LA Fitness Shooter's Theology - The Consequences of An Idea

It has been nearly four hundred years since Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of his church, but the revolution that began with that simple act is still having real world consequences, and not all of them good. The ideas that Dr. Luther affirmed in his struggle against the Roman Catholic Church are still active in the world, and, as they buzzed around the disturbed mind of an evil man yesterday, they comforted him and contributed motive power to his madness.

Last night I was shocked when I saw the LA Fitness building on my TV in a local news story of a shooting. My wife and I had a joint membership to that gym last summer - they sold us one at a discounted rate while they were still building it. We paid the deposit but decided not to pay the monthly payments and gave up the membership. We got the deposit back, surprisingly enough. So we could have been there when the bullets were flying. Teresa could have been in that room last night if we had kept the membership. I've lost a lot of weight since then, so I know I would have made use of it, and if I went, she might well have come along.

We now know that a man named George Sodini walked in with a gun and started shooting, and saved the last bullet for himself. He had a blog, which has been taken down by the web host, but his blog posts were archived, so we have some insight into what he was trying to do. Apparently his main intention was to kill himself. Murdering other people helped give him the gumption to do it. And why did he want to kill himself? Because he wanted to skip over the rest of his lousy life and just cut to the happy ending with God and Jesus in heaven.

Here is an excerpt from his blog which reveals this:

"I took off today, Monday, and tomorrow to practice my routine and make sure it is well polished. I need to work out every detail, there is only one shot. Also I need to be completely immersed into something before I can be successful. I haven’t had a drink since Friday at about 2:30. Total effort needed. Tomorrow is the big day.
Unfortunately I talked to my neighbor today, who is very positive and upbeat. I need to remain focused and absorbed COMPLETELY. Last time I tried this, in January, I chickened out. Lets see how this new approach works.
Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.
I will try not to add anymore entries because this computer clicking distracts me.
Also, any of the “Practice Papers” left on my coffee table I used or the notes in my gym bag can be published freely. I will not be embarased, because, well, I will be dead. Some people like to study that stuff. Maybe all this will shed insight on why some people just cannot make things happen in their life, which can potentially benefit others."

What hits me the hardest about this is that this man believed he was going to heaven! He had applied logic to a very typical evangelical Protestant belief rooted in the Reformation. When Martin Luther enunciated it he used the Latin, Sola Fide, Faith Alone. What this meant at the time was that good works (like buying indulgences from your local corrupt bishop) do not contribute to your salvation, at least not in such a way that they can make up for a lack of saving faith. A saving faith was one from which good works would emerge as a consequence because that faith, as a gift of God, would bring about another gift - Grace. Not much argue with there, but the idea began to morph and mutate even as Dr. Luther was propounding it. In a letter to Melancthon, Luther infamously wrote:

“If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly,  but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world]  we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness,  but, as Peter says,  we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.  No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.” (font and bold emphasis my own).

Before anyone decides to argue about my bringing up this statement, I grant that it was not contextualized by an overall discussion about mass murder. It concerned ecclesiastical and theological issues. But the context does not redeem this statement, either. The text of the statement stands as it is, not mitigated or softened by its context. It's meaning is plain, as plain as he wrongly claimed Biblical text always is as a rule. Luther was propounding a heretical antinomianism - a belief that no moral law applies to those saved by the grace of God purchased by the sacrificial death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The antinomian heresy is alive today, promoted as the "assurance of salvation". It is expessed when a believer who goes around saying that he has beeen "born again" asks you "If you were to die tonight, do you know whether you would go to heaven?" He then testifies that he, at least, knows that he will go to heaven and be with Jesus because he has been saved, and nothing can separate him from his salvation. And don't you want that assurance, too?

I first encountered this belief system in my teens, when I was reading a book by Hal Lindsey, The Liberation of Planet Earth. He had a diagram of the cross on a page and it showed how the death of Christ on the cross paid for ALL your sins, past, present and future. The left arm of the cross had over it, "all the sins of the past" or something like that, and the right arm of the cross had something like "all future sins". It made sense - that death had to pay for all sin, so of course it would apply to future sins as well as those committed prior to the crucifixion. It couldn't only apply to those sins committed by an individual before he was saved and/or baptized, because then that would leave the sins he commits thereafter unpaid for - requiring, what, another crucifixion? I remember that Lindsey claimed that once you are saved, all your sins, those of your past, and those you commit after you are born again, are paid for "once and for all".

Over time I struggled with my faith, abandoned it, and eventually returned to it. During that time I have come to terms with how much truth there is in Sola Fide, and it is not a worthless doctrine. But all the truth it contains can all be affirmed without denying anything that the Catholic Church has consistently taught and affirmed from that Christ taught the apostles and the apostes taught the early Church Fathers, until the time of Martin Luther, all the way to the present day. It definitely should not be used by people like George Sodini to justify or excuse or encourage themselves in despicable acts of multiple murder and suicide. That is an abuse of the doctrine, and abusus non tollit usus.

Certainly people like Sodini are the exception, not the rule, both for believers in Sola Fide, and among psycho killer suicides. Certainly there is no temptation among any typical Protestant Christian believer who accepts Sola Fide to test his assurance of salvation in this way, and I have never seen any indication that other crazy random shooter murder-suicides, like Seung-Hui Cho at Viriginia Tech in 2007, or the Charles Carl Roberts, the gunman of the terrible massare at an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster six months before, or the perpatrators of the Columbine tragedy, ever drew any dark, terrible strength from a belief in the assurance of their salvation in Christ. The latter, insofar as the believed in anything, drew their inspiration from Darwinian natural selection, and saw themselves as culling the herd. Cho was a hate-filled racist scumbag. Roberts was insane and claimed that he was overcome with the desire to molest one of these girls, and claimed ot have done so 20 years before - but the person who he claims he molested denies that. So it is clear that whatever is true about Roberts, he was batshit crazy.

Nevertheless I am not surprised that the antinomian Assurance-of-Salvation doctrine has had a death toll in a psychic atmosphere that brings forth people like Cho and Roberts and Sodini. The idea is mainly false to begin with, and bad ideas eventually bear their fruit - bad consequences...evil actions.

31 Years Ago Today - In Memoriam

On this day 31 years ago my father, George S. Rice, a New York City firefighter, was killed on the line of duty. My wife Teresa of the blog Teresamerica already dedicated a first rate post to him on the Fourth of July. I would rather link this one to hers than post a second rate dedication on the actual anniversary of his death, so I have embedded a hyperlink to that post on her blog in the text of this post.

The Writer In Me Is IN LOVE AND HE CAN'T GET ENOUGH!

Sometimes a little research, say, an hour or two's worth, can help you save serious money. Sometimes it will make no difference. You never know beforehand. But it is never a waste of time to ingrain a good habit by practicing, even if it will bear no immediate fruit on this or that particular occasion. Getting out of the habit, getting lazy, can be dangerous or expensive. In the case of researching before making a purchasing decision, it's just about dead certain that, if you aren't in the habit of doing due diligence and researching your options before making a purchase decision, one of the times you neglect it - maybe even the one and only time - you will get screwed in the ass with a rusty Phillip's-head the size of baseball bat. I know this from experience. Ouch! Fortunately, I learned my lesson, and avoided making an expensive mistake.

Last week I determined that I need a laptop. I need to be able to write thesis text during the downtime at my job. I need for that text to be importable into my desktop computer. I didn't need to be able to format that text while I write my composition, be it my thesis or a blog article. I didn't even need internet connectivity. In fact, the fewer distractions available, the better. Even having Solitaire on a Windows laptop would be a danger. I did not want to have to pay for those features which would inevitably tempt me to use my laptop for anything other than the thesis, but I knew I needed a working laptop. I didn't have much money for one, and since I didn't want to pay more for features that I didn't want to have available to me, I don't think I would have been willing to spend much, even if I had the money. I called a local Good Will Computer Recycling Center. They said their cheapest laptop was around $250.00 - this is refurbished, mind you, not brand new. That was far and away more than I was willing to part with, and I told the gentleman on the phone as much. I said that I remember that the last time I had visited the store, there were laptops in the low one hundred dollar range that ran on Linux, a free, open source OS. "Oh yes," he agreed. We have a couple here for $130 that use Linux, but they don't have video streaming, so pretty much all you can do is surf the web and do emailing."

"For my purposes, even that would be an unnecessary and unwanted luxury. All I need in a laptop is something that can do word processing. I am writing a thesis, and the fewer distractions the better. I just want to be able to write something at work that I can transfer onto a portable USB drive so I can put transfer it from there to my desktop computer at home."

"Oh, well, something like that we usually do have, and it would only run you around $85. A computer like that would be using Puppy Linux. We will probably have something like that again as soon as next week."

That sounded good to me and I told the gentleman on the phone that I might well be getting back to him next week. I had already decided that I would spend little more than a hundred dollars for what I wanted. That $85 sounded like as good a deal as I was likely to find, and I was tempted to leave the situation at that, and wait until next week. I did not succumb to that temptation. I got on the computer and did some googling.

I remember, back in the days when the Worldwide Web was in its infancy, that I used to use a portable word processor. It was a Brother. It had a typewriter built into it, and a floppy disk drive. It had all I needed for my writing, and I wrote quite a bit on my Brother word processor - term papers for classes, short stories, journal entries, and poetry. The brother was affordable, and if they had something more up to date, something with a USB port on it, that, I thought, would have been perfect. I looked for Brother brand machines, but could find nothing in my price range that fit the bill, not even on eBay. Then I started looking for anything that fit the phrase "word processor" on Google, and I happened on a few companies,but their machines were all in the high 2 or 3 hundred dollar range for anything new. One company had an attractive machine called a Neo. The company's name: AlphaSmart. So I went to eBay and looked for older AlphaSmart products, used, working. I found some old AphaSmart 2000's and 3000's, in varying prices and conditions. In fact, they varied quite a bit, and I almost overpaid on an auction that, fortunately, I lost. Someone else overpaid even more than I would have if they had not outbid me. I bid low on two other auctions, hoping that I would wind up winning one of them, bidding low enough that I could afford both if I happened to win both. Both were for the AlphaSmart 3000. One was less than $22 plus shipping. The other was for $9.99 plus shipping. They were both being offered by the same company. One of them was offered with a warranty and was said to "work great". The other was described as working ok, except for the space bar, which did not respond. Right now, I am writing this blog post on the one that was described as working great (it's even written on a piece of masking tape splayed across the bottom, so it would be visible on the photo in the eBay auction listing.) And you know what? It DOES work great! $21.49 + shipping, which, on this item, was $14.00 - less than $36.00 for all I need in a laptop, with a comfortable qwerty keyboard, Fed-Ex-ed to my door. I like this keyboard better than the one on my desktop, actually! I also won the other one, the one that was described as not having a responsive space bar, and not coming with a warranty...

...Ok, right now I am typing on the OTHER AlphaSmart that I won, bidding low, on two auctions on eBay, and purchased from a company called CACRC, located in Baton Rouge, Lousiana, on St. Philip Street, at number 800. They are also known under their eBay user ID coprecouncil. I cannot, at this moment, recall what all the letters in those initials stand for, but I know that the last three letters in CACRC stand for "computer recycling center." On the bottom of the invoice that came with the shipment of the two AlphaSmart 3000s it says "BE KIND TO THE ENVIRONMENT! Electronic waste us a growing problem. Electronics contain materials that may contaminate water and soil in a land fill. If you no longer wish to use the equipment, please do not throw it away or dispose of it in any other fashion. If possible, you may return the items for recycling to the CCARC, 800 Saint Philip Street, Baton Rouge, LA 70802. Call (225) 379-3577. Thank You!"

By now you may have wondered to yourself - did he edit this text, adding the spaces to it after he put it on his computer? Actually, the spaces are in the AlphaSmart 3000 machine. I am typing them right now using the space bar that allegedly did not work. Maybe something jiggled during shipping, but, knock on wood, for this moment, right now, it works fine. It's funny, because right under the space bar on this machine is masking tape, and written on this masking tape is the message "works. spacebar not respond"

So far, this machine is performing better than expected. I must admit that the keyboard is marginally less responsive than the one the other machine (the one with which I wrote the first half or so of this blog article). But even the responsiveness of the other keyboard was far beyond my expectations. This keyboard works about as well as I expected the other to. So both exceed my most optimistic hopes and expectations.

Now I want to describe the AlphaSmart 3000. It holds eight files at a time in its memory. It runs on three "AA" batteries. I was made to understand that you could lose the text in your files if your batteries ran out and no power was running through the machine, but, as it turns out, there must be some other interior battery or power source, because even if the "AA"s aren't in the machine, it can still send text through the USB port. The AlphaSmart uses power from the desktop computer through the serial connection in order to send the text. That means that it still has the text to send even if the "AA"s aren't in the machine. I tested this, and it is just like the manual said. The manual I found in pdf form online. Since these are used machines - there was no print manual in the shipping box - nor any cords. None were in the description in the eBay listing, so there is no problem with the absence of these things. I did not expect them to be there. It doesn't matter, because I have my own USB cord that is compatible with this - it is the one that normally connects my desktop computer to my printer. When I plug the AlphaSmart into the USB connection, it offers to send text in a particular file, one of the eight. If you want to send text from another one of the eight, all you have to do is press the key - "file 1", for instance, and the offer on the screen changes, and if you press send it will send the text from file 1. The desktop computer receives the text as if you were typing it extremely fast on the keyboard.

The AlphaSmart 3000 has an onboard calculator, and its word processor has spell check capability. This AlphaSmart, the one whose space bar works even though it was not supposed to, was only 9.99, and because I called the company and asked for combined shipping They prefer that you call before you pay for either item that you are going to combine with any other, but, though I did not ask for combined shipping until after I had paid for the first auction I had won, they were willing to give me the discount on the other item! So the shipping on the machine I am typing now was only $7.00!

That's right - two machines that are each everything I need in a laptop, for which I paid $31.48 plus $21.00 shipping, for a total of $52.48 - an average of less than $27 each! They arrived today, July 15, 2008, around noon, by Fed-Ex. The Fed-Ex guy knocked and actually waited for me to come to the door and sign for the package! That means that for $21.00 shipping CCARC got signature delivery. They could have skimped and paid less, and taken the chance that I would not have been home. If that had happened, the Fed-Ex guy would have knocked once, left the box at the door, and bolted back to his truck. That happened the other day. My wife got a delivery of a book sent to her by a friend of hers that she met on twitter - the latest book by Dave Ramsey. If we had not been home, and one of our neighbors in our apartment complex had decided that, whatever was in the Fed-Ex box, they wanted it to be theirs, not ours, that book would have vanished without a trace, and my wife would have had no recourse. Neither would the friend of hers who had shipped on the cheap. But CCARC required a signature, which I think is very smart - the right thing to do. It just so happened that we were both home for both deliveries, but that was pure luck. We could easily have both been out both times.

Back to the features of this AlphaSmart machine - what it has and what it doesn't have. Although the options for formatting text are much more limited on the AlphaSmart, you can still copy or cut and paste text, thus making it possible move paragraphs around. This is better than expected, since it wasn't mentioned in the eBay description, and, in a review by another AlphaSmart user implied that it was only the later AlphaSmart models, like the Neo or the Dana, that could copy and paste text, not the 2000 or even the 3000.

In every way, these machines have exceeded expectations, and for the money spent, they absolutely cannot be beat. It is beyond me why anyone would risk typing anything on an expensive laptop in a coffee shop where a spill could occur, when a low-cost product like this is available. If I had a notebook computer, I would still use the AlphaSmart to type text, and then import it into the laptop for formatting and sending it in an email or posting it on a blog.

The text of the various files are searchable with the find key. It can be plugged directly into a printer and thus a computer can be bypassed. The AlphaSmart's battery life is a huge advantage - hundreds of hours from three cheap "AA" alkalines! For someone who wants to just go out to a diner or a Dunkin Donuts and sit there and write his ever-lovin' heart out, and not have to choose between using an expensive laptop (exposing it to risks of spills or theft) or hand-write it in a notebook and have to re-type it all later with writer's cramped hands, this machine is ideal. I would be willing to pay considerably more for a machine like this than I did if I had the money. In fact, I want to search out and find another bargain like this and have a third one, a backup, so that Teresa could have one for classes, and I could have one to take to work, and if one of them is destroyed or breaks down or gets lost, the backup would be available. Ideally, both Teresa and I would have one main AlphaSmart each, one backup for each of us as well, and, eventually, each of us would have a regular laptop as well. I may even get bargains like these and re-sell them for profit, and roll the profits into getting more inventory, selling those for profit, rolling those additional profits into a growing inventory, until a part-time hobby business becomes a genuine going concern!

Now I am going to experiment with various places to type, to test the comfort of the several unusual situations that I can imagine wanting to be able to write in...

...At this moment, or rather, at the moment of the writing of these words, I am sitting on the privvy, the lieu, the porcelain throne. It is much more comfortable than when I tried this with a regular laptop with a regular fold-up-and-down monitor screen. With a regular laptop, I would have to push the screen as far up and out as possible in order not to have to crick my neck into a full Quasimodo just to see the screen at all. But then, it would still look weird and faded out, and in addition, the weight of the screen would always be threatening to tip the whole laptop off my lap - so much for a laptop being a true laptop - but with the AlphaSmart 3000, I have a real, bona fide laptop keyboard that I can type text into and see what I am doing. It is like a hybrid of a laptop notebook and a palmtop PDA - the screen size is PDA-like, which is exactly what I need it to be and no more, while the keyboard is a genuine QWERTY keyboard like that of a laptop computer, so I don't have to type with just my thumbs like kids these days do on their little I-Phone gadgets.

I am thrilled that I don't have to choose between interrupting my train of thought in order to address an urgent bathroom need and bringing an expensive laptop computer or PDA and risking something terrible happening to it and losing that huge investment (all the while developing a hump on my neck or ruining the joints in my thumbs).
More experimentation coming up...

...I was typing outside on my AlphaSmart 3000, hanging out with friends in chairs on the front lawn the apartment complex where we live. I never felt comfortable doing that before, even when I had a real laptop. Why? THE SCREEN! It would have been a barrier, an anti-social statement - leave me alone I'm computing, it would say. What's the point? I might as well stay inside and write. But I felt quite comfortable with this AlphaSmart, because there is no fold-up screen, just a little LCD digital read-out that shows a few lines of text at a time (four, actually). I wrote a couple of pages of thesis text while jumping in and out of the casual conversation that was going on. I did not feel that I had to choose between writing and having some fun with friends while getting some sun. I did not have to resign myself to staying inside and writing while my skin slowly pales into a sour-milk white color from lack of daylight.

So, anyway, I was outside typing, and while I typed, the space bar started to act up. Uh oh! I thought. That's it - my luck has run out. Only it hadn't - a little tiny piece of something started to emerge from under the space bar, and I picked it out with a thin paperback book cover. The space bar worked again, and it occurred to me that the thing I fished out might have been the problem with the space bar before this machine was shipped. If so, now it is not only the case that the space bar is working, but the problem is fixed, so it will not recur again.

Very cool...

...With its lack of a screen, this keyboard is so comfortable, I can lounge on the couch and type in comfort. If I had a screen, I would feel like I had to hunch over it. I would not be comfortable...

...Now I have the AlphaSmart 3000 on half my lap - that is, teetering on my left thigh, while on my right thigh I have a plate with a big piece of chicken and a fork. I am on the black love seat in my apartment living room, going back and forth between writing and eating, without moving from my seat (I have to be careful about getting the keys greasy, though!). Once again, the lack of a sizable fold-up-and-out monitor screen attachment would have made impossible what I am doing now on this machine...

...I just moved to my bed, and now I am laying down with my knees slightly propped up, and several pillows behind my back for back support...and now I have just moved to another position. Both are comfortable, more than I have ever been on a bed with a laptop compute with a typical fold-up/fold-down monitor attachment screen. There is a drawback, though. A light has to be on. With no luminescent screen, the AlphaSmart cannot be used in the dark. Also, another problem is the keyboard: it is a bit louder than typical laptop computer keys. So there will be no writing in bed with my sweetie laying beside me trying to sleep. The light from the ceiling and the banging of the keys would hardly be conducive to sound sleep...

...Teresa just called me over to the computer where she is writing a blog post on Obama and the birth certificate issue, and so I began keying this in by holding the keyboard in one hand while typing with the other, and looking back and forth from the desktop monitor and the little LCD screen on this AlphaSmart. I am doing that right now, and I know that what I am doing right now would have been impossible on a more expensive laptop with an attached screen. It would have been too heavy and awkward. This AlphaSmart is light and easy to hold and type on - very comfortable.

The AlphaSmart, then, has its advantages and its disadvantages. But the difference between them is that I have spent much more time talking about the advantages, and I am still not done, while I cannot even imagine any other significant disadvantage besides what I have already mentioned. One last advantage is how the AlphaSmart turns on immediately, with no delay, no boot-up cycle. It turns off just as quickly. So you can pull it out and start typing at a moment's notice, and turn it off just as quickly and get going. I can write all day and well into the night, without having to stop my train of thought while eating or going to the bathroom (washing hands after use of the toilet is a little tricky with the AlphaSmart 3000 around, but if that is the only genuine interruption, that's not so bad. In any case, I can write for very long periods without the structure of this machine making it uncomfortable for me, and I can even eat or use the john while typing in comfort. With all that writing time, it is a very good thing that the power drain on the batteries is very small The batteries would last for over a week if the machine was left on constantly, and because they are just ordinary "AA"s, like the kind you put in your TV remote, they are very cheap to replace, and this thing never seems to get hot from prolonged use.

I want to conclude this now, so I am going to import the text in the slightly better, warrantied AlphaSmart 3000, and then the text from this one, and then add a brief conclusion using my desktop computer keyboard...

...

...

...I am writing this text on the desktop computer, and I am struck at how annoying the keyboard is compared to that of even the lesser AlphaSmart (though that is due in some part to the pounding these keys have taken over the course of a year or so). All in all, I prefer keyboarding on the AlphaSmart and importing. The keys on this desktop computer keyboard are confusing to my fingers. The AlphaSmart decreases my typos and the aggravation they cause!

...

...

In conclusion - I highly recommend the AlphaSmart series, especially the AlphaSmart 3000, probably the best for the money. I wish I was getting paid to say this, but who would pay me? AlphaSmart is not selling their 3000 series anymore - that's vintage by now. They are on the Neo and the Dana now. I am recommending a good, working used machine. I am recommending doing due diligence before any purchase decision. I have two laptop machines for roughly half the price I could have spent on a more conventional used laptop, and for a tenth or less of what a brand new brand name Windows or Apple Macintosh laptop computer would have cost me. I saved that money because I searched for the bargain. I did not leave well enough alone - I reached out for better than adequate, and found an extraordinary buy. So reach out! Try! Seek! You won't always find, I am sorry to say, but so what? Sometimes you will succeed, and when you do, BOY IS IT sah-WEET!

Why They Hate Sarah Palin - The Real Reason (WARNING! This blog post contains profanity and expresses the offensive opinion of an offended person!!)

I have been keeping this blog unpolitical since I started it, but now I can no longer sit by and let the spiteful, acid-dripping viciousness go on without comment. Yeah, I like Sarah Palin. I think she's great. Fuck you if you don't like it! I've had it up past my bald head with the unremitting bloodletting that has been underway since she first came to national attention when McCain won my vote and the votes of others like by nominating her as his running mate!

Her critics have never been fair to her for a moment. She has held herself up with extraordinary grace and poise, which has to be judged, not just by what she has said and done, but by what she has not given in to temptation to say or do in response to the constant stream of viper venom spat her way by the hissing snakes of the political media elite, the whole Crowd of Cocktail-Party Cunts!

Peggy Noonan's hit piece put it over the top. I am past my tolerance threshold. Don't bother looking for a link to it here. If you haven't read it, consider yourself lucky. I will not help you become polluted.

I am pissed off. I can't stand it anymore. You see, I know the real reason for all this, and for why it has continued for eight months since the election. It's not just her politics (although if not for her politics, that which truly fuels this hatred would actually endear her to her detractors).

So now I am going to hold up a mirror to you Naked Emperors out there. You ain't smarter than her! She's a grown-up! I am going to force you to face the real reason why you hate her. Here it is:

She's HOT!

That's it. Women who already would dislike her for her pro-life politics, her religious convictions, and her folksy ways, find it to be a twisting of the knife that she is beautiful and charming. The fact that she has an equally good-looking husband and her children are, respectful and well-behaved (for the most part) does nothing to endear her to them, either. What really gets their dander up is the fact that she has the nerve to look as good as she does.

And what about the men who hate her? Why do they hate her? Because she's hot. Because they hate the fact that they have the hots for her. And, more importantly, because the women that they have any chance at all of having sex with any time soon hate her, so they better hate her, too!

Her politics do not make her unique. Her accomplishments as a governer are exemplary and admirable, but they, too, would be shrug-worthy from the liberals if she were a guy. They would long ago have forgotten about a male Alaskan Governor turned McCain running mate with Palin's accomplishments. I imagine that a male VP nominee governing Alaska would have been yesterdays' news before the day of his announcement was even out. And if it were Governer Todd Palin, the women-critics would never have gone after him sharpened-claws-out the way they went at the Honorable Sarah. The attacks would have been considerably less intense, and they would have been over by now, and a Governer Todd Palin as the former VP nominee would not have been subject to one sleazy obstructionist legal action after another, so he would still be the sitting Governor of Alaska.

Sarah Palin is not just the first female Republican Vice Presidential nominee. She is the first hot chick on a major party ticket in American history. That not disrespectful, mind you. There is nothing wrong with being a hot chick. It doesn't make her dumb. It doesn't take away from her accomplishments, or her record. It has, however, provoked the immaturity of liberals, stuck as they are in perpetual adolescence. Usually this stuntedness shows itself in the fact that they never outgrew the adolescent rebelliousness that is the root of their hatred of traditional beliefs and values, which they associate with their parents and their parents' generation. But now, it comes out in their hatred of Sarah Palin because she is the beauty contest-winner, the prom queen, the hottie.

To wit:






It makes them hate her beyond all reason, as much if not more than they hated George W. Bush. Now, instead of Bush Derangement Syndrome, we are being treated to Palin Derangement Syndrome.

If she were a Democrat, however, they would forgive and excuse anything and everything, and they would love that she was a hottie. They would adore her if she agreed with them on abortion on demand and socialist government programs as the panacea, capable of curing all our ills. In fact, she, not Biden, would be Obama's VP if she were a Democrat. Because she's hot. but instead, she's a Republican, and therefore they hate her as much as they have ever hated any Republican. Because she's hot.

Well, grow the hell up, people!

Little People o.k. being laundered and hung to dry

They call themselves "Little People", and they want you to call them that, too. You can't call them "midgets" anymore. That's demeaning. But you can call them "little people" because that's not demeaning at all! No, really, being called "little people" is perfectly acceptable to them. They have said so. You can call a little person a little person to his or her face - they are perfectly content with that. Just don't call one of them a midget. And now don't say it on broadcast TV, either. It's a dirty word. They want the FCC to ban it. It can join the ranks of

shit, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, and motherfucker.

The word "piss" used to be on the list, too, but nowadays even newscasters will say that this and that happened and "boy he was pissed!" I am pretty sure people say "tits" once in a while, too, on tv though that, also, was banned once. Of course, there are other words they don't like to use, though the list has adjusted a bit - certain words used to be ok, and now they are not, and others used to be forbidden, and now they are fine. When I was a kid, you almost never heard ass, bitch, son of a bitch, bastard - even "damn" was scandalous. Now this person is a dick, that one is an asshole, she is a bitch and he is a real son of a bitch bastard. But no one is a nigger, there are no faggots, and no one can invoke God. That's a dirty word, too - I have heard His name bleeped. Of course, no one should be using dammit as His last name, and I appreciate those bleeps. But even pious invocations have gotten bleeped out on regular TV in my hearing. You won't hear anyone say Jesus Christ, either, except perhaps for the occasional blasphemy that slips through.

Now you can't say midget, either. The little people don't like it.

You, see, during an April episode of "The Celebrity Apprentice", the contestants "created a detergent ad that suggested bathing little people in the detergent and hanging them to dry," according to an article in the AP two days ago, and they had the nerve to entitle the ad "Jesse James and the Midgets."*

And you can't do that. You can call them little people and talk about treating them like dirty laundry, but for God's sake --

--- don't call them midgets!


Call them little people. Until they get tired of that, and decide they want to go back to being dwarves or munchkins, or progress to being hobbits or leprechauns. No matter what label they accept eventually it will become a dirty word, because what they really don't like is being reminded that they are shorter than others. It's the condition that they don't like. It's the reality. Changing the word will not change the condition. Euphemisms are designed to soften the blow of hard reality. They are that by which we hide from the harshness of the world.

I do find it odd, though, that the euphemism that the little people are choosing is something that, not too many years ago, would have been considered insulting and demeaning right on its face.


* Actually, the ad was "Jesse James Gets Dirty With Little People" - the AP writer was obviously too busy to do what I did - spend about eight seconds searching on youtube.

Weekend At Bernies 2: Electron Boogaloo (5 of 5)

After four installments, now with this fifth and final one, the astute reader by now is saying, “On the contrary, Kevin - you have not shown that Bernie is dead. You have only shown that Bernie did not successfully kill my soul. The Materialists have claimed that Bernie vanquished God and spirit and any possibility of a non-physical substance that could ground free human agency and the possibility of the survival of consciousness after the physical body is dead. That may have been an exaggeration, but just because he failed to kill his enemy does not mean he is dead. Perhaps he still lives.”

I beg to differ. The whole point of Materialism was to provide a complete causal picture of reality without the need for non-material things. It was supposed to account for everything that happened without the need for soul or spirit, and without leaving anything out. Anything not covered, any gap in the causal account, could be exploited by those who deny the truth of materialism, and thus no such gap was supposed to exist. No such hole in our causal knowledge was acceptable for anything that purported to be a scientific worldview. After all, science was classically defined as cognitio certa per causas, certain knowledge through causes. If complete causal certainty is abandoned, then, in a real sense, so is science - at least in the sense of a naturalist scientific worldview.

So when we hear the click on a Geiger counter and ask why that happened, we point to an individual radium atom decaying at that precise moment. But then if we ask why that particular radium atom decayed at that exact second, not another one or not the second before or the one after, we hit a brick wall. According to the quantum physics it is not only the case that we do not or even can not know the answer to that question. Rather, in purely physical terms there is no possible answer at all. It happened like that, and not any other way, for no reason at all, if physicalist Materialism is correct. That is a denial of the ubiquity of causality that was the ground for deterministic Materialism in the first place, and was based on an essential pillar of rational thinking, one without which no science is possible: The Principle of Sufficient Reason. That means physicalist Materialism is ultimately unscientific, at least in the classical sense of what we always meant by the term science. If physicalism is true, and quantum physics has the final word, then no complete scientific worldview, is possible.

But that was ostensibly the whole point — not just to discredit traditional notions of soul and moral responsibility and free will and the possibility of an afterlife — but to replace those views with a complete scientific description of reality free of those elements. That was what we were promised. But the Promissory Note on what Sir Karl Popper cleverly called “Promissory Materialism” has come back denied. Materialism may be the default position of Western academia and science, but that default position is in default of its promise - to provide us with a satisfying alternative picture of ourselves and the world that explained everything it claimed it would eventually explain. Now all we get are excuses why they will never be able to come up with what they promised.

The fact is, on every level materialism has failed. It has failed to account for consciousness in terms of individual neuron firings, and now it is being admitted candidly in some quarters that what they are now back to calling “the Neuron Doctrine” (instead of merely “the basic facts, established with scientific certainty, of how the brain works”) has more or less failed, and that the brain acts as a reticulum, a network, with different areas acting simultaneously in parallel, with no discernible bottom-up explanation of such parallel, unconnected, spatially-separate effects. What is needed is a retrieval of Aristotelian formal and final causes and the acceptance of agent causation - too long discarded by modern science in favor of mere event causation, and the exclusive focus on efficient causes that are purely natural, material and physical. What is needed now is a top-down holistic casual agency, able to orchestrate the different parts of the neural network at the same time even when they are apparently not in communication with each other. What is needed is a revival of traditional Thomist-Aristotelian hylomorphism - the concept of the soul as the substantial form of the body. Only a top-down holistic causal agency like a substantial form - a soul - can address these problems. Materialism, with its commitment to bottom-up event causation, is utterly helpless to fill that need.

Materialism has also failed to discover physical principles that explain the origin and diversity of life on this planet, or to provide a coherent account of the difference between living and non-living things in purely physical terms. It has failed to account for biological activity in purely chemical and physical terms (another area where the soul would fit in nicely, thus it should be no surprise that they cannot explain these things - they have hamstrung themselves by banishing the true explanation). Even in the area where it was thought to have made the most headway - the discovery of complicated bio-molecules, it has failed to account for the information those molecules store and use in terms of Darwinian natural selection alone. Materialism has failed spectacularly in every possible way, and now we can be sure that it will never be able to give us more than excuses for its failure.

That is why Bernie is dead. He was way overextended and had science’s loan sharks after his ass, and when they caught up to him, he couldn’t pay up. So they busted a cap in his ass. And another. And another. And another and another. And one in his head: Neuron doctrine BLAM! Right in the forehead. Morphic resonances BLAM! Irreducibly complex bio-molecules BLAM! Real information in DNA that cannot be accounted for by successive random mutations that survive by natural selection BLAM! Non-local influences and quantum uncertainty - the failure of bottom-up physicalist Causal Determinism BLAM BLAM!Believe me, he is not as hale and hardy as he looks. No matter what the materialist behind the pet shop counter says, he’s not just resting, or pining for the fields. He’s as dead as John Cleese’s Dead Parrot, and it’s starting to get funky in here, like a dead philosophy’s dead ass.

Weekend At Bernies 2: Electron Boogaloo (4 of 5)

(continued midstride from 3)...

Searle, to his credit, has not ignored quantum physics before committing himself to deterministic materialism. He gives an argument against it right before he mentions Laplace‘s image:

Indeterminism at the level of particles in physics is really no support at all to any doctrine of the freedom of the will; because first, the statistical indeterminacy at the level of particles does not show any indeterminacy at the level of the objects that matter to us – human bodies, for example. And secondly, even if there is an element of indeterminacy in the behaviour of physical particles – even if they are only statistically predictable – still, that by itself gives no scope for human freedom of the will ; because it doesn't follow from the fact that particles are only statistically determined that the human mind can force the statistically-determined particles to swerve from their paths. Indeterminism is no evidence that there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom that can move molecules in directions that they were not otherwise going to move. So it really does look as if everything we know about physics forces us to some form of denial of human freedom. (Minds, Brains & Science, 86-87)

I am grateful to Harry Frankfurt for introducing a very useful term into academic philosophy in his 2005 bestselling book. I am not writing my thesis right now, but a post for my blog, so I feel justified in using this very strong term to characterize Searle’s hand waving in the passage quoted above. It is BULLSHIT!

First, the phrase “statistically determined” is self-contradictory bullshit - the two words don’t cohere. Particles are not “statistically determined” and they do not have “statistically determined paths.” That’s another bullshit phrase. Quantum indeterminacy rules out the existence of determined paths. Any fusion of statistics and determination is bullshit. The statistics do not determine anything. The statistics are there because that is all we have in the absence of causal determination. Statistics and Determinism are as opposed as probability and certainty - they are incompatible.

Second, if causality is from the bottom up, then the causality that occurs at the level of objects familiar to us like our bodies is entirely grounded in quantum indeterminacy, so his curt dismissal here is ridiculous. If he wants to be a bottom-up Causal Determinist, he has to explain how and where the determinism comes in if it does not start at the bottom! What’s more, he willfully forgets that the whole strength of Determinism against the primary intuition of our freedom of will and action was the cogency of absolute causal determination from the bottom up, and the lack of causal gaps from the bottom up that would allow room for that freedom. Well, now we know that bottom-up Causal Determinism is false. That means Determinism is defeated! Quantum indeterminacy is not evidence for human freedom, and we don’t need it to be - we already have plenty of evidence for human freedom. It is the refutation of the Determinism that was the only evidence that ever counted against that freedom. With Determinism refuted, there is no more reason to deny the indubitable evidence of or own moment-by-moment conscious experience of making free decisions. Searle went too far when he said, “Indeterminism is no evidence that there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom.” Indeterminism is admittedly not evidence that there is human freedom, but it is surely evidence that there could be such freedom, since it defeats the contrary position that, due to Determinism, there could not be such freedom - that it is impossible. The position asserting the impossibility of radical human freedom is refuted. What’s left? The possibility of radical human freedom!

Quantum theory knocked the living hell out of Bernie and kicked him in the balls while he was down. The injuries it inflicted on him were mortal blows. There was no chance of recovery. If false philosophies had souls that could go to hell, Bernie would be all burny. He’s a dead son of a bitch. So Materialists prop him up and parade him around as if he were alive and well. Don’t you believe it!

Link to Last Installment of WAB's 2 part 5 of 5 (ignore the fact that the url says its 06. It's the 5th of 5):

http://thenakedontologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/weekend-at-bernies-2-electron-boogaloo_06.html