Semi-Daily Journal

I wonder, though, if people like Krugman or Kinsely give enough credit to Bush's religous feeling. I wonder if Krugman or Kinsely have read any of the Left Behind novels, or have any sense for an evangelist kind of Christianity. Because, I think, if evangelical Christianity is your starting point, many things make sense that otherwise could only be an expression of deep cynicism.

I'd be interested to hear Lawrence Krubner would explain how the illogical or inconsistent arguments that Kinsley identifies are somehow made whole by an appeal to fundamentalism. They are perhaps made palatable for the fundamentalist, but the illogic and inconsistency remains.

for some stuff on the Left Behind books and President Bush, see

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16749

David:

BINGO! Look, would a Christian start a war to win an election? Would he also lie about the patriotism of someone like Max Cleland to win an election? Would he lie to his citizens and his soldiers to justify this war? OK forget the war? What about the tax burden? The budget? The economy? And almost every other important policy issue? Would a Christian lie about everything? I am a Christian and I take my moral obligations quite seriously. When Bush feigns being a Christian, it's simply insulting.

Given that Kinsley has Parkinson's disease, he certainly has reason to be shrill.

Does anyone know if the Bush twins were conceived by in vitro?

Didn't Christ say that "who is not against us is with us (talking about some non-Christian Jewish healers)"? Sometimes, it seems like we did not read the same Gospels. Now, all Christians, I believe, are entitled to their personal reading of the Bible (I am a converted Catholic, I guess...), in the same way as they are entitled with a personal relationship with God and Christ.

Yet, there is a notion in Buddhism (and I'd be very surprised not to find it in Judaism and Islam as well), that I think exists with Paul the evangelist as well, if I remember well, that the one who uses Holy teachings for personal gain or to hurt others is damned, even beyond redemption (this is Paul speaking - and Buddhism, of all). My 2 cents forth of religious morality.

And this is also a warning to the morons who think they can hide their greed and racism & intolerance behind any hypocritical religious belief. We shall uncover you there as well! BTW, isn't that exactly was were supposed to be fighting our ennemies for?

Didn't Christ say that "who is not against us is with us (talking about some non-Christian Jewish healers)"? Sometimes, it seems like we did not read the same Gospels. Now, all Christians, I believe, are entitled to their personal reading of the Bible (I am a converted Catholic, I guess...), in the same way as they are entitled with a personal relationship with God and Christ.

Yet, there is a notion in Buddhism (and I'd be very surprised not to find it in Judaism and Islam as well), that I think exists with Paul the evangelist as well, if I remember well, that the one who uses Holy teachings for personal gain or to hurt others is damned, even beyond redemption (this is Paul speaking - and Buddhism, of all). My 2 cents forth of religious morality.

And this is also a warning to the morons who think they can hide their greed and racism & intolerance behind any hypocritical religious belief. We shall uncover you there as well! BTW, isn't that exactly was were supposed to be fighting our ennemies for?

Jean-Phillipe C. S.--Matthew 7:15-23. "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. [...]"

See http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?passage=Matthew+7%3A15-23&x=21&y=10&NASB_version=yes&language=english
for the whole text.

Second time I've used that cite today, and on the same subject. Ideas bloom like the red tide in the blogosphere.

So, closely watching George Bush leads to higher intelligence?

"Because, I think, if evangelical Christianity is your starting point, many things make sense that otherwise could only be an expression of deep cynicism."

It makes sense for such a person to believe that we are engaged in a crusade against non-believers, that one is just an instrument of God's will, and that Armageddon will soon be upon us. A President who subscribes to this sort of thing is as frightening and dangerous as the most troglodyte mullahs.

Lawrence Krugner asks, "I wonder, though, if people like Krugman or Kinsely give enough credit to Bush's religous feeling."

I give plenty of credit his denial that he's a born-again Christian, which one can find on belief.net. In fact, it seems rather clear he's innocent of religious conversion of any kind, which is why he passes himself off as an evangelical while he does such vicious things.

Bill Hough, president of the Union Seminary, on Bill Moyer's NOW, denounced politicians who claim to be Christians and yet grind down the poor and enrich the wealthy. The only person he named was Tom DeLay. But he might as well have named George Bush.

Just ask yourself, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

Russell Baker in the New York Review of Books points out that President George Bush is a revolutionary as are the Republican Congressional Leaders as are a set of radical-right judges as Scalia and Thomas. We have an Administration that is radically changing the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. From the environment to social insurance to foreign policy American life is being defined anew. This is a methodical radical Administration.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16730

Russell Baker on Paul Krugman

Thanks for the great link. I read it and then E-mailed the author telling him how much I respected his thoughts.

That is something I'm doing more often now, after becoming adicted to blogosphere. I know that opinions like Michaels will meet with overwhelming negative response from the active right. We must support those writers. Me must let them know when they "did good". I guess we must also let their editors know. hmmmmm. Now how does one go about doing that.

I'm learning.

JWC - Nice point about showing appreciation.

Evangelicals are taught that things exist that they cannot sense, things for which there is no factual evidence. They really believe that the world is populated with demons and angels, for example, or that prayer will have results. Believing in things for which there is no factual evidence eventually has to teach you that you can believe things for which there not only is no evidence, but for which the actual evidence points to an opposite reality.

This could explain the President’s willingness to believe all manner of odd things, about taxes, wars, the perfidious French, scientists with their rigid insistence on the problem of global warming and the need for stem cell research, and the apparent view of many Muslims who think that the US is engaged in a war against Islam. And it explains why he feels resentful of those who disagree with him and his good heart solely in reliance on evidence.

Not to minimize Parkinsons, but the "Bush's embryonic stem cell decision endangers my health" doesn't seem like the strongest argument.

At first blush it's striking, but on more reflection it's not that far off from "these damned laws are preventing me from obtaining the blood of virgins which I need to stay young", ala Countess Bathory.

I suppose that would be what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope.

>>I suppose that would be what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope.<<

That's the case if you believe that blastocytes are people with immortal souls, and that killing them means their immortal souls are doomed to limbo for eternity--deprived of the face of God, et cetera.

But I imagine very few people believe this. Half of all fertilized ova do not come to term--failure to implant in the uterine wall or miscarriage. Would you believe in a God that damned half of the souls he created to limbo just for the hell of it?

Brad DeLong

Unlike many other religious leaders, (Mohammad, for instance) Jesus did not write it down. In the whole of the new testament, there are very few quotes that are directly attributable to Jesus hisself. This one is:

Luke 9:50-  And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us.

This is different from what Mr. Bush said, " you are either with us or against us". The Jesus quote suggests that everyone not in the set that is against us can be considered for us. Bush statement implies that eveyone not in the set that is explicity with us is against us. Thus Jesus would be more inclusive in whom he considered allies, while Bush is more exclusive. In fact, Mr. Bush is exclusive to the point of being a unilateralist.

The Krubner comment at the top of the comments makes a good point about Mr. Bush and his religion. Kinsley assumes that Mr. Bush makes his decisions rationally. Decisions made on faith are not necessarily rational. The stem cell decision was made on the basis of faulty facts and personal religious beliefs including belief in a "soul" that is added by a God to a fertilized egg at the time of conception. If one starts from this belief that is not rational, then those who do not also hold this belief will find the whole process irrational.

Decisions not to whole heartedly confront the AIDS epidemic early on because some people believed it was a punishment sent by God is a similarly irrational decision.

But we knew this before the last election. In 2000, we knew that George W Bush was a right wing Christian fundamentalist who had tax cuts as his number one priority and held numerous beliefs that could only be justified on the basis of adherence to a religious creed. That is exactly what we got, a president who puts tax cuts above all else and makes scientific decisions based on religious criteria. One does not have to be a complete moron or a hardened cynic to make illogical decisions based on religious beliefs based on faith and not rational science.

That does not make the final decision any less rational or its ultimate affects any less on those who will suffer the consequences.

i've always wanted to know how many fertized human ova (zygotes, right) I could have in my eye without even noticing. That would be a lot of human beings to wipe out with a Kleenex.

Bush is a rehab Christian. He's grateful for having been saved, but he still has plenty of the creepy frat-boy plantation-owner attitudes that he always had.

Recruiting people who feel guilty is one of religion's big tricks, and indulging their meanness is part of the game. Crusade and Jihad were both often manned by people looking for redemption -- there was a formal system whereby military service absolved sins. The 9/11 suicide bombers were not necessarily the best Muslims.

"Faith is the evidence of things unseen and the substance of things hoped for".

This sentence, originally in Greek, is clearly a deployment of Greek philosophical vocabulary to paradoxical effect. I don't know the Greek original and am not sure of the word that "evidence" translates, though "substance" must clearly be "ousia". At any rate, here's an effort at free-form translation. 'Faith is the showing forth into the light of that which is unseen and the recurrence to having-been (i.e. to its "foundation") of that which in coming into being remains in being, of what is (futurally) hoped for.' Presumably the point of this paradoxical utterance, a mode of expression not uncommon in religious writings, is that faith is precisely not (worldly) knowledge, that its criteria are not those of knowledge, nor vice versa, that the growth of moral/spiritual insight that faith affords is neither based upon, nor substitutable for (entitative) knowledge. I bring this up to point out the absurdity of thoses who insist that the Bible must be read and understood "literally"- and in English, to boot. At any rate, G-d did not pronounce himself anciently upon blastocytes. He saved such matters for future revelations.

Why does it seemt that only the shrill voices are heard? Where was the measured debate on this issue? An administration that uses an autocratic process to make policy is going to attract a lot of "shrill" criticism because they are subverting the democratic channels of reasoned debate.

Hmm, Kinsley asks if he has a legitimate reason to dislike Bush personally. The reason boils down to that Kinsley thinks Bush is a poor logician. That seems a weak argument.

A much better argument (and one of those type M's, Arnold Kling doesn't cotton to) is that there is something else driving the hatred (Kinsley wasn't honest enough to use the word Jonathan Chait defends)of Bush. I'm guessing it's moral vanity.

"You are either with us or against us" - this is the logic of decisionism, a theory of law and politics developed by German scholar Carl Schmitt, which, in Niklas Luhmann´s terms, proved to have high "connection selectivity" for the ideologues and propagandists of the Third Reich. Schmitt himself later also expressed his delight at seeing his thoughts being mirrored in the little red book authored by Chairman Mao - which, in turn, alerted some producers of intellectual drapery for the various local versions of a "Red Army Faction" active in respective European countries to his ideas as a new source of inspiration.

One may believe the U.S. should - and will be able to - completely eradicate evil - i.e., Muslim fundamentalism. Or one may acknowledge that WTC happened - apart from the brutality and ruthlessness of those who committed the atrocious act - because CIA and FBI didn´t (or, due to foolish, hyper-liberal over-regulation, weren´t allowed to) exchange available information on its perpetrators. Only if one accepts the first proposition, however, will it seem logical to proclaim the beginning of what is now coming to be called "WW IV". I just hope that Europe will never follow along on that path - even if the U.S. then decided to give up on NATO. Given the current state of the U.S. media, I have difficulty imagining a President in the White House who revokes the Bush doctrine anytime soon. Even following the Wilson scandal and the scathing TV ads run by the Democrats polls still show 60% of the population believing that Saddam had WMDs.

With regard to Krugman´s position on Mahathir, Westerners would be well advised to look at Mahathir´s track record as leader of an ethnically divided country. Did Malaysia do worse than the U.S. - where one third of Afro-American males has lost its right to vote? I have an inkling that the fabricators of the "Protocols of the scientists of Saddam" would be served best by a resolution to just shut up for a while in order to try to reflect on their true motives. Mahathir certainly ranks high in the bigotry league, but he doesn´t come across as stoking up religious, nationalist or ethnic hatred.

Good to know that we can continue to count on Patrick to fulfill the all-critical "bush-enabling" role, which includes defining other's arguments for them as a form of bogus criticism.

If it makes you feel better Patrick, i don't hate Bush - i think he is a pathetic, small-minded fraud of a figure who has been in office for 33 months and done a good job for 4 of them.

I do, however, hate his policies and his dishonest way of selling them....

>>Hmm, Kinsley asks if he has a legitimate reason to dislike Bush personally. The reason boils down to that Kinsley thinks Bush is a poor logician. That seems a weak argument.<<

No. Kinsley dislikes Bush because he thinks Bush is trying to cut a decade off of Kinsley's lifespan--trying to prevent research that might come up with cures for Parkinson's disease--and that Bush is doing so not for "moral" but for trivial political reasons.

John Halasz,

In the passage you refer to, the word translated as "substance" is upostasis (best I can do without a Greek font), not ousia.

Maciej,

Thank you, you are correct. I checked it out on the internet, since, needless to say, I am neither a Greek, nor Biblical scholar. The word "upostasis", from which the English word "hypostasis", directly derives, literally means "stand under", as does the Latin "substantia", from which the English "substance" directly derives, which standardly serves as the translation of the Platonic/ Aristotelian "ousia", which also can be regarded as a synonym for "upostasis" in Greek, though there is a difference, of course, between Biblical/late Hellenistic Greek and Attic Greek. The word "elenchoo" ,from which the word that translates as evidence derives, does carry the sense, among other possibilities, of "bring to light, or expose". Interestingly, the word translated as "things" is a derivative of "pragmata", "things done", and perhaps suggests some connection to prophetic/eschatological fortelling. At any rate, I always thought that the citation in question ( Hebrews 11:1)- and I could be wrong, since I am no expert- was meant to distinguish Christian faith from Greek (pagan) philosophical knowledge, as in the citation about "folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews", that its "assurance" (another possible translation of "upostasis") is not the same as the certainty ascribed to knowledge and its "conviction" (another alternative translation of "elenchoo") is not the same as evidence. Faith then would be a radical uncertainty, in cognitive terms, even an anxiety, which is only to be overcome by its commitment to "things done". This would contrast with later ecclesiastical/theological efforts to systematize Christianity as a doctrine, a kind of knowledge. My original post was occasioned by that of Massacio, who alluded to Hebrews 11:1 in pointing to its regressive/superstitious application on the part of fundamentalists. At any rate, my primary interest in the matter is to distinguish the normative criteria for ethical/spiritual insights from the normative criteria involved in cognitive truth claims, in contrast to epistomological efforts to reduce ethical norms to cognitive claims.