)
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C.S. Lewis addressed your assertion about the random nature of destruction. With the fall, the earth became subject to physical laws. That means things happen as they happen, without regard to the goodness of the people who suffer. An earthquake happens because physical laws determine that it will happen. God does not intervene, because He has acquiesced, in a limited way, to this earth being subject to physical laws. It isn't really a conundrum. The world is unfolding as it must, according to the physical laws of the universe that God created. What we experience as evil is just the cold fact of reality in a fallen world.
What is paradigm-shifting about Christianity is that God promises that this world, subject to inexorable physical deterioration, will be redeemed--and it will be redeemed through the act of divine incarnation in human history. That the act of inhabiting humanity redeems the entire universe. Not some feelz of a personal relationship with God.
OK. Thanks for the discussion J.
I'm sure we'll have a chance to think and contemplate and talk about it and other things some more again.
The greatest achievement of the Evil One is convincing us that he doesn't exist. To say that man creates evil is to pay homage to the Evil One.
@Anne:
Christianity is not really about an interpersonal relationship with the divine. The pabulum of "Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior" has spread that nonsense.
I know a lot of devout Christians who would vehemently disagree with that statement.
This is a radical departure from every other faith tradition. And for Christians it is only possible because God inhabited our humanity, literally redeeming every cell of our being.
I think those aforementioned Christians would agree totally with this. And I agree that Christianity is radically unique from all other religions. It's one of the reasons I detest thought Golden Bough comparative religion crap, where the Christ story is said to be some revision of a meta-myth similar to some story from Ancient Egypt. I hate that kind of Joseph Campbell mythicism. I suspect you and I are trying to describe the same phenomenon. Granting all that, I still can find no reason to take its claims seriously. And the power of the message is part of the reason. When I compare the message to the means of delivery, the latter seems so provincial and mundane to me. The issues and concerns Jesus addressed, essentially the origin myth of Hebrew civilization, are issues of the Bronze Age. You can't accept Christianity without accepting Judaism, and I consider Judaism an absurdity. An historically important, sui generis absurdity perhaps, but an absurdity nonetheless.
With the fall, the earth became subject to physical laws.
I had not heard that from C.S. Lewis. An interesting thought. I would qualify it, though, with saying that the laws of physics, e.g. gravity, applied even in "the Garden" before the Fall, i.e. the time when humans decided that they would rather do things their way, rather than God's way. However, God would intervene when necessary to prevent harm.
But when man said, thanks but no thanks to God, that is when He said, "OK, you want to live in the world without me, go right ahead." Of course, He has not receded entirely into the heavens like some clockmaker deity, He still interacts with His creation, but He also allows humanity to experience the choice they made.
An interesting thought to think out.
I'll ponder it some more. But it is late here. Not all of us set their clocks three hours behind.
Night.
Yancey,
So 4/2 reports in the incremental progression at 22,562 and 4/5 reports at a super "expodential" 63,455 and that's not concerning?
n about the random nature of destruction. With the fall, the earth became subject to physical laws. That means things happen as they happen, without regard to the goodness of the people who suffer. An earthquake happens because physical laws determine that it will happen. God does not intervene, because He has acquiesced, in a limited way, to this earth being subject to physical laws. It isn't really a conundrum.
If you posit a god that does not intervene in the physical world, that is one thing. But that is not how I understand most Christian's conception of the world. It seems to me that most Christians readily accept the possibility of god's intercession in the physical world. Many believe this is a rather frequent occurrence. When people survive terrible accidents or recover from dangerous illnesses, people readily acknowledge the glory and grace of god. When children experience unimaginable agony or a family experiences great tragedy, we are told that god works in mysterious ways.
I also do not accept the fallen world explanation because it relies on original sin for its foundation. We are born guilty. Jesus may have the capacity to wash this sin from us, but I still find it a poor explanation for the suffering of children.
OK -- I just saw a commercial, which leads me to ask this very deep question:
Sabrina Duncan, Kelly Garrett, Jill Monroe, Kris Monroe, Tiffany Welles, or Julie Rogers? Or, if you swing that way, Bosley?
I was never a big Farrah fan, but was taken with Kris/Cheryl Ladd.
Now I'm going.
@Mark:
Sabrina Duncan, Kelly Garrett, Jill Monroe, Kris Monroe, Tiffany Welles, or Julie Rogers? Or, if you swing that way, Bosley?
Sabrina is who you'd want to have dinner with; Kris and Kelly are who you'd want to spend the night with. Fawcett always seems like a bimbo. She was very Monroe-esque in that regard. An insecure neurotic desperate to be taken seriously. She tried it in the female revenge pic Extremities, where she played a rape victim who gains the upper hand and subjects her assailant to torture and abuse. It's a less tawdry version of I Spit On Your Grave, where a flip female empowerment angle is slapped on a film that luridly lingers on scenes of sexual assault and abuse and the heroine conveniently exacts her revenge while dressed in a negligee.
Regarding Kavanaugh and Biden accusers…. I think only one rare type of individual can be a liar and yet, when interviewed by disinterested capable persons, still not be seen as lying. That type (gifted and virtually undetectable liars) masters and continually applies lying as a central feature of their personae. These are the people who use persistent lying to get through life unscathed: con artists, compulsive pretenders, criminals, fraudsters/cheats, serial killers, etc. All the rest (the “amateur” liars) in my opinion will be detected when questioned and interviewed with even modest probing by the questioner/interviewer. When they (“we", the regular people) start telling our story and filling in the blanks under questioning, we’ll be found out. I think I, for example, can form a solid and correct opinion about credibility because I’ve had about five decades of adult life during which to size people up via conversation. Neither of the two women are “career liars”, obviously. That is, they’ve not made their way through life by perpetual lying and covering up things. That said, I consider the Kavanaugh accuser is untruthful, and the Biden accuser is telling truth. In both cases, that’s by virtue of listening to or reading accounts of what they’ve said an how they back that up. Sure, I COULD change my mind on one or both of them as I am more exposed. But I doubt that will happen.
Re: Biden and the records at University of Delaware: Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were some kind of records pertaining to Tara Reade that made Biden look bad. Given that we've already heard that Biden operatives were there nosing around, what do you think the chances are of anything with Tara Reade's name on it still being there? Unless they were completely incompetent at finding and pocketing/destroying said records, I'd say that it's more likely that we'd find information about space aliens at Area 51, Bigfoot and Amelia Earhart's bones at the University of Delaware than anything about Tara Reade. If Hillary can make 30,000 emails disappear, I'm sure Biden's spooks could do the same.
In any event, certainly in Christian society "evil" is NOT a real force. Rather, it is the absence of a real force, namely "good," just as dark is the absence of light and cold is the absence of heat.
This idea explains how our society got into its present extremely messed up state. Evil is not just the absence of good! Certainly there is an evil in passivity when action is called for, but that’s minor compared to what Evil accomplishes through direct action. A recent example is the way that Flynn was set up. Thinking in “absence of good” terms blinds you to a lot of what’s going on. Most people don’t want to know unless it’s directly affecting them, and that makes sense because they have to live their lives. But pretending that there is no active evil in the world is just clinging to a delusion that should have been smashed long ago.
Anne you are an excellent apologist, and I will reiterate here the point you brought up earlier: Satan’s greatest achievement was convincing mankind he doesn’t exist.
I find in contemplating the Divine I can glimpse infinity from time to time. The repetition of prayer is a reminder that these events I am meditating on did not happen 2000 years ago, they are happening NOW, they are always happening. God created time and space and exists outside of it and through it, and all of time to God is the same. So Christ becoming human and dying on the cross is a continuous sacrifice for the world.
And as Anne said, there is literally nothing we can do to make ourselves worthy of that sacrifice, except accept the gift of grace that is given to us, and try to bring about the kingdom more fully here on Earth.
“ C.S. Lewis addressed your assertion about the random nature of destruction. With the fall, the earth became subject to physical laws. That means things happen as they happen, without regard to the goodness of the people who suffer. An earthquake happens because physical laws determine that it will happen. God does not intervene, because He has acquiesced, in a limited way, to this earth being subject to physical laws. It isn't really a conundrum. The world is unfolding as it must, according to the physical laws of the universe that God created. What we experience as evil is just the cold fact of reality in a fallen world.”
We lost my youngest brother when he was a senior at Dartmouth to a climbing accident (back in CO). My mother was the one who had the hardest time with his death (my partner lost her older brother at a similar age, and her mother reacted similarly). One book that helped her was “when bad things happen to good people”, surprisingly to us, written by a rabbi. In it, the author asks, if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then why do bad things happen, esp to good people (like both of our mothers losing their respective golden child)? God could have prevented the loss. Why didn’t he? Both young men were bright, talented, well liked, and devout Christians. Did they deserve to die so young? Did their families deserve to lose them? The answer this author suggests revolves around free will. With omniscience and omnipotence, God could reward the virtuous and hinder or condemn the wicked among us. But that would ultimately mean that we would be doing what he wanted because we knew that we would be receiving earthly benefit. Moreover, he would know beforehand how we would react, and make us respond the way he wanted through his omnipotence. But in the end, that would mean that the good we did would be his decision, and not ours. And we didn’t have free will. That means that the eating of the forbidden fruit was the acceptance of free will. It isn’t God’s choice whether we are good or evil. It is ours. But with that choice, comes the possibility of having chosen good, over evil, and being judged favorably by him after our earthly death.
And, yes, this answer is consistent with your suggestion that God has acquiesced to this Earth being subject to natural laws. Because if he didn’t, then we would lose the free will to determine whether we are good or evil, whether we believe in him, and accept him into our hearts.
Which, at one level is circular. That circularity being why a leap of faith is required. That leap of faith is fundamental to our free will. If he didn’t step aside, then the choice whether to believe and do good, over doing evil, would be his choice, and not ours, and thus no choice at all.
America is a culture without maturity. Americans seemingly progress from infancy to childhood to youth and finally to senility without a stop at maturity. The train of our lives just roars through Maturity Station like its nothing but a minor siding instead of the destination our youths should aspire to achieve. We see this most clearly in our penchant for diminutives. Biden isn't Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Or Mr. Vice-President Biden. He's Joe Biden.
There was a time when childhood diminutives were put within inverted commas, lest the writer was to imply a false familiarity. A time long gone it would seem. But maybe not. Following an Instapundit link, I visited a Space.com report about the two NASA astronauts who are scheduled to fly the first manned mission of Elon Musk's much-awaited Crew Dragon spacecraft. In the article, the two pilots are introduced as Robert "Bob" Behnken and Douglas "Doug" Hurley. This style strikes me as rather odd. Though we can regret the general loss of formality, putting these common diminutives within quotes is probably an overreaction. Now if our astronauts acquired some really colorful nicknames, quotation marks would be fitting and proper. In fact, it would be a minor breach of etiquette to fail to use them. Would Nino "Two Toes" Caleca take offense at being styled merely Two Toes? Of course, he would. And the owner of a truly monumental moniker Michael "Mad Dog" Malaspina would likely leave you bleeding in a gutter if you left off his quote marks.
Now to the more mundane.
We started moving into the new house about two weeks ago. I go back to the old house almost every day to pick up what the movers missed, and do some of the cleaning. House should probably have a For Sale sign by the time I get back there Sun or Mon. She is the one who swore we would never move again, three and a half years ago, and she is the one who decided we needed to move again. Unfortunately, this time she really wasn’t much help. We have much too much stuff. Two pack rats.
I actually liked the old floor plan a little better. The new house has a junior suite downstairs, and the rest of the rooms were squeezed a bit as a result. A good friend of mine suggested that she is becoming an invalid, and to prepare for it. That is where the junior suite comes in. The stairs are also wide enough for a stair lift, or we could put an elevator in from the den downstairs to the lift upstairs. If we ever need either. My parents put in a lift for my mother, but my father took it out after she died. He was negotiating the steps to their quad level house up to maybe a month before he died in his mid nineties. Indeed, after he quit running, and she was no longer with him, he would routinely climb the three half flights of stairs every day for exercise.
But the thing that got me started on this subject tonight is that of food. We are maybe a half mile from the Snottsdale border. There are (or were) a lot of good restaurants in that city, esp up north where we are. Much better selection than where we used to live, and day and night above what we have in MT. There is a shopping mall right across the line in Snottsdale, and it is filled with mid level restaurants. Probably half the businesses there. Almost all of them are open for takeout, and most were doing a brisk business last night. Second most busy was Carlos O’Brian’s, the only “Mexican” restaurant she likes (and I have had to drive halfway across Phoenix to pick up food for her from them in the past). Almost a dozen groups waiting in well spaced lines at Door 1 or Door 2 (if you order wasn’t ready - ours was). The honors though go to Chick-fil-a, that rubs a real assembly line with their drive through. Two people taking orders, walking along side as you drive along, I put into tablets, one window for payments, and the second for the food. Likely as many, if not more, people working there than was the case before the “lockdown”.
Oh, and a very highly rated gun range in that shopping center. I was expecting to use the one on the other side of the Scottsdale airport, 10-15 minutes away. But this one is in easy walking distance. And while the stores in the shopping center were closed, the range was open. I don’t mind that Bed Bath and Beyond was closed, but don’t think I would like living wher gun ranges weren’t considered “essential”.
“There was a time when childhood diminutives were put within inverted commas, lest the writer was to imply a false familiarity. A time long gone it would seem. But maybe not. Following an Instapundit link, I visited a Space.com report about the two NASA astronauts who are scheduled to fly the first manned mission of Elon Musk's much-awaited Crew Dragon spacecraft. In the article, the two pilots are introduced as Robert "Bob" Behnken and Douglas "Doug" Hurley. This style strikes me as rather odd. Though we can regret the general loss of formality, putting these common diminutives within quotes is probably an overreaction.”
It is interesting. We have a lot of Roberts on all sides of our families. Both my ex wife and my partner had father’s named Robert. The ex also had an uncle, while my partner’s best fried is also one. Her oldest grandson is Robert III, with a grandfather going as Bob and father as Bobby. My only full uncle was Bob, but we renamed him as Uncle Boob, after his cluelessness probably cost my mother a half million dollar inheritance from her step father. Worse, my mother’s Welsh grandfather was Robert Robert, son of Robert William (at least by then they were only using their father’s name as their middle name - Welsh genealogy can get interesting from when they were still switching around last names). My next brother has Robert as a middle name, presumably because my mother didn’t want him to have the same first name as her brother in law had (which BTW was convenient when we all acquired Texan double names when two of us were living in Austin). My partner gets torqued when I call her late father Bobby C, and her best friend Bobby V. Only her mother, and his siblings and parents ever called her father Bobby. Of course, in reality, I would call him “Mister” in real life, despite having been with his daughter for over 20 years now, though I did address my former FIL as Bob. Up until fairly recently, the standard seemed to be to call Roberts who were close family or of succeeding generations ‘“Bobby”, older generations not related to you “Robert”, as well as professions that you don’t know, and the rest of them as “Bob” (unless you have too many of them, as my partner does with her grandson - he is the “Robert” in the family).
I am still a bit discomforted by “Bob” Mueller, “Jim” Comey, “Bill” Brennan, etc. none of us know them. I think that NASA should have kept with their given names. Putting their diminutives is quotes just looked contrived.
That the act of inhabiting humanity redeems the entire universe.
Universe-sized delusions of grandeur based on some old ghost stories; not only irrational to the point of nuttiness, but also the exact opposite of humility.
Meanwhile back in the real world, with the downgraded WuCooties stats my 4/24 prediction is back to being right on target:
Based on the current stats, I'm going with "overblown media-driven panic" and that it'll be similar to a bad flu season, where, according to CDC, 50 to 60K Americans die in a year: that's an average of 4-5,000 deaths a month, though they're mostly in one season.
I had two Uncles Bob. One was really named Chester, the other Gilbert.
So Bob's your uncle?
John Henry
If evil has its own independent existence, like the Dark Side vs. The Force - which is an ancient Manichaean idea -- then even if humanity caused evil by our own acts of the will, then ultimately God is the source of evil, inasmuch as all things can have their existence only through and in Him, the Creator of all.
And if God is the ultimate source of evil, then God Himself is evil -- He contradicts Himself.
Yet, God in the Christian and Jewish understanding is all Good.
So if God is both all Good AND evil, then God is both God and Not-God.
Evil may LOOK like it has its own independent being, it may seem that it is a countervailing force that battles against good, it may appear that way and we may refer to it in that way, but that is illusion.
Even those that we refer to as "being evil," e.g. Satan, are not per se evil, but are merely evildoers. Evil is a condition and an action, it is not an ontological state of being.
Another notion of C.S. Lewis was his imagery of Hell in his book The Great Divorce.
To the people inhabiting it, Hell has the appearance of this great big town that stretches on and on into the distance.
Yet, when the main character goes up to Heaven, he is invited to look down upon Hell and he sees from that perspective of Truth, that Hell is only a tiny speck.
In other words, evil is a diminishment of Good. It is the lack of good. And, the "absence of good" is just as bad and destructive as evil being its own independent force.
Meanwhile, that which is called "Purgatory" is not really a place, nor is it where one is consigned for a period of time, before one enters Heaven.
Rather, it is something of a process. Kind of like comment moderation, where the bad in the comments is examined and purged out.
A most crepuscular sunset.
Mark @1:36 AM said: "Now, if God DOES exist, then what is the cause of evil?
Again, there can be only one answer: man is the cause of evil."
Some evil, I'll grant. But not all of it; I'll not rehearse cases for you, it will not affect your motivated reasoning. But many who work in medicine (for example) might take exception.
I tired decades ago of trying to square this circle and gave it up as a waste of time. I guess I'm just not needy enough to think that I can't be happy unless the universe cares about me.
Additionally, @9:06 AM Mark said: "So if God is both all Good AND evil, then God is both God and Not-God."
So the problem is... What?
Phidippus wisely says, "I tired decades ago of trying to square this circle and gave it up as a waste of time. I guess I'm just not needy enough to think that I can't be happy unless the universe cares about me.” I’m right there with him/her. I’ve also recognized that with so many things in the world that strain my ability to explain or even comprehend, why should I, (as less than a speck in the universe) waste time on the most elusive of them all? If there were a God, seems to me he’d be telling me, “quit pondering this stuff and instead devote your limited time and mental energy to contributing something good for others around you every day.” Some billions of humans have walked this path we call “life” without solving the eternal mysteries, but I admire most the ones who follow that insightful “here and now” advice from wherever it may have originated. Nutshell: Don’t look to me for answers to the “big questions”. Instead, as Bill Withers said,
Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on
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