The Remnant

This is long and deep. 

Then read Bill Whittle—before PajamasMedia fame—(up to the "virtual city" suggestion in Part 2, which is interesting but not instructive.) 

You'll note the title is, You are Not Alone. (Those were also Glenn Beck's exact words to a caller whose sense of isolation and despair made him want to give up. It was the genesis of "We Surround Them" and the 9.12 Project)

You'll notice that Glenn Beck's theory is different than Albert Nock's. Beck believes there are more of US than THEM. Nock's an elitist in the sense that he believes there are many fewer men of quality and character than...the other kind, which he calls "the masses".

I'm not sure yet who is more accurate. Maybe the Tea Party and the 9.12 Project have brought the Remnant out of their isolation...but also lesser beings who will enjoy the carnival while it is shiny and new...but will return to sleep once the novelty wears off.

But, maybe not. Maybe the "average American" is more likely to be part of the Remnant than citizens of other nations.

Will the Remnant keep our republic's ideas alive, and rebuild a just and free civilization when we're managed to destroy ours?

Are WE part of the Remnant? 

Is Glenn Beck a prophet? (From obscurity—a voice crying in the wilderness—and opprobrium to momentary popularity?)

The Gunslinger

Questioning

What Rand Missed

I'm reading a sort of encyclopedia of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. Subjects are in alphabetical order, and quotes from her writings are inserted regarding each.

The one overriding theme that I disagree with Rand about is her rejection of God, the belief in whom she calls "mysticism".

I understand her mistake, but I find it ridiculous that a woman of her intellectual gifts made it.

When I was 18 year's old, I made the same one. Eventually I figured out my error. It appears Rand never did, and I think that so many other people make her mistake.

She rejects Religion, and mistakes it for God.

As a child of Catholic school, my image of God was limited to the Catholic/Christian one. When I rejected that particular vision, I called myself an "athiest". Silly, I know, but it seemed to make sense at the time, when I had no alternative view or definition or description of God to turn too. The only one I knew was the God as presented by the Catholics. And when He turned out to be a logical impossibility, I was left without any God at all. No God = Atheist. That's teenage logic.

But I got caught in that mistake for years.

What I didn't think through at the time, and Rand appears to have never done, is that the particular view of God that you learn in Sunday School is not the Being himself.

We both rejected an opinion about God....not God himself...and confused the two.

I'm always amused at secularists who claim that the Theory of Evolution proves that God does not exist. I'm equally amused at the gullibility of secularists, who believe God (whatever that means to you) is so limited in power that he could not have set evolution in motion to create homo sapien exactly as they claim it did.

Every act in their lives gives them the perfect example of how it's done. When humans make babies, they don't say magic words...and a baby appears. They couple...and in the fullness of time, a homo-sapien develops. Duh.

When a secularist wants a lawn, he plants seeds, and in the fullness of time, grass grows. How, exactly is that different from the idea that God could make the world...exactly as we have discovered it operates.

In all the years I was a practicing Catholic, I never met anyone who believed in the "literalness" of the Bible. And it is only this literal interpretation against which the newborn athiest rails. Every Christian I know is perfectly happy to accept evolution and the existence of God without the slightest hesitation. Indeed evolution makes the Intelligent Designer even more creative, marvelous and admirable than the simplistic fable of Adam and Eve.

Rand appears to have been unable to see the possibility of a God of Reason whom she could have adored as her "Perfected Man".

As I've said here before, it's Reason that makes us "(made in) the image of God". And Reason was Rand's total focus. It's a shame she couldn't make the leap. I suppose it was her obsessive attention to Man that prevented her from lifting her eyes sufficiently to see the eternal possibilities.

As for her condemnation of "mysticism", she is right when she is talking about "blind faith", of adhering to dogma without thought, of the requirement of believing the logically impossible, in the belief that what is natural and healthy and good and joyful, and necessary for the fulfillment of Man's nature is, by definition, evil, and that altruism to the point of self-sacrifice and existential self-denial are virtues most admired, and most highly valued by God.

She was right to reject them all. But wrong to imagine that in rightly banishing them, she annihilated God. If she had looked a little longer and deeper, she would have seen that what she did was shatter the distorting, funhouse mirror that generations of small, fearful, angry men had contructed before the image of God...and reflected only their dysmorphic souls.

Smashing that false image revealed a God she could have loved and trusted...but she turned away too soon...before the broken glass fell away, before she beheld the God of Reason.

And like so many atheists, thereafter she never questioned or examined her own "blind faith".

As much as it would horrify her, it would seem that Rand's philosophy is perfectly compatible with a faith in God. You just have to pick the right one!

The Gunslinger

The Devil and The Jedi

Having professed myself not a believing Christian, I thought a few words might be in order to clarify the previous post regarding the Mark of the Beast in The Apocalypse, It is often said by non-believers, especially those that disdain Christianity, that The Devil is a Christian "invention".

Those who make this claim are correct only in the strictest sense. The specific image, a red devil with horns, a barbed tail, goatee and cloven hooves, who resides in a firey, eternal Hell, and whose job it is to tempt souls to everlasting damnation is unique to Christianity. But there is no dearth of images of Ultimate Evil in the annals of human religious thought. The Egyptian god Osiris was murdered and Isis was hounded by the evil god Set. The Norse god Loki caused the murder of the beloved Balder. The Frost Giants representing the great evil, Chaos, were the perpetual enemies of Thor. In pre-Islamic Iran, the good god Ahura Mazda, was opposed by Aingra Mainyu the chief deity of evil.

Star Wars has the Dark Side of the Force. Lord of the Rings has Sauron. Pirates of the Caribbean has the cruel, immortal Davey Jones. Harry Potter has Lord Voldemort. Buffy and Angel and Supernatural have vampires and demons, and hell-mouths and hell-gates!

(...and the Left has George W. Bush...)

The idea of ultimate, unredeemable evil is not unique to Christianity, and though it is from the Bible that the idea of a Mark of the Beast comes to us, we need not interpret it as limited to the Christian Devil.

Evil's minions come in all shapes and sizes. It is not the form, but the function that matters. I think one can accept the concept of an evil Mark of the Beast, without professing faith in Christian dogma.

Just because it's in the Bible doesn't make it literally true. At the same time, just because it's in the Bible doesn't make it automatically false.

Non, and anti Christians would do well to remember that.

The Gunslinger

Moral Relativism vs Moral Context

I really like Dennis Prager. Usually. He is, as he is fond of calling himself, an articulate advocate for Conservatism and Believers.

I like Dennis Prager. But sometimes he can be so smugly self-congratulatory and self-righteous, I just want to dive through the radio and throttle him.

And he was just that the other day. And since I found myself shouting at the radio...I figured it might be good material for a post. As Dennis himself, likes to say: First the facts, then my opinion.

Prager had a show the other day about "Crossing Over", meaning, essentially Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos", which, if you live on another planet, encourages Republicans to re-register as Democrats in order to vote for Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries, in order to prolong this bloody Clinton/Obama fight for the nomination.

Prager is against it.

First, he's misunderstood the reason for the tactic, assuming the purpose of the cross-over was to nominate Hillary as the easiest for McCain to beat, which he claimed was silly because it was impossible to know who, in several months would turn out to be the easiest for Republicans to beat. Indeed, he feels that Obie's been hurt by the exposure of what little substance of his true self we saw: Wright, Ayers, etc...that he has become ultimately un-electable in the general election. (Note Prager forecasts that which he claims others cannot.)

Second, he fails to note that it was the very prolonged nature of the process that allowed such revelations to find their way to the public consciousness. If Obie had swept to the nomination purely on his "hope" and "change" kool-aid mantra, he might still be Messiah material.

(Given McCain's terror at saying a word against Obie for fear of appearing racist...or worse, Conservative, it seems unlikely he'll be doing much "exposing")

But that, in any case, is only a side issue for Prager. His main thrust is that it is immoral to cross over parties. And he explains that when there are sticky issues in which it is sometimes difficult to determine the goodness or badness of a behavior, he applies what I call the "Golden Rule Standard":

If somebody did it to me would I like it?

And his answer in the case of cross-over voting is a clear and emphatic, "NO!". His conclusion is that to cross-over is to cheat, to make ends justify means, which allows one to do anything in order to win. This, he says, is exactly what's wrong with Liberals, and why they are so immoral, even though they might sincerely consider their foul "ends" to be good ones.

Prager states that to act in this way is to lower ourselves to the level of Liberals, to abandon the higher moral ground. To cheat is wrong, even for a good result. He believes that Republicans are no better than Democrats if they act this way.

Now, most of the time I admire Prager's pristine logic, his fairness, his honesty, and his insight. But in this instance, he is being simplistic, illogical, and so caught up in a false comparison of details that he actually misses the point.

He claims simply that since crossing over is wrong, then crossing over in order to prolong the primary campaign is wrong.

The fact that it is to increase the chances that Obie's faults are exposed, so that Democrats stop blindly considering him a Messiah, and mindlessly sweep to victory this near-Communist with all sorts of unsavory associations—which might very well doom the country, and that in anybody else, would assure him a quick and ignominious defeat...does not matter.

But, much as I prefer moral issues being being black and white, and despise Liberal moral relativism, there is such a thing as context!

Killing is wrong, too. And by Prager's logic, that being so, there is no context in which killing is justified. Obviously that is absurd.

Shortly after I heard him make his argument I saw a TV show in which the Hero, in order to get to the scene of an impending murder in time to save the victim, needed to steal a car. According to Dennis' tender moral sensibilities, he should not do so, because "stealing a car is immoral". (Golden Rule Standard: if he stole my car, I would not like it!) Is the rigid, fragile condition of the "moral" Hero's sensibilities more important than the life of an innocent victim?

Reminds me of the pacifist allowing his family to be murdered before his eyes because he doesn't believe in "killing" the bad guy.

Not much of a Hero, really.

Now, I am not suggesting that cross-over voting is justified in the same sense as the above, but that was not Dennis' point. He was claiming that since crossing parties in order to mess with the other party is immoral in an of itself, therefore, regardless of ends or reasons, it must not be done by a moral person.

And thereby, he argues that since stealing a car is immoral in and of itself, regardless of ends or reasons it must not be done by a moral person.

And that since killing is immoral in and of itself, regardless of ends or reasons it must not be done by a moral person.

And it is that simplistic, shallow, and, frankly self-righteous argument, that self-centered jealousy of the purity of one's own soul at the cost of great harm to others that I find so morally and logically repugnant.

And another thing. Prager actually uses moral relativism in his argument against cross-over, by suggesting that there is a moral equivalence between, not the ends Liberals and Conservatives desire, but their belief in the goodness of their ends. Since both parties believe their ends are good, cheating to further either end is equally morally wrong.

But wait. Is the old saw, "The Ends Don't Justify the Means", always true? I think life & morality is more complicated than simple truisms. Indeed, sometimes the ends are all that matter. And I think it is a human's moral responsibility to discriminate among them.

Prager claims there is no difference between Liberals cheating for their BAD ends - ends they believe to be good, and Conservatives cheating for their GOOD ends - ends they believe to be good.

But as usual with moral equivalence, it is a false comparison. Believing in unicorns is not equivalent to believing 2+2=4. One is absurd, one is true.

It matters what one believes—whether true or false, good or bad. And one's belief can be fairly judged against objective standards of truth and goodness. And in my opinion, certain means may be justifiable for objectively good ends that would be condemnable for objectively bad ones.

Cheating to elect Hitler is immoral. Cheating to keep him from getting elected isn't. Because one person really believes that Hitler is a good guy does not make his opinion as valid as that of the person who really believes Hitler is a monster, because Hitler IS A MONSTER!

I understand the moral quicksand potential here. But no one ever said being human or moral was easy, or simple, or always clear. That is part of the human struggle, the human dilemma.

I would be willing to do a lot of things to stop the rise of the Fourth Reich in America that I might not, under other circumstances, consider moral. And I just don't think my soul would be in peril if I did.

End Rant.

The Gunslinger