May 7
To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that talks about where the Church is heading today. This was posted in Heidelblog.
Clark has a legitimate point in noting how past errors reincarnate themselves for the Church today. But he also demonstrates the fatal flaw of many conservatives: that they look solely to the past to understand and respond to today's world. And just as narcissism's fatal flaw is elevating the present over the past so that those in the present have everything to teach and nothing to learn from those from the past, many conservatives elevate a set of past times over the present so that those from the past would have everything to teach and nothing to learn from those modern times.
Where is the Church heading? To answer that question in America, one would expect to have to address the issue of activism and equality for the LGBT community in society. One would expect to have to address social justice and environmental issues. One would expect to have noted how the dominant branch of the American Church, which is a blend of conservative Catholicism and Protestantism, either supports all or a subset of those with wealth and power as the dominant branch of the Church did in the pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain. One would expect to have to address those subjects along with what Clark addressed.
Young adults face the biggest challenge in the Church today and yet that isn't mentioned here. What is their challenge? It comes from their elders who have taught them that these young people must choose between believing in salvation by grace alone through faith alone and working for the kind of social justice that the Old Testament prophets spoke of. What many of these young adult Christians do with the apparent 'Sophie's Choice' given to them by many of their elders will determine where the Church is heading. And whether they will find a faithful way of keeping the Gospel while learning from the Old Testament prophets depends on whether they recognize the choice being given to them by their elders is a false dichotomy.
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May 8
To Joe Carter and his blogpost denouncing Marx and Marxism because of the approximately 100 million deaths allegedly attributed to Marx by some Conservatives. That post appeared in the Acton blog.
Articles like the one above and the one cited only show a conservative, opportunistic approach to Marx. For American conservatives are all too eager to trash Marx so as to present their own nation as the paragon of virtue. Besides the fact that Gregg, whose article Carter cites, is grossly mistaken in attributing Hitler's rampage to Marx and somewhat understandably mistaken in attributing the deaths from reigns of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot to Marx, he ignores the fixed number of deaths that would have occurred anyway because Marx, and those who claimed to have followed him, was reacting, rather than encouraging a first strike, to tyranny and killing.
Would Russia have left WW I as early as it did if there was no October, 1917 Revolution. Remember that the February, 1917 Revolution produced the Provisional Authority government that was controlled by the Capitalists in Russia. And, out of self-interest, they favored continuing Russia's participation in WW I despite the hardships such participation caused on the Russian people. Or we could take Guevera and Castro on Cuba for another example. It wasn't until the Cuban Revolution that the US government considered pulling their support from the corrupt and brutal government of Batista. Or we could go to Nicaragua and note how the US supported the Somoza government before the Sandinistas overthrew that government. There are other places we could go as well.
Or we could ask Carter and Gregg this question: How is it that Marxist revolutions are considered murderous while the American Revolution was not? After all, one of the reasons for wanting independence from Great Britain was so that the colonists could expand westward. And that mean dislocation and death for Native Americans.
We could also ask how many deaths could be blamed on Jesus Christ and Adam Smith if we follow the same logic that Carter and Gregg have? After all, how many indigenous people in the new world lost homes and even their lives to those claiming to be Christians? This would include not just the British-based colonizalization of North America, but the Spanish conquests of Central and South America as well. And how many indigenous people from Africa and Asia lost their lives due to the Christian European empires? How many people lost their lives in the American interventions to help business reported on by former Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler? Or how many people lost their lives from the various kinds of US interventions following WW II? How many people lost their lives as a result of regime changes that the US instigated in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Greece, Chilé, Nicaragua, and so on. And how many millions of Vietnamese lost their lives to American bombings? And how many people have lost their lives because of the almost 40-year-old war started in Afghanistan right at the end of the Carter Administration? Should we blame Jesus Christ and Adam Smith for those deaths or is such attribution to them ludicrous?
There are certainly things Marx wrote that are wrong and have caused harmful effects. But crediting him with 100 million deaths shows a lack of knowledge and understanding as to what Marxism is and isn't. For if Christianity can have false believers and Republicans can have RINOs, why are we so compelled to assume that each murderous leader who calls himself a Marxist is really a Marxist?
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To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on the use of a Social Psychology experiment to claim that there is no settled science. Here, he is echoing the sentiments of Palanyi This appeared in Heidelblog.
From one social Psychology experiment, Clark's conclusion is that there is no "settled science'? That is what the pairing of the telling of the above Social Psychology experiment and the title Clark gave to this blogpost implies But if there is no settled science, then would it not be true that there is nothing we can know that is true from science? That means that we could wake up some day and discover that the earth is flat rather than round, that the sun revolves around the earth and not the other way around? And then the next day, we could learn just the opposite is the case.
If there is no settled science then we e could learn that none of the vaccines we've taken work or that some of the medicines we take don't work without diseases changing. And we could learn that gravity does not exist. And not only that, we could learn that water does not freeze at 32 degrees and that ice doesn't form at the top of any containment of water.
I could go on but there is settled science for those saying there is none. That science comes from the study of economics and supply and demand and how neoliberal Capitalism is the best economic system ever. And we know that that approach to economics is the only settled science people who say there is no settled science believe in. That is because there is a particular context for saying there is no settled science. That context is the subject of climate change.
For if there is no doubt that people are contributing to changing the climate of the earth in ways that threaten our descendants, then our American way of life and thus how many of our businesses operate must change. We might be compelled to live and work in a far less individualistic and more collective ways. We might be compelled to be far less materialistic in how we live. We might have to change our economic system despite the settled science its supporters insist on. But perhaps the fear of change, because one is happy with the current status quo, is the biggest factor in saying that there is never any settled science.
Finally, Clark should know better than to attach the above title to the story of this Social Psychological experiment. In terms of logic, he is trying to prove an absolute rule with a single example with an uncountable sample space. Such an attempt is severely logically flawed. For when trying to prove absolute rules, like there is no settled science, only one counterexample is needed to disprove them. And what is distressing here is that Clark seems to be engaging in a ruse in saying something about climate change without disclosing his intent in citing the experiment described above. What he wants to say about climate change is that we don't know for sure that it is happening and thus we don't have to change. And that indicates whether he is satisfied enough with the status quo so as to not want it to change despite the unspecified future suffering many will experience.
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To Dylan Pahman and his blogpost on his celebrating the possible closing of Barnes & Noble, and other big chains, due to its inability to compete with Amazon. This appeared in the Acton blog.
http://blog.acton.org/archives/101493-dont-save-barnes-noble.html
Pahman misses the big picture here. For the big picture isn't about one monopoly replacing ma-and-pa stores or one monopoly replacing another or the roles of regulations and competition in the business world. Nor is it about how conservatives tend to reduce economics to commerce with its redefinition of the concept of stakeholder to consist of only providers and consumers. Rather, the big story is in how extreme individualism that contains no concern for externals destroys not only other people lives, but eventually our own nest too. For this growing trend to buy more and more from Amazon is about the shoppers' convenience and ability to avoid dealing with other people. And what is ironic is that Pahman celebrates the success of Amazon's business venture which includes the cornering of markets served by Amazon. For with that cornering comes the centralization of control of those markets. And centralization of power is suppose to be an enemy to conservatism--at least that is the case when it comes to government.
The problem with extreme individualism, besides the fact that it is suppose to be against the Scriptures, is that such individualism spreads to other areas of life. If I am not suppose to be concerned with who suffers from the purchasing decisions I make, then should I be concerned with the cuts in my taxes even though those cuts lead to the reduction of social safety nets and/or an unmanageable national debt that will force austerity on those who are most vulnerable? If I can benefit from my nation's business regulations that protect neither other people nor the environment, then should I care about who will suffer from the lack of protection those regulations would have provided? If my nation's foreign policies help benefit me in terms of living the life I want, should I be concerned about the victims of those policies?
As we focus more and more on how we individually benefit from our decisions, we feel morally justified in the decisions we make regardless of who suffers because of our decisions. We become immune to the pain others suffer because of the benefits we enjoy. And that is fine for us until those with more power and control act the same way as we are. And that is called karma.
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