• (global) Fear and loathing?
• Climate report, it did warm up … but not very much.
• Two religions … and Euthyphro.
• Weatherman … a bomb a day?
• From a simple book.
• Bikes for the non-biked … like this.
• Logic in the chopper.

At the basis of much of the debate which goes on the subtext at which we worry was highlighted in a little book. Then Cardinal Ratzinger and philosopher Jurgen Habermas debated the following question:

Does the free secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee? This question expresses a doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state can renew from its own resources the normative presuppositions of its existence, it also expresses the assumption that such a state is dependent on ethical traditions of a local nature.

I wrote of that here (check it out, a few interesting quotes from the book The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion are included). Herr Habermas (here I diverge from my Mr/Mrs/Ms nomenclature as a reference merely to his Deutsche origins) argues (of course) the affirmative and Fr Ratzinger the latter.

Fr Ratzinger notes that there are pathologies of religion which are quite dangerous. It is this in fact which the atheist apologists over emphasize often and key upon, most recently JA noted “zeal” as peculiar religious problem, setting aside for some reason that other ideological zeals have been at the root cause of most of the 20th centuries mass killings. However, this misses the point. The vast majority of both the faithful and the secular are quite non-violent. The question isn’t about the fringes, although those should not be ignored, but the central question is can society function without without religious ties binding it? Charles Taylor in the book A Secular Age noted the important and central role the church had in the softening and civilizing of our social behavior over the last 600 years. Compare for example ordinary behavior by the elite between the 15th century (War of the Roses) and the Elizabethan 100 years later and then to the Victorian in the 19th. They are like night and day. The conventional wisdom was that this was driven by the Enlightenment and the secular (reason-based) move. But that doesn’t pan out to a careful examination. There was no “enlightenment” occuring in the 15th century that gave rise to the vast differences seen in that period.

But the question of whether a large scale national enterprise can hold together its society in the absence of any faith is unresolved. The French reformers of the 19th century attempting to craft a brave new world thought that the rites and rituals of the religious world gave continuity and permanence to daily life that a purely materialist secular world could not. They attempted to craft similar rituals to replace them, but as Mark Twain noted when his wife attempted using off-color language that “she’d had the notes but didn’t make music.” That is, they tried to make rituals but they, much like Mr Obama with his “clinging to guns and God” remarks, didn’t have the connection to the common man that was need to make music (rite/rituals) that the common man wanted to hear.

The demographic crises in mainly secular Western Europe, which afflicts our (secular) subcultures in the States, is not affecting the non-secular societies world wide. One of the commonalities in secular points of view that might be important to this question is how the secular culture promotes a radical individualism … and how that individualism is not very conducive to the sacrifices and commitment required of marriage and family. Without marriage and family raised as a linchpin or centerpiece of ones society, the same demographic crises will occur. People will go their individual ways and eschew raising families. Birth rates will drop and a generation or two later … the Piper will have to be paid for that particular indulgence.

So, to focus the question a little further, I might restate Herr Habermas’ eloquent question as:

Can the free secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee? This question expresses a doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state in the absence of religion eschew radical individualism and recall the necessary importance of stable marriage and family.

So if you disagree, and think that a secular society can in fact put family and children ahead of ego … tell me why and where are the clues that point to that notion.

Mrs Palin is widely attacked on by those on the left. We’ve heard over and over how Mr Obama’s experience is far more applicable to serving in their respective offices. As well, various criticisms of interviews and tidbits from her past which cast here in a unfriendly light have dominated the press. At the Hugh Hewitt blog, I’d like to highlight two posts from last week which I think might elicit comment. I’ve asked in the past, in regards to her overwhelming negative portrayal in the press how she comes to be our most popular governor (when the Senate from which the other candidates derive their past has a collective approval rate in the low teens).
Read the rest of this entry

• You can actually buy these for the office, we had some up at ours for a while.
• One way to view the debate … which I hope to view on the weekend.
• On a report on Afghanistan.
• But … will we be able to buy it in the states?
• A Catholic philosophers blog to mark … (HT: The H of C)
• RvW illiteracy as a main stumbling block to its overturn.
• Devils Dictionary updated … for the online dating community.
• I can’t imagine why Mr Obama is taking that course.
• That bailout bill … the pdf.

Continuing to chew the abortion issue with some amiable conversation partners, Mr Boonton suggests that there is a significant problem for the pro-life communities seeming disregard and nonchalance over the fact that a significant fraction of conceptions result in no implantation (naturally) and that even after implantation spontaneous abortion remains a possibility in a significant fraction of pregnancies. Often the parents are unaware that they have conceived and a essentially symptomless termination of the pregnancy occurrs. He suggests that money well spent on natal care of ailing infants is rightly not diverted to research and development to halt this, apparent, outrage … if after all if early fetal life is worth “the same as an adult (or infant)” then not wanting to halt this outrage is … outrageous (or hypocritical). Read the rest of this entry

• One useless movie noted.
• The Christian carnival.
• Mr Obama and the 1st Amendment.
• Two posts by a real economist on the economy.
• Mary Poppins … Time Lord?
• The non-centrality of Afghanistan contra Mr Obama and the left’s assertions to the contrary.
• Very Cool.
• Connections and the singing kids thing.
• Earmarks.

Boonton has asked, and I’ve been temporizing:

A good question that ended up getting EO to ban a commentator was based on a hypothetical fire. You rush into a IV Fertilization clinic that is on fire. There happens to be a live baby in a crib crying. There is also a heavy 60 pound mini-freezer whose label says it contains 150 frozen fertilized eggs. There are only moments to spare and you can only carry one out. Which is it?

It is my understanding that typically 10 blastocysts are implanted with an average of one about one “taking” and producing a child per attempt. So, in for purposes of discussion consider that, if implanted, here we are talking about an average of 15 potential children “frozen” and one in the crib. What would I do in this case is the question. Now, we really have no way of knowing in the heat of the moment what we would actually do, but for purposes of discussion I’ll try to imagine what I’d do. There are a number of possibilities here I think that are all reasonable.

1. If I knew nothing about the situation, and was a complete stranger.
2. What if one of the freezer (or infant) had blastocysts all “assigned” to someone you knew. That is the freezer was IVF product for just one couple. What if you knew either mother? Would that affect your decision?
3. If I knew of two or three women to whom those blastocysts belonged and didn’t know the mother of the infant …
4. Another variation of the question, what if it was not a living baby vs the frozen blastocysts but a heavy valise carrying cash. How much money would it have to be before you’d leave the freezer?
5. How about if it was the infant? How much money to leave the infant?
6. Numbers, I think matter. Blastocysts themselves are very small, I think. Just a cluster of a few dozen to a hundred cells. What if it was a 30 kg freezer with a million blastocysts. Would that matter? How about a 100 million? What if those blastocysts were 150 T-Rex bastocysts recovered by genetic archeology. What if there were a thousand and they were the last survivors of a racial subtype, such as a ethnicity facing extinction?

My answers:

1. (unknown) I’d save the infant. The infant more than likely has a mother and a family. Most blastocysts are abandoned. For IVF techniques produce and excess of blastocysts, and understandably parents stop trying to have more children … when they achieve pregnancy. Why the rest are not then immediately destroyed is of course because such destruction is felt by most people to be morally problematic.
2. (known mom) This would certainly matter. I’d save the freezer or the infant if I knew the parents … unless the parents where the parents of the “freezer” blastocysts and I knew that they had no intention of having a child.
3. (prospective parents known) I’d likely save the blastocysts. That would likely be at least two or three babies to the one …. on average. If it was “even”, I’d likely save the infant.
4. (money) I’d save the freezer.
5. (money for infant) I’d save the infant.
6. (numbers) At some number it becomes highly likely that more lives will be spared if the freezer is saved. A million makes it almost certain that the freezer has more value. T-Rex … -> the infant. I have no idea where I’d fall on the racial question. But if I thought that prospective mothers would be found, I’d favor the freezer.

Finally, I’ll note, I am one of the pro-life persons who think that IVF is morally problematic in and of itself … for what it’s worth.

• A measured evaluation of Mr Obama’s infanticide “smear”.
• History and narrative.
• Are Democrats to blame? My take is that they are both to blame. The Dems for pushing for relaxed lending standards, the GOP for holding the line on limited regulation (which in itself isn’t bad) but when you couple reduced regulation with no reduction in liability … that way lies disaster, recall the SNL crises, which was exactly a release of regulation but not liabillity.
• Heh. And one way to stand athwart history shouting “stop”.
• Mr Kerr looks at Mr Osteen.
• How long can you watch this video? Here’s an antidote. Some more remarks here.
• A raffle.

I’ve got a few loose threads running around. I’m going to pick a smaller one tonight. Last night I quoted Wendell Barry on the public and private nature of sex and the consequent dialog in our society which has lost its sense of community. And I think we should take seriously the notion of moving our discourse out of the conservative/liberal divide and center it around community. With that in mind (and another loose thread to nip) in this comment trail, commenter Boonton suggests that there is not good “pro-life” answer to:

A good question that ended up getting EO to ban a commentator was based on a hypothetical fire. You rush into a IV Fertilization clinic that is on fire. There happens to be a live baby in a crib crying. There is also a heavy 60 pound mini-freezer whose label says it contains 150 frozen fertilized eggs. There are only moments to spare and you can only carry one out. Which is it?

The initial response, which you can follow (but I’ll summarize) is that there is at least one problematic feature to this, that the IVF is problematic for many who hold pro-life positions, e.g., the Catholics. I suggested that one might make a problematic moral question in the context of an extermination/concentration camp, but that the different arguments might ignore a “Gordian solution” (in the case of saving IVF blastocysts its that IVF is problematic in the case of the camp … it is the mere existence of the camp). Mr Boonton leaped at an mistaken notion of what such a “camp moral quandary might be”, so before going further I’ll offer that as an aside before going on to the real point. In the context of a camp, a analogous moral question might be, you are in position to save either one child imprisoned in the camp or 5 (pick a number greater than 1) children of the guards … you know that tomorrow everyone in the camp will die. Whom do you save, the one child or the five? The one has had a recent life filled with horror, the others benefited from luxury not of their making but as a result of their parents choices (crimes) and (abuse of their) positions of power.

So the matter at hand with the asides finally set, err, aside, is that we want to discuss abortion in not in a “cold-blooded mechanical” fashion, but instead in the language of “respect, responsibility, sexual discipline, fidelity, or the practice of love.” Now we live in a culture which has been dominated by a particular (Christian-Greco-Roman) culture. What this means is that our narratives describing what comprises healthy community all involve a healthy helping of ethics which include a disavowal of abortion, and for now what that means for those of us in our culture is that abortion is a symptom of a breakdown of community. So, I’ll turn the tables back on the pro-choice crowd, how does abortion fit into your notion of healthy community? And if it doesn’t why is the question of pro-choice/pro-life on the table? For the question at hand isn’t one structuring law right, its recovering community.

Do you think the market will rebound to day, as investors grab deals … or will it continue to plunge? Why is the bailout bill noted as “the GOP killed it” with 95 Dems voting against it?

• Iraq casualty tolls.
• The bailout and Mr Obama, he only thinks its an issue when giving speeches. Does that make it a lie? or just hypocrisy?
• I have to re-read this piece, it was too long in my morning RSS link/rush to figure out where it was going. But it looks interesting.
• Art viewed through the lens of the Gospel.
• Summarizing the credit crisis. Another view. One more. And a suggestion that Wall Street isn’t as centrally important as it once was.
• A winter not-so-wonderland.
• Mr Obama’s tax plan and unintended consequences, predicted.
• What i want for my birthday.
• A pro-choice vegetarian … once upon a time.
• I too am a sexist cyclist, and I think almost all guys who race are as well. Getting “girled” irks.
• Duh. It’s not that one doesn’t believe that’s what the Obama campaign claims and says. It’s that one doesn’t believe it will work (or in fairy dust).

In the book (and eponymous essay) Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays Wendell Barry writes an final impassioned essay pushing the importance of community. Mr Barry notes the inability of public discourse to deal with sex and other issues is due to the failure of community. Writing:

Once it [a society or culture] has shrugged off the interests and claims of the community, the public language of sexuality comes directly under the influence of private lust, ambition, and greed and becomes inadequate to deal with the real issues and problems of sexuality. The public dialogue degenerates into a stupefying and useless contest between so-called liberation and so-called morality. The real issues and problems, as they are experienced and suffered in people’s lives, cannot be talked about. The public language can deal, however awkwardly and perhaps uselessly, with pornography, sexual harassment, rape, and so on. But it cannot talk about respect, responsibility, sexual discipline, fidelity, or the practice of love. “Sexual education” carried on in this public language, is and can only be, a dispirited description of the working of a sort of anatomical machinery — and this is a sexuality that is neither erotic nor social nor sacramental but rather a cold-blooded, abstract procedure which is finally not even imaginable.

[…]

The public discussion of sexual issues has thus degenerated into a poor attempt to equivocate between private lusts and public emergencies. Nowhere in public life (that is, in the public life that counts: the discussions of political and corporate leaders) is there an attempt to respond to community needs in the language of community interest.

Bertrand de Jouvenel as summarized in Mahoney’s little book Bertrand De Jouvenel: Conservative Liberal & Illusions Of Modernity (Library of Modern Thinkers) also notes that the discourse between liberal and conservative is an intramural struggle between two parties which share a largely common set of (erroneous) assumptions. Modern political discussion is straight-jacketed by the Hobbesian/Lockean assumptions which are largely fraught with error, yet remain dominant. For example, Locke proposes notions of natural rights to protect from the obvious dictatorship of Hobbes social contracts ability to subsume any and all parts of the private into the public realm. Rousseau, critiqued this by noting that the notion of rights does not in any way hinder the government from taking. Observe the last weeks dialogs on the banking crises. Nowhere in the discussions do we find asked if it is the “right” of government to decide whether the proposed takings (the $700 billion) was right. So often there is talk about the barriers between politics and religion. Barriers between the partisan political and the financial seem, if anything, more important. But no fundamentals needed discussion here. The assumption is, that whatever is needed, can be extracted by fiat by those in the beltway.

I have on a number of occasions argued for pushing our political members to assign powers and responsibilities to the local level. There are many good reasons for this. Above, Mr Berry notes eloquently yet another of them. Community in this country is dying. In part this is due to the very low price of energy in our petroleum driven economy. High mobility and ease of travel makes anonymity and disconnect from our neighbor easy and in part natural. This may be a temporary adjustment as it may be likely that in a half-century the petroleum engine driving the modern 20th and 21st century economy may in fact wind down. Mr Berry points as well to other structural elements in our society that keep our alienation from community intact. Mr Jouvenel also isolates and notes the peculiar yearnings that citizen of Babylon (as he terms our multifarious multicultural society) possess. For the citizen of Babylon is a repellent and attractive nature to the smaller more unified societies of old. The unity that a small society could have is at the same time exciting in that it is a thing one can strongly believe in, can join, and participate fully … but at the same time that giving up of self to one particular thing is repellent.

My suggestion to this is strengthening of the small community by giving it responsibility and authority. Babylon might perhaps co-exist with a multiplicity of small cohesive micro-societies joining together in a larger whole.

• Two cheers for the prosperity gospel … or not?
• Both Obama and McCain to skip the bailout vote, having both (mainly) skipped any part in the actual building of the bill.
• One plug for Starbucks, the IBM/Microsoft of coffee (you can buy better, but you can’t pay more).
• Mr Obama as more out of date than Mr McCain.
• A Law blog looks at the “final solution bill.”
• Who are those people who might “change their mind” as a result of the debate?
• If Mr Obama things this sort of legal tactics are good, what will he do if he’s in charge of the Justice dept?

Congrats to Bert Grabsch of Germany on his great ride yesterday, 43.7 ks at over 50kph.

• Heh. National Punctuation Day?
• A modest proposal … on banks.
• I don’t get how anyone could do that, no investments at all? But I guess when you line up friends like this, that’s another sort of investment.
• An interesting take on the abortion debate, the zygote … what is it?
• I really didn’t know stuff like this happens in the modern world.
• What happened in the beltway … stays in the beltway?
• Aid and numbers.
• One man’s take on the McCain/Obama choice.

A discussion I had at my blog a long time ago resurfaced. Long time commenter The Jewish Atheist today “reposted” this. The gist of the discussion boils down to on the one side:

• Millions of people have had “revelatory” experiences.
• While certainly some of them are due to insanity or fraud … clearly by the numbers not all are.

The counter argument, provided in the link above argues:

• Yes, but that doesn’t mean they are “real” experiences of what you perceive them to be.
• In fact, look here, some researcher has produced an apparatus which by putting on this large helmet and applying large (fluctuating?) magnetic fields to the cortex one can simulate similar experiences.

There’s a problem with that counter argument. And the problem is that it is irrelevant.

Consider CGI in the cinema. Now good CGI which looks “real” takes a lot of stuff. You need, in the theatre, a good sound system and good quality projection, and a good audience. On the production side, you need a staff of talented programmers, artists, and a big bank of dedicated graphics “super-computers.” With that, you can give the impression of “seeing something real.”

To “mimic” the revelatory experience you need an experienced technician and some specialized equipment. Just any strong magnet won’t do. I performed experiments and TA’d in labs doing NMR (MRI without the “imaging”) in school. Those experiments produce very strong (not so quickly fluctuating) magnetic fields. People coming out of MRI machines aren’t claiming “I heard the Virgin speak” in great numbers. No. The magnetic field application has to be specifically engineered to simulate this effect.

Humans are physical. If we have revelatory experiences, they impact our physical being. If you cannot mimic that experience with some sort of apparatus or cortical stimulation of some sort then one has to wonder if in fact those people are actually lying. That this experience is something of which the human organism is incapable … and if incapable, how is it happening?

The problem is that “intense specific pattern of electro-magnetic stimulation” to the brain … OK say that can simulate a revelatory experience. Nobody is suggesting that stray radiation is floating around causing it spontaneously. If you see a series of images flash before your eyes in the absence of the cinema you suspect it might be real. If you have a revelatory experience in the absence of a laboratory … you also might suspect it is real. And in both cases, that might be a better guess than not.

Update: Edited, some grammar corrected and language clarified.

• Have a good idea? It might be worth $10 million dollars. What that will be worth of course …
• Nothing of interest here, move along.
• It is my understanding that you cannot give up the right to sue … even if you wanted to do so … alas. I personally would often like to have the choice to give up the right to sue my doctor(s) for malpractice in return for cutting the 50% of their fees which has to go to pay their insurance against the same.
• And people complain about Mr McCain’s choice of Mrs Palin, how about that knucklehead?
• Weinberg re-enters the science/religion “debate.”
• Liturgy summarized for comparison.
• Congressional Democrats against it in rhetoric … not so much in action.