Y Safle

You would think that if the world was going to end then people would want to spread the world. Moreso if in so doing they might actually avert the impending catastrophe.

Not so, it seems, American “liberals”.

Okay – that is unfair. I am probably (hopefully) only talking about a small fraction of American “liberals”. No doubt my stereotype is wrong. But here is what I’m talking about.

There is a blog posting titled You just don’t want to die of starvation because you’re jealous I have a Hummer and you don’t, where the writer wishes to rail against the thesis of one Jonah Goldberg that people would question global warming science if it turned out that global warming was entirely natural (a strange counterfactual in any case).

The writer puts words into the mouths of conservatives thus:

[they want to continue] the conservative theme that people who like nature are so abhorrent that it’s worth it to fry the planet just to [tee] us off

And then goes on with an ad hominem line that suggests we can ignore the ramblings of conservatives because they are the same people that gave us the pro life movement.

You can check out the feedback on the site above. I pointed out that it is illegitimate to conflate these issues, whatever one thinks of them. I was immediately attacked on my views on what it means to understand humanity of a foetus, and at the same time for bringing abortion into a thread ostensibly about global warming! Worse, as I tried to give reasoned arguments, I was attacked by a string of ad hominem arguments of the form “you are too stupid to understand”, “All your country men are mad” and such like.

Now call me stupid (clearly many have taken me up on that already), but my point was that when an issue is as important as global warming – where the whole world is being affected, and where society consensus is required to effect a lasting and workable change, it seems to make no sense to me to snap and bite at someone who agrees with you, simply because they disagree on some other issue.

What seems to be happening is that American “liberals” are adopting a package of beliefs that define their community. If one is a “liberal” in America, one must be pro-choice, believe global warming is a problem, and who knows what else.

You may not pick one belief and be admitted. It is all or nothing. Accept the package or be mauled by the self professed sentry dogs to the ivory tower of “liberalism”.

But this is just nuts. If we really care about global warming, and we really care about our environment then it makes absolutely no difference what our other beliefs are. We can work together to effect a change. Indeed, one way that more advanced countries in this field are making progress is to use the market to control emissions. Right wingers have something to add to the resolution of this issue, and whatever our political stripe, we must accept that help gladly.

After the lack of engagement in the thread above, and the appalling string of ad hominem arguments, I find myself as just the kind of person who would like to go out and buy a Hummer just to annoy the woolly thinking self styled “liberals”.

Fortunately for the world, I won’t do this. Partly because I feel to strongly on global warming, partly because I probably can’t afford to do so, and partly because I have no idea what a Hummer is!

But what do I make of these “liberals”? Well I think they are downright dangerous. If a pro lifer, (or any other right winger) were wavering on the global warming issue, these people would push them right back into the comforting arms of the Jonah Goldbergs of this world.

Worse, they have misappropriated the term “liberal” here. That is why I have been applying it in quotation marks to them. An essential tenet of liberalism is respect for the freedoms of each other, including freedoms of belief and speech. These people have no respect for such freedoms. They demonstrate just the type of small minded human behaviour that makes global warming such a threat to us. They perpetuate the idea that communities of which one is a member are better than those of which one is not. They believe conservatives are all stupid and mad, and afford the same judgement to anyone who does not accept their designated package of “liberal” beliefs.

This is ghetto thinking.

If we want to save the world we need to step out of the ghettos and start shouting about what really concerns us.

I confess I don’t understand American politics.

It seems that if you try and talk about some political issue or another in America, what it all boils down to is “are you pro choice, or pro life?”. Witness for instance this thread: http://pandagon.net/2006/07/05/you-just-dont-want-to-die-of-starvation-because-youre-jealous-i-have-a-hummer-and-you-dont/, ostensibly about global warming – but really a dig at the so called religious right in America.

It seems that if you are a right winger in America you are not allowed to believe global warming is a problem, and you must be pro life.

Why?

I guess that an ideology that believes in small government, low regulation and the dominance of the mythical free market could have a vested interest in arguing that global warming does not exist. If there is no problem, we do not have to regulate it – and whilst we are at it, we can have a war or two to transfer money from the public sector into our more deserving private business interests!

But why is abortion a polarised political issue?

Some points to note:

1. Abortion is often a religious issue. But historical Christianity believes in ascetism, and is opposed to greed and materialism. Thus we should find many Christians who oppose the consumerist policies of the “free” market with the inherent beliefe that the generation of wealth is the greatest good. Thus these Christians should not be economic right wingers.

2. The dichotomy between pro choice and pro life is a false one. How many people that believe abortion is at least sometimes acceptable (thus pro-choice) would accept that they are anti-life? Many reasonable people find the truth somewhere in the middle of this issue, so polarisation into two opposing camps seems unhelpful

3. As the ethic of the right wing is built on the economic premise that the generation of wealth is the greatest good, I continue to wonder how this argues for a pro life agenda?

Of course, I have stereotyped a few things in this message. I am sure that many right wingers are not “pro life” (or at least, already do lie elsewhere on the spectrum between the two poles). I am fairly convinced that the belief that generation of wealth is the greatest good is so endemic in society (be it American, British or any other) that most people don’t notice it and just accept it whether they think themselves right wing or left wing.

But I wonder whether anyone can actually disect this question and tell me exactly what is right wing about pro-life and left wing about pro-choice? Or is it just historical accident that these issues have become the key questions asked of U.S. politicians (who cannot seem to reverse the laws in any case!)

Last week I wrote about a made up quote from the Koran that was passed to me. It generated some comments (see the original post). I have answered those comments but the issue of what kind of wars God might approve of reminds me of the Just War theory of Saint Augustine.

Someone asked me:

There is a big and growing discussion, mostly in English, about whether nations do or can be caused to apply JW [Just War] concepts to their own actions.

I immediately observed that another question might be whether the “Just War” concept as formulated is in fact correct.

However, my correspondent went on:

A pretty standard observation is that non-combatants get killed in wars of any “stripe”. That is often said as if it were a surprise. The important question, it seems to me, is whether fewer civilians get killed in a JW than would be killed if there were no war.

There is an issue of responsibility here, and we should note that humans are not like beans that can be counted and weighed one against another. If there is a room full of unconcious people who are about to die in a fire, and I throw them from a window so that half of them survive, whereas half of them die from the fall, then I have indeed saved half of them, and my actions – it seems to me – are ethical (assuming there was no better means to save them available to me!)

But now consider this same room, and I decide I will save these people by releasing a flood from some water tanks that will quench the fire. I do so knowing I will drown several other people in another room unaffected by fire. Is it now ethical for me to spend the lives of other people to save these?

If one volunteers for action then one says that their life is available to be laid down for the cause for which the action is prosecuted. But what of those who do not volunteer for this action and do not want it? What right have we to lay *their* lives down for the sake of others?

This is the kind of messy ethical situation one finds oneself in when attempts at a peaceful resolution to a festering problem are abandonded for the economic, logistical and political expediency for war.

I think it is a mistake to try and shoehorn our actions into Augustine’s Just War theory – we may manage to do so, or we may not, but the danger is that in uncritically accepting a theory from another age, whose underlying ethics we have not investigated, we may attempt to abdicate our responisbilities to consider the issues carefully for ourselves. For Christians, that means in the light of a fundamental biblically derived Christian ethic. Such a Christian ethic would need to examine everything from our current lifestyle, our culture and its assumptions as well as the morality of both the Iraqi and western regimes.

Saddam Hussain wears his imorality on his sleeve, and a reading of Amnesty International reports is terrifying, but let us not fall into the trap of imputing some overarching morality on our own nations – many of Saddam’s atrocities were perpetrated with western backing, and using western weaponry. We do not hold the moral high ground.

Well that’s a podcast to avoid.

Steve Gibson of Truth Driven Thinking once again shows that his own thinking is driven by anything but a thirst for truth when he interviews Tom Harpur, the author of a book that asserts that there was no historical figure of Jesus.

He says that he does not interview nuts and the like, and justifies his interview of Tom Harpur by reciting a long list of credentials for the man, to convince us that we should take him seriously. This appeal to authority is logically fallacious, and intended to bring about a positive emotional response. He needs the fallacy too, because Tom Harpur’s thesis is fundamentally flawed.

Mr Harpur summarises his thesis that Jesus is not a historical figure by saying that the only source of information about the historical Jesus comes from Josephus.

What utter tripe.

What on earth do we think the gospels are then?

Now let’s get this straight: You do not have to believe all the claims made for Jesus to believe he was a historical figure. You do not have to take every word of the gospel accounts literally to understand that they are talking about a historical figure.

Harpur dismisses all the gospel accounts as in some kind of known mythological tradition, and that it would be well known in the ancient world that the accounts were mythological. But this is not so, and he does not defend his view against the numerous refutations of the same viewpoint that have been occasionally asserted. It is quite clear to anyone who studies first century literature that when history was written as history it was believed to be historical.

We need go no further than the letters of Paul to verify this (and note, the verified certain and early letters of Paul – particularly 1 Corinthians, which we know comes from about 52 AD):

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

1 Corinthians 15:3-6

What does this passage say? That Paul belives in the historical Christ and the historical ressurrection, and that he tells the Corinthian Christians that there were people still alive who would and did verify the historicity of Christ.

We should cite Luke too:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Luke 1:1-4

This is not a mythological account that Luke writes. This is a history that Luke has carefully investigated. Harpur is talking utter tripe when he suggests that Josephus is the only account of the historical Jesus and this podcast is a joke. Steve Gibson seems to be interviewing only those who make the most outrageous claims, and thus he teaches us nothing. What a pity.

Harpur’s thesis is not new. Indeed it is now at least 200 years old. For an interesting take on this story, see James Kiefer’s article on Whately’s Essay: Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte. Whately responded to a Tom Harpur of his day by using the writers own methodology to argue that there was no Napoleon (despite the fact that people of that time were presumably still alive who had known him).

The interesting thing is not only did people think Whately actually disbelieved the existence of Napoleon (rather than just providing a critique of another author), but they actually believed he had proven his case!

The Pagan Christ is a myth. Jesus Christ is not.

Steve Gibson of the Truth Driven Thinking podcast, website and book offers us a survey on which we can apparently analyse something about our critical thinking skills and what he calls “Emotion Driven Thinking”.

He is careful to claim the survey is unscientific, but having taken the survey, I think it is worse than unscientific – it is hopeless – an excellent example of what not to put in a web poll.

Let’s examine why it is so bad:

1. The first question asks us to rate our critical thinking skills. No problem here, except that some demographics might have been better to start with (age, sex, education etc.) However, what are we going to derive from this datum? The survey sample is self selecting (a problem with all web polls), so we might expect the respondents bothering to take the survey to already be interested in critical thinking.
2. We are next asked to state all beliefs that we have held at some point in our life (so that we can be asked what beliefs we no longer hold). This question fails because we cannot reasonably recount every belief we have at some point held. For instance, as a child I was interested in the story of the Loch Ness monster, but I cannot reasonably say now whether I ever really believed such a monster did or does exist.
3. Question 4 was the one that drove me to write this article though. It reads:
   

   At any point in your life have you believed that you “heard” a discernable message from an extra terrestrial being, directed to you (including hearing a voice, seeing a message, talking face to face, or any other bonafide communication to you)?

   My problem with this question is that “extra terrestrial” is a term used generally to describe non-earth born alien life forms (as in the filem/movie “E.T.”) It appears from this wording that Mr Gibson wants to use the term more freely – in the sense of any “out of this world” experience, including spiritual experiences.

   This is illegitimate because he introduces an emotional element (of the kind he claims we must exclude) in his terminology. It is also illegitimate, because a Christian would point out that a message from God is not a message from an extra terrestrial, because of the doctrine of God’s immanence. Christian doctrine places God in all creation. God is the only one for whom it is true that were he to leave a room, the room would cease to exist.

   Thus Steve Gibson’s question fails to capture what he thinks it captures, and nowhere does he ask whether people who think themselves good critical thinkers have had spiritual experiences that they once or still consider to be real.

4. Question 5 fails to take into account that people outside the U.S. might read his survey (or that there might be more to politics than vague notions of left and right).
5. Later he asks us whether our views would change, and if so in which way they would change. If we know our views will change in a certain direction then the views have in fact already changed.
6. Question 11 again asks for political leanings based on the U.S. system only. I wonder if it is because the U.S. only has two parties that they think that politics is a matter of two sides. Indeed, is there a really a difference between the two American parties?
7. Later we are asked if we believe those outside our faith group can get to heaven or the good afterlife. I’m not sure what Hindus or Buddhists would make of this question, but again Steve Gibson seems to misunderstand Christian theology when he assumes on his podcast that one can answer this question in the affirmative only in defiance of Christian teaching. Was Abraham a Christian? All Christians should answer this question affirmatively.

So here we have a survey that is supposed to tell us about critical thinking, but it actually shows a lack of well rounded thinking on the part of the survey author. This is why he can interview a republican party non scientist hack who suggests that global warming is not a problem and we need do nothing about it, without once really challenging the muddle headed thinking in his presentation.

If we are to learn critical thinking from Mr Gibson, it should be to look at his example and then not do it this way.

Well that is my opinion anyway.