Yep. Denying the possibility of directly comprehending the physical world with one’s own powers of reason and observation inevitably leads to a paralysis in the ability to formulate theories of the operation of the natural world.
Clayton -
Hey Merlin,
(I dug your tv show, btw!)
Are these questions addressed to me? Whatever. I’ll answer 'em anyway.
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Yes. Mosaic law doesn’t seem to put them in the same category, it does put them in the same category. They are both lawless acts.
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hmm, Gen. 17:6. “I will give you many descendants, and some of them will be kings. You will have so many descendants that they will become nations.” True enuf. But your question would seem to suggest that the existence of States is evil, and that God is therefore evil for suggesting it!
But, aside from that, I think a better question would be, does God advocate the existence of States? The answer is yes. An even better question, however, would be, does the State have a right to make statute law, fiat law, or is the State bound by something over it to simply administer those laws given it from above?
This, in fact, is the answer to someone else’s point - might as well kill 2 birds with 1 stone - that the State, under Christianity, has an all-encompassing focus, and that Christianity requires a big State. This is incorrect. The State, under Christianity, has such a limited role it bares no resemblance to what we see in the world now. It’s role is only 1 thing: the administration of the sword, ie: justice. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less. It has, in other words, a limited jurisdiction. I’ve pointed this out before, and so have others like Gary North & Rushdoony. Others like Hans Sennholz held it also. (I’d like to do some further study into whether Henry Hazlitt held to this too - I could be wasting my time - there may not be any info out there to suggest one way or the other, I dunno. It probably isn’t important anyway, but people like to have some names they can throw around to back up their own assertions, and Henry Haxzlitt’s not a bad name to toss up, so I’ll see. His quote from Francis Bacon in his ‘Economics in One Lesson’ was irrelevant to the argument, but he stuck it in there anyway, almost like a personal testimony.) Heck, even guys like Murray Rothbard and, perhaps, HL Mencken, certainly no friends of orthodoxy, knew that was the case even tho’ they disagreed with the governing assumptions of those who did!
In other words, let’s kill this idea off now. The State’s role is the administration of justice, nothing else, according to Biblical Law. No-one cares whether you disagree with Christianity now, but everyone should just drop off the idea that Christianity means a big State, statism, marxism, whatever-ism.
Hans Hoppe defines the State, in the tradition of Max Weber, as follows: “[the State] must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agents power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.” State = coercion. Coercion = sin. The State is sin. If you have something else in mind, it is not a State but some sort of voluntary association that provides services that are presently monopolized by the State.
Clayton -
Hey Clayton,
I don’t have time to go thru’ all this, but just a few quick pointers:
You mention disagreeing with biologists…umm, which ones? Not that it was relevant to the argument that Marx & Engels recieved ‘scientific’ justification for their nonsense from Darwin’s nonsense, but there are numberless biologists out there who disagree with the evolutionary hypothesis.
A decentralized process??? Huh? I thought the current theory, unless it’s changed in the last 5 minutes, was that all was one until the Big Bang, which would, in fact, and I just realized this now! thanx for that, Clayton!, give justification to Marx & Engels as opposed to Mises & Hayek! But you did do a good smother: ‘Marx was a quack’ (value-judgement) ‘and Engels wasn’t even a scholar’ (which obviously precludes him from having anything worthwhile tosay, I take it?) So you don’t care what Marx & Engels thought. But hang on, that was the argument in toto! If you don’t care about it, what are you commenting on it for? What’s doing there?
Your assertion that Christianity puts the State forward as the ultimate arbiter of all things or something has been answered elsewhere on this list, so I’ll let that pass.
You think Cornelius Van Til confused knowing and persuading. I think you mean DR Cornelius Van Til. This man was, after all, a scholar, and therefore worthy of respect, remember? Umm, I have to bring you to task here when you say that all you have to go on are your sense perceptions. Umm, this just doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny. I think you’re smarter than that, or at least , in Christian charity, I presume so. Empiricism died a quick death when it was brought to its logical conclusion that we don’t experience causation - we draw the conclusion in our own minds that A caused B. If a tree falls in the forest, but there’s no-one there to experience it, has it really happened? How do we know that our senses are reliable? Is the mind really just a blank slate, with all these ‘experiences’ hitting it, sort of hodge-podge-like, or does the mind take part in the knowing process itself? At what point do ‘sense perceptions’ become ‘knowledge’, and how do you know in the first place? These are the kinds of silly questions that philosophers go on with, but they are pertinent to the point you raised. In fact, they aren’t really useless questions at all when you realize that western philosophy gave up trying to answer the big questions of epistemology & metaphysics ages ago becoz they couldn’t - they had no answers. These days, philosophers are tied up in ideas like ‘What is language?’ Really interesting stuff (not!)
Does this mean that we discount reason? Does it sound like I do? I can, after all, write an intelligble sentence, using corect speling and grama, so it would appear that, either my use of reason presupposes the falsity of my Christian commitment, or that it shows the truth thereof. I think we both know where we both stand here. If you’ve read Van Til, you’d be aware of his analogy of the buzz-saw. That’s how I see non-Christian sense perceptions, memory, and (most importantly) reasoning capacity. If you disagree with that, and, assuming you know the analogy of the buzz-saw, I assume you do, then we’ll have something further to talk about.
But, in closing, remember what started all this: the assertion that religion & Capitalism are opposites or some such nonsense. While it would be easy to agree on the grounds of what some people, as opposed to other people, have done with religion in the past, a quick read of Gary North’s ‘Moses & Pharaoh’ would suggest that they go pretty well together. So the questions boil down to: From which philosophy/religion does Capitalism naturally flow? And, Is it possible to be consistently Capitalist if one does not hold to that religion/philosophy?
Hey Merlin,
Long time no see!
Ii have no real argument with your required ‘voluntary association’. I would simply define THAT as being the State. After all, people can, voluntarily choose to go out from the jurisdiction of one State to another. I can leave Oz to go to Camelot if I choose, and therefore my ‘association’ with Oz is ‘voluntary’, but while I am in Oz, I am subject to the laws of that land, for better or worse.
But why would you define Coercion as sin?? That presupposes (there’s that Van Tilian word again!) that there is some kind of universal standard of sin, and of coercion, which, as an anarchist, you cannot have. So your assertion that Coercion = sin is meaningless.
Anyway, I’ve had enuf of this for one day…it’s 2pm Saturday here now, and I’ve done nothing around the house yet! I have to say that the manner in which the discussion here has been conducted has been, for the most part, congenial, in keeping with Mises’ doctrine of ethics - “be really excellent to each other.” Where it hasn’t, I accept full responsibilty.
I don’t understand how the big bang supports Marx and Engels at the expense of Hayek and Mises?
The statement that “the mind is an emergent property of the brain” occurs in the fields of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience, primarily. Of these discussions and debates only those in the field of Neuroscience deal with the material object of the brain. I’ve hunted about a bit online and found many opinions and hopes for proof in this field, and many statements that proof is coming soon. As of today, however, proof has not been announced.
Therefore proving a fact not proven takes us back to earlier arguments in this thread: it would be similiar to proving there is no God.
Can you prove that the mind does emerge from the brain? Otherwise, you have made a statement of faith.
This is the General category and in my understanding is not required to be on economics. I’ve enjoyed the arguments on Stateism and Theists. The great majority of our founding fathers were Diests. The majority were also masons, also Diests. And they did believe that a State was necessary, except possibly Jefferson. This may be further indication that Diests support Statehood.
Christianity has no such formal political doctrine, while its dogma, and doctrines can be used in order to support various systems of government, it does not provide such an over-arching plan with regards to the state.
Biblical Law was the law of Israel, but Israel’s divine function has been accomplished, and now it is no more in the strictest sense. Thus the “Law” as understood in this sentence is no longer of used, and is, for the lack of a better term, obsolete.
This is what happens when people have an unstated agenda…oh, btw, and I know it’s difficult with these lists/forums as I’ve done it myself here, the points you’re objecting to weren’t made by Clayton B, but by me.
There’s no justification provided for this assertion. It’s just a ‘gimme’ apparently. The reason for this, tho’, can be seen from the following statement…
Once again, the unstated presupposition of this statement is that the Old Testament, specifically the Law as given to Moses, has no validity. Our dispensationalist has a problem here, however: how does he justify his statement? The Bible itself no-where draws the line in the sand in the same way our questioner does. Further, it opens the door to any wacko socio-political philosophy to claim justificaton from the Bible - usually a good tool to use when trying to hoodwink people that don’t know any better in order to gain power & control. Denying the Law allows us to set up our own law in its place, something Christianity denies to us. I think Gen 3:5 sums that up nicely.
If our dispensationalist can provide some justification for his/her assertions, then good - just bring it. The only trouble is, it faces the same problem that the Anarchists face: the assertion that freedom is good, with no universal justification for it, aside from Mises’ “be really excellent to each other”, the only difference is it replaces Mises with Jesus, and gets treated with the same disdain that Anarchist ethics is by the general populace.
Like Gary North says, “You can’t beat something with nothing.”
I just found this! It was posted yesterday, by someone calling themselves ‘Capital Pumper’. I’m sure name that makes sense to him/her, but, yeah whatever…
Apparently I pulled BS. I’ve never tried that before, but ‘Capital Pumper’ seems to know about it. Sounds kinda painful, but, yeah whatever…
I weasled in the atheism = faith myth. No arguments there, but I didn’t weasel it in - it’s out there, in the open, Dude! It takes a great deal of faith to be an atheist from my perspective. You only have to look at what Doug Wilson did to Chris Hitchens to figure that! So go figure, huh? (oh, btw, you can find that stuff on YT, or if you’re really a glutton for punishment, you can buy the thing on dvd from American Vision and other places. I don’t know if the atheists are happy about that as I have never seen or heard of it being sold by them. Seems only Christians are confident enuf to put it out there.)
I implicitly lied about Darwin being an atheist. I never asserted this, either openly or otherwise. What Darwin was, aside from a BS artist, is entirely irrelevant! I don’t care! It doesn’t matter. Cop the tip: it’s not what Darwin was that is the issue here, but what Marx & Engels did with Darwin’s BS that matters.
I equivocated evolution with atheism. No drama’s there. I did. So what? I didn’t know it was possible to be one without being the other as well, whether that’s modern or ancient evolution or atheism. Whether that’s right or wrong I dunno. Bottom line is, our ‘Capital Pumper’ did a hit-&-run attack, without stopping to offer his/her poor victim assistance to know the relationship between them correctly, or even if there is any. So his/her point can be disregarded as lacking evidence.
Finally, I also invoked the atheism ----> communism non-sequitur. Did I? I would have thought that the reverse was true, which is what I have been saying all along! Strangely enuf, our ‘Capital Pumper’ failed to stop for long enuf, once again, to explain how I engaged in non-sequitur-ism. Now I could be wrong about atheism & communism, and the implicit links between them, but ‘Capital Pumper’ obviously doesnt care enuf about his 'Capital’ism to try and educate me! He would rather be an atheist than a Capitalist, I take it therefore.
Which leads me on to his/her final point:
His/her final closing remark is more illustrative of his/her own assumptions than they are any refutation of anything I’ve said. To label something a straw man argument, you must first demonstrate that it is, something ‘Capital Pumper’ couldn’t be bothered to do. He/she is therefore, in Aussie parlance, ‘just tossing it up’, and as such, what he/she says can be safely disregarded as irrelevant. His/her final statement that ‘it’s just one of the reasons I stopped watching debates on religion’ begs the question finally…what are you doing here, then???
Oh, hang on, it appears that our protagonist had a brain explosion a bit later on while responding to somebody else, and left in a mad huff, so, aside from the entertainment value he/she has provided me with here, in the context of the overall debate, his/her points raised above are irrelevant as well. Go figure, huh?
The problem with your statement is that people don’t fly planes into skyscrapers, execute apostates or caution against the use of condoms based on shuffle-board-related mumbo-jumbo. They do so, however, based on religion.
While that technically doesn’t make religion more or less true (though it definitely makes it less believable to me), it definitely makes it especially warranting ridicule, contempt and opposition, as compared to most other mumbo-jumbo people might engage in.
Why did you misattribute these quotes to me??!?
Clayton -
They also do so on the basis of political indoctrination. [8-)] Humans can be emotionally manipulated, that’s all that it means.
Well, you’re welcome to denigrate the practice of some or all (what you call) religions to any degree you like, I think it is a mistake to fail to understand the positive role which religion evolved to fulfill within human society.
Clayton -
I won’t deny that, nor will I deny that religion has positive effects on some people, and that it plays an important role in society. You are also free to disagree with the wisdom of opposing religion, but your earlier comment on singling out religion being supposedly a “Freudian slip” by antitheists stems either from a grave misunderstanding or was an offensive trivialization.
Oh, man! I can’t believe you guys are sitting this one out! My rhetorical bloodlust is screaming! I can see it now:
“Well, actually you’re both full of crap…”
And you really can’t even be certain of that. Makes the whole lot of folks speaking in absolutes seem like total toolbags. I’d like for them to keep it up though, it makes it easier for me to know who to avoid.
The ones with no dogma, and no centralized, hierarchical structure, and who don’t try to convert, and who don’t have a concept of “pious vs infidels”…
Of course, without that stuff, religion is just spirituality, or a philosophy.
Hmm, maybe Buddhism or Taoism? They sort of blur the line there.
How about “Empirical Transcendentalist”?
I would also like to include meditation and psychedelics.
Don’t believe in germs, or the roundness of the Earth, either, huh?
Well put. Nurse, 1000 uG Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, stat!