I don’t know if discussions of this sort occur on this blog, as I’m a new contributor. Should I offer more like this? Whaddya think?

Blog neighbor Jewish Atheist in a “interview/meme” offers this:

Q7. What’s your favorite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

Without God, I can’t see how we have free will. It appears that we have free will, therefore God must exist. Curiously, nobody seems to make this argument except me, on Opposite Day.

My refutation is that we actually don’t have free will. This has disturbing implications, which I have not yet come to terms with.

Not to stab the theistic argument in the foot, but there are a few short remarks I’d like to make here, some of which I’ve touched on before, but perhaps restatement will bring out some interesting details and conversation:

• A deterministic universe exhibits simple free will in the following way. Consider a baby (classical relativistic) universe/close system which consists of a experimental  Feigenbaum mapping (google it), tuned past simple period doubling and to the onset of the chaos. In this situation, the mapping acts as a bit shift, x_n+1 = Fraction(2 * x_n). Initial conditions become amplified by a factor of two every iteration. However, soon over time the Planck distance will intervene, that is the bit shift will probe distances unspecifiable in the initial system, for to specify the system to that accuracy would require probing length scales/energies which would form a black hole … and thus cannot be specified. The system will not “fail” but will exhibit free will, that is the system is “free” and unconstrained by initial (unsettable/undefinable) conditions to take whatever value it wishes. In fact, ever after that point, the system is “free”.
• Suggesting that initial conditions of our universe sets the behavior today, besides the difficulty/impossibility of setting those conditions suffers from a dimensional problem. If the Universe is D+1 dimensional (D=3+1 or 10 … doesn’t matter for this argument), then the “boundary” at T=0 is D a D-dimensional phase space. To line up the bank shot so that Beethoven will, while deaf, compose the Ninth Symphony (or whatever other work of art you find transcendent or inspired genius) that requires setting the conditions and a space (the evolving Universe) of dimension D+1. Fine tuning/accuracy is required to “finesse” the evolution on a large, if not infinite, time axis.
• Another issue facing the fine tuning hypothesis, is the current “best understanding” physics gives about the early Universe, to whit inflation. Small quantum (or thermal) fluctuations present at the onset of the inflationary regime (when space-time is “e-folding” or exponentially expanding) are largely flattened out, those fluctuations survive as galaxies and galaxy clusters today, and form the large scale structure of the visible universe. Setting up the Beethoven bank shot has to survive inflation.
• One way additional way to isolate the free will problem, is genius. That is, I contend genius requires free will. Genius exists. Therefore free will does. To counter that, one must explain how genius can exist without free will. JA, repeatedly contends, without proof, that free will cannot exist in a deterministic system, I disagree. However, on my side I contend that genius, especially as demonstrated in “transcendent” art, cannot exist without free will. The “bank shot” for a deterministic system to create it is too far fetched.

For myself, I would contend free will does not require God. Semiotic content in the Universe however does. If our words have meaning, God exists. 🙂

Amy-Jill Levine is an interesting scholar. An Orthodox Jew she is at the same time, a Professor of New Testament studies in the Vanderbilt University Divinity school. I’ve recently read her book, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. She makes to points in direct opposition to points made by blog neighbor David Schraub.  Mr Schraub has contended on a number of occasion that the notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition is a false one. Ms Levin’s entire thesis and work is built on that bridge. Additionally, he has in a number of occasions advocated that for various situations apology for wrongs generations ago should be made by the descendents. In opposition to this notion in the context of anti-Semitism, Ms Levine offers (on more than one occasion in this book):

 Park guilt and entitlement at the door before engaging in interfaith conversation. Some Christians come t the interfaith table so aware of their history of supersessionism, anti-Semitism, and violence against Jews that they avoid claiming that Jesus is the Messiah, for to do so would be telling Jews that Judaism is wrong. [….] Conversely, aware of the tragic histry of supersessionism, anti-Semitism, and violence against Jews, some Jews come the the table with a sense of entitlement: they seek apologies rather than engagement. Neither approach is useful. Christians today are not responsible for the sins of the past; Jews today are not in the position to grant forgiveness for those sins. Neither Judaism nor Christianity has a pristine history, and victimization is not something to be celebrated. [note: emphasis mine]

These highlight the twin problems which Mr Schraub and the “apology” advocates in Jewish or racial matters miss.

1. Those in the present are not responsible for past sins and those descendents of those wronged are not in a position to grant absolution or forgiveness for those sins at any rate.
2. Coming to the table with an expectation of entitlement or a consciousness of guilt is not conducive to engagement or rapprochement.

• The Christian carnival is up in fine form, mighty early (or late).
• Obama and corruption, not a politician unlike any other. That trope is a lie.
• A description of “moderate Islam”, note its lack of correspondence with actual Islamic tenents. More on that here.
• A lede for a podcast:
  

  A few years ago I was being interviewed on an NPR program, and the host asked me, “All this fancy stuff you do in church, the icons and candles and incense, doesn’t it get in the way? Doesn’t it distract you from worshipping God?”I said, “Imagine that it’s your anniversary, and your husband has taken you to a nice restaurant. There’s a white cloth on the table, roses and candles, a glass of wine, and violin music is playing in the background. Does that distract you from feeling romantic?”.

• Gore sets the example … not!
• An interesting spin on the pro-choice equal or not the pro-abortion notion. Compare the “I’m against abortion, but don’t want to enforce it by law and prefer to work through culture.” to “I’m against torture, but just don’t want to enforce it by law and prefer to work through culture.”
• I loved the film, That Sinking Feeling, is that one of those sinks, well adorned with two cherubs?
• Memory Eternal, my favorite dancer has passed away.
• A problem I haven’t had, cow infestation.

More deconstructing of the meme that Bush lied and the Democrats were misled. This time, it’s from James Kirchick. This isn’t someone on the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy mailing list; he’s been actively speaking out against the Right. And now we hear from him:

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

Oh please Read the Whole Thing(tm). Frankly, I’m thrilled that the Washington Post Editorial Page Editor and now an assistant editor of the New Republic are finally arriving at the truth. At the same time, the information that they’re working from — the Senate Intelligence Committee report recently released — doesn’t really break new ground in terms of the facts presented, and in fact comes to the same conclusion that the 2004 report from the same committee came to, Senator Rockefeller’s bleat about being led to war “under false pretenses” not withstanding.

As much as the media has presented and pushed and given air to the charge of lying on the part of the Bush administration, and as serious a charge as it is, one would hope that it would give as much attention to the report and those on the Left who are backing the President.

One can hope. One can always hope. But hold not thy breath.

[tags]James Kirchick,The New Republic,Iraq war,Bush lied,Senate Intelligence Comittee,media bias[/tags]

• On the “unlamented demise” of the daily newspaper, in a blunt appraisal.
• On the effects of being conscious of bias.
• Marriage: A two part-essay on marriage and the East. Part one. Part two. Another essay on Kuznicki on Morse on Marraige.
• It seems Easterlin was wrong, money can buy happiness. Is that because happiness is defined down to “contementment”?
• A Constitutional issue and the recent SCOTUS decsion on Guantanamo.
• BSA.

• The Word in China, a history.
• A map.
• More evidence of the media (and the left) not getting the “faith” thing.
• The museum of that went glub glub.
• A quote from de Beauvoir.
• On Science and mystery.

Dan Trabue, liberal God-blogger at Payne Hollow, notes some Scriptural references on relations between the sexes. His conclusion:

Now, this is not a topic that I’ve studied a lot, but just from what I’ve read, I’m willing to accept that the Bible is a document of its patriarchal, pre-modern times and realize that, yes, back then, women weren’t treated right. But even in that context, we see hints of God’s more egalitarian ways shining through. In Christ, there is no “male” or “female,” we see Jesus talking to and treating women as equals, we see women leadership in OT and NT stories.

So, my answer to the larger question – is God sexist? – an absolute No. But the Bible does tell stories that reflect the mores of the day. As long as we don’t try to take those sexist/misogynistic attitudes as literally applying to how we interact as humans today (ie, women remain silent in church, the man is the “head” or master of women, selling our daughters, etc), and embrace the God-given liberty and equality for all, then I think we’re okay.

Now, I’m not going to jump on his “not a topic I’ve studied a lot, but …”  which should throw up red flags. It is a good question how the verses he quotes support his conclusions. However, it might be interesting to note some history. Read the rest of this entry

I’d use a different adjective, but then, I’m not the target audience.

A stunning 20-something woman hooks up with a seemingly innocent guy at a rowdy singles bar. Hot foreplay starts on the cab ride home and progresses into the bedroom.

That is until, while searching for a condom in the bedside table, she sees a photo signed "Thanks for your support!" from Republican candidate John McCain.

Horrified, she bolts, dropping her bag and spilling a campaign button on the sidewalk: "I only sleep with Democrats." The camera quickly cuts to a cool, bespectacled man with a donkey pin on his lapel. The couple’s eyes lovingly lock.

"Blue Balled" — an edgy, video short distributed on YouTube and other Web sites this week — has a simple message: If you vote Democrat, you are intellectual, hip and savvy. If you vote Republican, you are an untouchable — bumbling, square and uptight.

…and are less likely to have an STD, perhaps? 

The 527 group putting this out is called "Truth Through Action".  They actually sell "I Only Sleep With Democrats" shirts on their web site.  OK, so then, what’s the truth that their action is trying to convey?

[tags]Democrats,politics,Truth Through Action,[/tags]

• Heh. Heh, again.
• On loneliness. For some reason this reminded me of the (unhelpful at the time?) maxim I quote not unfrequently to my daughters, “If your bored, that’s not a statement about the universe, it’s a statement about you.” Which is to say, we live in a universe full of so many things to do, to think about, to see and so on. Boredom is a fault of the subject not their environment.
• The Woz.
• Bike raffle for a good cause. Great bike too.
• The atheist and the bear … a joke.
• Rummy’s bike.

Bertrand de Jouvenel in Sovereignty notes has an effective, if reflexive, definition on political authority. A person has the authority to request those things which those to whom the request is directed feel is in his authority to request. In this manner, an “authoritarian” regime is one, paradoxically, which lacks authority. It must substitute force and terror and other methods because it lacks the authority to do what it commands. A master/slave relationship is unjust only if the slave rejects the authority of the master. In a monastic setting, the authority (freely granted) to the abbot by those in his care would in another setting seem more servile than much of the Slavery seen in the old south. However, because that authority is freely granted it is just. In that regard, one might regard coercion as the sign a government is going off the rails. The more coercion, the more imperfect the union.

The general principle that decides whether a government is exceeding its authority or restricting too much the liberty of its people therefore is measured by the amount of coercion required to enforce its decisions and not by an analysis outside of the culture and context of that particular action.

In St. Silouan the Athonite, St. Silouan teaches that following traditions of freedom, equality, hierarchy, and love as demonstrated by the Trinity (for example read the opening chapters of John Zizioulas Communion and Otherness and On Being and Communion), that the correct way for the authority, such as an abbot or staretz (spiritual advisor) is to give his command once, and if it is not obeyed offer no reprimand or repeat the command.

Parents however, cannot apply that rule in the same way. Children need repetition. As the saying goes, “The problem with children is that they are so darn immature!” In part this as well goes for men in society. Government lies somewhere between the monastery and the family regarding the need for repetition and the assumption of maturity of its members. Society cannot put a stop sign at an intersection and leave it up for just a week and leave it at that. We need reminding of the regulations and rules that society needs to operate smoothly. Additionally as generations pass and peoples come in and out of our society the customs and regulations must need be repeated.

The political process then is a exercise in walking the line, minimizing coercion in a way that maximizes human flourishing by locating and utilizing the authority that is generated naturally in human intercourse. From these simple observations a few general principles might be extracted:

• Authority, as it is generated by human contact and connection, can be strongest if generated locally, that is personally.
• Permission to do a thing is not approval. Government or its representatives can firmly condemn abortion, adultery, and so on. The point is that saying a thing is harmful to flourishing is not the same as coercing one to stop.
• The sign of better governance is not abstract review of its principals but a review of how much coercion is required to keep it in order.

Recently, Jason Kuznicki reconsidered the same-sex marriage question, and his considerations as always are well worth considering. Like abortion, eugenics (Downs abortions for example) and euthanasia these are matters on which Christian tradition frowns. But … how does the Christian traditions and theology noted above as well as Jouvenel’s ideas on authority instruct us to order policy?

Marriage, as noted toward the end of his essay, is an institution which has grown up in community, fostering, encouraging, family to aid in the raising of the next generation (and the care the prior). In that mode, it would be permitted for a state to maintain a statement of the need to support the nuclear stable family. It is not optimal for the state to either enforce denial of same sex marriage to Boysville, New Hampshire or on the other hand to insist that it be part of the community in Evangeliste, Kansas. It is however, likely that those small communities can generate the authority to enforce policies which from an outsiders perspective are far more encompassing, but from within the community are however within the limits of freely granted authority.

Today’s easy access and dissemination of information makes coercion harder if not impossible to hide (especially in the long term). A lot of coercion present in society could be removed by granting to the local community, where authority is strongest, those things which affect the community. That community can then grant to higher structures, city, county or state, the authority to regulate relations with other communities. Likewise states to the federal level. What needs to be watched for is local communities governments resorting to undue coercion to enforce their requests especially on subsets of their community.

However that seems a easier line to walk than finding a non-coercive way of finding a federal or state level statement on marriage that  both Boysville and Evangeliste will swallow.

(Note: I’m thinking out loud here, hoping that commeters will help me solidify my thoughts with more coherence. )

No, not the 80’s song by Nick Lowe. The “kindness” brought to you by a government that just doesn’t seem to understand basic economics. Employment of minimum wage earners keeps going down (the cruel part) because of the hikes in the minimum wage the government keeps mandating (the “kind” part).

The percentage of teens classified as “unemployed” — those who are actively seeking a job but can’t get one — is more than three times higher than the national unemployment rate, according to the most recent Department of Labor statistics.

One of the prime reasons for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that policymakers have forced down the throats of local businesses. Economic research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address poverty.

According to economist David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment for high school dropouts and young black adults and teenagers falls by 8.5 percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States’ minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.

So it should be no surprise to see teen jobs disappearing or to hear bleak testimony from employers across the country that make these hiring decisions.

And it’s not just teens looking for a summer job that this hurts.

There’s no end to the economic data that confirm these common-sense observations. Research from the University of Georgia, the University of Connecticut and Cornell University indicates that increasing the minimum wage causes four times more job loss for employees without a high school diploma than it does for the general population.

Furthermore, minimum wage hikes don’t effectively target the people who are typically portrayed as the key beneficiaries — low-income adults raising kids. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, just 14 percent of those who benefited from the most recent federal minimum wage hike are sole earners in families with children.

The whole “living wage” canard used to buttress the case for increased minimum wage, then, is an incredibly small amount of those who benefit, and arguable more folks are hurt because of it. The question always asked is, “Is it better to have a lower-paying job, or no job at all?” Democrats will consistently ignore or hand-wave away this question, in the interest of “caring”.

Well ask those unemployed folks how much that “caring” helped them.

[tags]minimum wage,economy[/tags]

• Protecting our children from … reality, not always a good idea.
• Matthew, the Mount and a little exegesis worth reading.
• Fly by wire, next generation edition.
• Downs screening.
• The Christian carnival is up. So is the Patristics Carnival.
• Obama bringing out the worst in America.
• A debate to watch on theology and the political race.
• Contra imputation of grace.

Often praised progressive blogger “hilzoy” at Obsidian Wings writes in reaction to McCain:

“MATT LAUER: “If it’s working Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?”

SEN. MCCAIN: “No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea, Americans are in Japan, American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw; we will be able to withdraw. General Petraeus is going to tell us in July when he thinks we are. But the key to it is that we don’t want any more Americans in harm’s way.”

“hilzoy” writes:

Several thoughts: First, my initial reaction to this was fury. There are men and women over in Iraq, in the middle of nowhere, counting the days until they come home. There are families who jump out of their skins every time the doorbell rings. There are spouses trying to keep their marriages together while they’re thousands of miles apart, soldiers wondering whether anyone will really understand what they’ve been through and kids growing up without knowing one of their parents. How could anyone say it doesn’t matter when they come home?

Geesh. Can she read at all? Why do families of the troops stationed in South Korea, Germany, Japan and elsewhere not “jump out of their skins” every time the doorbell rings. Uhm, that would be, as McCain noted, “What’s important is the casualties …” Duh.

Because of the low but continued casualties, staffing levels are high and that is one problem. But … we’ve had troops stationed in Germany and Japan for over 60 years and in South Korea for almost as long. The “fury” reaction to that is noticeably lacking … just as is rational thought on the part of yet another progressive blogger.

Yeah, that’s what I want; permission from the government to pay for the medicine my doctor says I need.  That should never be in question, yet it is in the People’s Republic of England.

Cancer patients deserve to be able to pay privately for drugs without having their free NHS treatment withdrawn, a doctors’ leader said last night.

Baroness Ilora Finlay, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, said Labour’s policy of denying free care to patients who use their own money to buy the latest drugs went to the heart of the purpose of the health service.

Lady Finlay, a doctor who specialises in the palliative care of cancer sufferers, asked:

‘Can we justify spending billions of pounds on the relief of relatively minor conditions and deny patients with life-threatening disease the support of the NHS when they want to bridge the costs themselves?’

Oh no, say the proposal’s detractors.  That would be unfair.

The Government says allowing cancer suffers to pay for some drugs while receiving others free would create a two-tier health service, with patients on the same ward being given different drugs depending on their ability to pay.

But critics say it is ‘cruel and perverse’ to stop people using their own money to better their health.

The NHS has determined what cancer treatments it will and won’t pay for, and even if you could afford it, you’re not allowed to, unless you want to take on the full burden of payment for all your health care, and essentially forfeit the taxes you paid into the system. 

These are the kinds of debates you get into when you let the government run health care.  They pay, so they are in control.  Of everything.  One size does not and has never fit all when you’re talking about wellness.  Do we really want these sorts of debates in Washington?

[tags]socialized health care,England,Baroness Ilora Finlay,Royal Society of Medicine[/tags]

• In praise of giving praise in the morning … and a book noted.
• Links for life. To the suggestion that pro-life voters stay home.
• Reading the Obama tea leaves, sort of akin to the old Kremlinology.
• Analogies run wild. Kinda like the Bulwer-Lytton contest, no?
• Ephraim.
• Graduation.