Personal Update

I've recently moved, and married.

So, uh, what's new with you?

Knowest that thou hast been rearended by the LORD thy God

The other day I saw a large vehicle (I think it was an SUV) parked by the grocery store, which was owned by someone who loves God so much, they stuck a big ole tetragrammaton in Hebrew script where the license plate is supposed to be.

Yes, the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God (though many Christians are certain they know how to pronounce it, and are happy to do so). I'm not much for the idea of intrinsically sacred words, but if there are such words, then the tetragrammaton is first among them. Jews have not utterred it in millennia, and avoid writing it down lest that copy be destroyed--as would happen if, say, it were plastered on the front of a car, and that car were to run into something--a rather frequent occurrence here in Chicago.

It was no Jew that owned this car. An SUV licensed stamped with the mark of YHWH? Only a Christian, and probably only in America.

Rorty among the believers

Naturally, there have been many posts about Rorty's death on philosophy-related blogs, like here and here and here (which even links to little old me). But I'm impressed by how often the news has been mentioned on blogs which don't have all that much to do with philosophy. I knew on some level that Rorty was fairly popular outside of philosophical circles, but I've still been surprised. (Some philosophers would say that this is owing to the fact that Rorty's appeal was limited to the philosophically ignorant. Which, I suppose, I was when I first became a Rorty fan.)

In particular, I'm surprised by how often he's been mentioned, and treated with respect and even admiration, on religion-oriented blogs like SoMA, Jesus Politics (in a series of links), Levellers (link via Jesus Politics), and the conservative First Things (link via Levellers). Rorty was an outspoken atheist who clearly didn't see religion as any sort of personal option, thought that it was about time that modern culture grew up and got over the religious urge (and here he included secular imitations of religion--e.g., what he saw as a tendency to treat scientists as a replacement priesthood), and took a hard line against there being any role for religion in the public political sphere. Yet there are apparently quite a few theists who found him worth reading, and worth engaging on something more than a merely polemical level. (I have in the past detected some distinctly Rorty-flavoured vocabulary coming out of the local divinity school. Of course, I'm unconvinced that the divinity school is particularly religious, so that might not mean much.)

It might even be possible that he managed to convince some theists to reconsider the wish that God had more of a place in political discourse. Well, that's pure speculation on my part, but he presented a good case (the same case that you'll find in Rawls or Habermas--but with better rhetoric). I'm thinking that maybe the "new atheists" should take some notes, assuming they have any interest in going beyond mere polemics, and saying something potentially useful. From the Levellers post:

As a believer, I also appreciate having atheistic dialogue partners like Rorty, rather than the current wave of angry atheists (fundamentalists of unbelief!) like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.

But I suppose an "angry atheist" might think that this just shows that Rorty was too soft on religion.

(Incidentally, as I've said before, I don't think Dennett belongs on that list. The basic idea of the book--that the phenomenon of religion should be subject to empirical examination, and that the religious shouldn't shy away from that--sounds fine to me, as far as it goes. Though I suppose I should probably actually read the thing before I really pass judgment on it. Dennett was another big philosophical influence on me, back in the day, so I'm not entirely unbiased here.)

Blasphemy and faith?

A post on some blog hosted by TIME, entitled God and the GOP? (via), begins:

When you embark on any dialogue concerning God and politics, you can be certain of raising the ire of the most religious.

With the ire-raising presumably accomplished by statements like the following:

However, it is my personal belief that God is not a fan of partisan politics. Partisan politics are about man’s will, while God is about his will. He is neither Republican nor Democrat. It is my strong belief that God cares about one thing, and one thing only, and that is the individual’s heart, Republican or Democrat.

Which would piss off the "most religious" under the assumption that those believers who go around politicizing religion and Goddifying politics are the "most religious".

The post continues:

Blasphemy is the act of using God to promote a personal goal—financial or political

So it turns out that blasphemy makes you more religious.

Which seems an odd way to think about religion.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

I just read the sad news on Leiter Reports, where Leiter also recounts an anecdote about Rorty which nicely sums up some of the essential features of Rortiness, and how he was received by many of his fellow philosophers.

Rorty takes most of the credit for my decision to go into philosophy. I was studying cognitive science at the time, and that program had some philosophy requirements, which I decided to take care of all at once. So I took a course on philosophy of science, and another on philosophy of language (plus one on modal logic, for no particular reason). Between those two courses, I encountered W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Arthur Fine, all of whom struck me as pretty interesting. But in the end they mainly just helped prepare me for what really got me hooked: reading Rorty's "Solidarity or objectivity?" and "Science as solidarity" in the philosophy of science class. A couple of weeks after that I decided to switch majors (...again). I became a convinced follower of Rorty, and spent a number of years basically agreeing with him about absolutely everything.

I've since found points of serious disagreement, but my image of Rorty still forms a substantial portion of my philosophical ego-ideal. For example (from the introduction to his Truth and progress):

I have sometimes been mistakenly commended for originality, simply because I often put apparent dissimilar figures - for example, Nietzsche and James, Davidson and Derrida - in the same box. But there is a difference between being original and being eclectic.

[...]

Back in the sixties, when I was a thrusting young analytic philosopher, I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe a star-studded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic.... "No trick at all," Hampshire explained, "for an old syncretist hack like me." At that moment I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up.

That's pretty much what I want to be when I grow up, too.

Rorty himself would probably have been somewhat ambivalent about having influenced me to pursue this career path. Here are some of his final words on philosophy (from "Grandeur, profundity, and finitude", in Philosophy as cultural politics, the most recent - and I suppose now final - volume of his collected philosophical papers):

Perhaps the best way to describe the diminishing interest in philosophy among the intellectuals is to say that the infinite is losing its charm. We are becoming commonsensical finitists - people who believe that when we die we rot, that each generation will solve old problems only by creating new ones, that our descendants will look back on much that we have done with incredulous contempt, and that progress toward greater justice and freedom is neither inevitable nor impossible. We are becoming content to see ourselves as a species of animal that makes itself up as it goes along. The secularization of high culture that thinkers like Spinoza and Kant helped bring about has put us in the habit of thinking horizontally rather than vertically - figuring out how we might arrange for a slightly better future rather than looking up to an outermost framework or down into ineffable depths. Philosophers who think all this is just as it should be can take a certain rueful satisfaction in their own steadily increasing irrelevance.

I beg to differ, Professor Rorty, but you'll never be irrelevant to me. RIP.

One Point Twenty-One Gigawatts!

My apartment building got hit by lightning today. Lightning is really loud when it's that up close. But, apart from that, it was a lot less exciting than I would have hoped. I haven't developed any mutant electro-powers or anything, for example.

The only bit of real drama involved my computer fritzing out. Very thankfully, it has since recovered.

In other lightning related news (via), a giant Jesus statue got zapped into pieces a few days ago. Naturally, this is passed off as just random chance. Uh huh. Just like it didn't mean anything when the set of The Passion of the Christ got struck by lightning twice (hitting the Assistant Director twice, and the faux-Jesus once).

Harris explained

Sam Harris (among others) likes to portray religious "moderates" and non-"literalist" interpreters of scripture as somehow deviant or deficient qua religious persons. For example, in his opening salvo in his blog-debate against Andrew Sullivan earlier this year, he says:

Given my view of faith, I think that religious "moderation" is basically an elaborate exercise in self-deception....

Harris thinks that all religion is bad, but in the case of "moderates" he not only faults them for being religious, he also faults them for failing to be really religious. He sees "moderates" as guilty of having committed themselves to a bad game, and then guilty again of playing that game really poorly.

In the eyes of many people (both believers and non) who have more sensible views of religion, this attitude can be a bit mystifying.

A common diagnosis is that these are prejudices which get adopted just out of convenience. It is convenient (so the story goes) to cast "literalists" as the paradigm religious believers because "moderates" and non-"literalists" are harder targets for anti-religious manifestos. Now, there might be some truth to this, but I doubt it's the whole story. Besides, it's not at all clear to me that, in general, "moderates" make for tougher game. For example, Sullivan is a "moderate" if anyone is, and is a generally articulate writer to boot, but that doesn't seem to slow down Harris' rhetoric much at all. (I didn't follow the whole debate, but from what I did read, I'm inclined to give Harris the win.)

Another diagnosis, made by Slacktivist, seems to suggest that Harris et al. are, like "literalist" believers (whom he dubs "illiteralists"), suffering from a lack of literacy skills--leading them to be incapable of figuring out how there might be truth in a text without it having to be read literally. But this seems pretty implausible to me. As best as I can tell, Harris functions at a high level of literacy, and is perfectly capable of understanding that, in principle, there is a difference between reading scripture non-literally, and falsifying it. (And actually, I'm not sure this is really the right way to describe what is motivating "literalist" theists, either, but I won't get into that now.)

Anyway, I thought I'd say something about what I think is going on behind Harris' anti-"moderate" and pro-"literalist" attitudes. I can't recall anywhere where he spells this rationale out explicitly, but I think it makes sense of some of the things he says.

It's all based on this starting point (from the same post as above):

Perhaps I should acknowledge at the outset that people use the term "faith" in a variety of ways. My use of the word is meant to capture belief in specific religious propositions without sufficient evidence....

In the philosophy biz, we appreciate this sort of terminological clarification. That said, Harris' explanation of what he means by "faith" could be fleshed out quite a bit more.

First, I think that, at some level, Harris understands, as he ought to, that "faith" is the name of an aspiration. To declare oneself as a follower of a certain faith is to make a substantial commitment, one which makes demands on a person. The religious person can live up to this religious commitment to a greater or lesser extent--it is possible to be more or less faithful in one's religious commitment.

Now, if we assume that faith just is "belief in specific religious propositions without sufficient evidence", we seem to have a pretty straightforward way of measuring a person's faithfulness: tally up the number of "religious propositions without sufficient evidence" which the believer believes, and that will tell you how faithful he or she is.

Now, for this to be at all a plausible picture, we're going to have to clarify it by specifying that, when dealing with a follower of religion X, we need to focus on those "religious propositions" which are associated specifically with religion X. (So, for example, the proposition that Joseph Smith read divine revelation off of golden tablets is a proposition specific to Mormonism, and it would be silly to see it as somehow relevant to measuring the faithfulness of a Muslim.)

But now consider two Christians, both of whom believe in the Bible in some sense--but one of them is a "literalist", and one of them is not. The non-"literalist" is probably going to read the Bible as expressing some "religious propositions without sufficient evidence", but it's pretty certain that the "literalist" is going to read the Bible as expressing a considerably greater number of "religious propositions without sufficient evidence". In both cases, there is some sort of Christian faith, as Harris understands it. But, compared to the non-"literalist", the "literalist" is going to end up believing a greater number of "religious propositions" associated with Christianity. And so, given Harris' method of measuring faithfulness, the "literalist" is clearly the more faithful of the two, with the non-"literalist" being a comparative failure as a person of faith.

So there you go. Doesn't that all make sense?

The essence of the humanities

This Onion article was sent to the maillist for the philosophy grads, under the subject heading "What we do":

Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things

AUSTIN, TX—University of Texas professor Thom Windham once again furthered the cause of human inquiry in a class lecture Monday, as he continued his longtime practice of finding connections between things and other things, pointing out these parallels, and then elaborating on them in detail, campus sources reported.

"By drawing parallels between things and other, entirely different things, I not only further my own studies, but also encourage young minds to develop this comparative methodology in their own work," said Windham, holding his left hand up to represent one thing, then holding his right hand up to represent a separate thing, then bringing his hands together in simulation of a hypothetical synthesis of the two things. "It's not just similarities that are important, though—the differences between things are also worth exploring at length."

Fifteen years ago, Windham was awarded tenure for doing this.

Yup.

And pretty much the only thing I could think after reading this was "Mm, tenure, that sounds awesome."

Fun with TBN

Dr. Myles Munroe, in taped commentary on John 1:1-2, remarks:

When you read those original words in the Hebrew, it doesn't make any sense.

Nope, no sense at all.

Respect Darwin's authoritay

The arguments for evolution ultimately succeed. The arguments for creationism ultimately fail.

I'm using this word 'ultimately' because it takes a rather thorough grasp of biology and geology (and I think maybe also the nature of scientific argument in general) before one can really see precisely why the evolutionary arguments (as a whole) end up defeating the creationist arguments (as a whole). Because there are creationist arguments that are powerful enough and sophisticated enough to completely overwhelm the ability of the average pro-evolution layperson to respond to them.

And when the pro-evolution layperson encounters such a creationist argument, and has no idea how to respond, and yet continues to believe the evolutionary thesis -- on what is that continued belief based? In general, it is based on the assumption that, somewhere, there is some scientist who has the knowledge necessary to validate the evolutionary thesis against the problematic creationist argument -- or, if not that, then there is some scientist somewhere who could do some further research and then come up with the knowledge necessary to validate the evolutionary thesis. Now, even if this complicated evolutionist response were provided to the layperson, it probably wouldn't be really understood -- high school biology was a long time ago, and wasn't all that informative in the first place. But that doesn't matter: someone is doing the relevant scientific research, and this other person understands what that research means, and how evolution works, and why exactly this creationist argument is wrong. And the justification of the layperson's belief in evolution is happily deferred to this expert authority.

So, in general, the layperson's belief in the evolutionary thesis is based on trust in an authority, trust which cannot be fully justified by the layperson.

Now notice that you can replace 'evolutionary' in that sentence with 'creationist', without making the sentence any less true.

This is because, with respect to the believer's ability to give articulate empirical arguments, the average pro-evolution layperson's belief in the evolutionary thesis is in the same 300-cubit-long boat as the average anti-evolution layperson's belief in the creationist thesis.

And this is true, notwithstanding the fact that the creationist thesis (when properly understood) is ultimately unjustified, based on dogma, and dependent upon authority, in ways that the evolutionary thesis (when properly understood) is not.

AAAAAA!

Just got back from a game of Texas hold 'em. After a few hours of play, in the wee hours of the night, we called last round with three players left in the game.

I was first to deal, Aidan to my right, Daniel to his right. First hand of this final round, I go up against Aidan, and it turns out that he had started with a pair of aces in the pocket, and ended up with triples.

Note for those unfamiliar with the game: in Texas hold 'em you start out by dealing two cards to each player, face down: this is the player's "hole" or "pocket". Further cards are then dealt face up as "community cards", and the players build hands out of the community cards combined with their respective pocket cards. On any given hand, you have about a 0.45% chance of starting out with two pocket aces, which is a rather substantial advantage.

So, Aidan was very lucky on that hand.

Second hand of this final round, Aidan goes up against Daniel. Daniel bets everything he has left, and Aidan calls with (I think) a pair of kings, leaving Daniel with very few ways of coming out on top. One of those ways was to have pocket aces--which he had.

Daniel was very lucky on that hand.

These pairs of aces were clearly migrating clockwise across the table, meaning that I was next up. As the last hand of cards was being dealt, I start cracking my knuckles and bragging about how I was going to play my aces so well as to be sublime.

For pocket aces to hit three people in a row, one after the other, is such a monumentally improbable coincidence that I feel I have a decent excuse for why (as I must admit) I did not play as well as I'd predicted, when I looked down at my pocket cards and indeed discovered that I was the third player, in a row, in that final round of the night, to get pocket aces.

Creepy.

IDNTIMWYTIM: "evangelical"

BBC reports: Evangelicals split on global warming.

This is true: evangelical Christians are indeed split on global warming.

And it's a worthy topic for a news story. Evangelicals owe most of their newsworthiness to the role many of them have played in the rise of the Christian Right; as such, it's quite common for people who are unfamiliar with the evangelical movement / community /subculture to see it as a monolithic group that is totally unified on matters of theology and politics -- which it is not.

So, good idea for a news story. But the execution is questionable.

To illustrate this split among evangelicals, the story focuses on two groups which take opposing views. Choosing a group of evangelicals who thinks that global warming is not important (because it's not happening) is relatively easy: they went to (the now late) Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. As for a group of evangelicals who thinks that global warming is both happening and worthy worrying about, they went to Eastern Mennonite University.

Only problem being, Eastern Mennonite University is almost certainly not evangelical. Mennonites in general are not at all connected to the strains of Christianity that fall under the evangelical banner, and (apart from the BBC story) I can't find any webpage that refers to Eastern Mennonite University as evangelical.

Part of the problem here might be the vagueness of the term "evangelical". But semantic vagueness is no excuse for plain old sloppiness.

Another part of the problem might be that evangelicalism is a phenomenon that is probably largely foreign to the UK, especially the segment of British culture that populates the offices of the BBC. But this is the BBC, and we expect better from the BBC.

Especially when it's not all that hard to find an example of a group of evangelicals who are concerned about the environment. (Say, the Evangelical Environmental Network.)

(For more on the meaning of "evangelical", and an IDNTIMWYTIM going in another direction, see here.)

A fairy tale

Once upon a time, God spoke through a prophet, promising the destruction of the city of Jerusalem for such sins as these:

Her princes within her are like wolves tearing the prey, by shedding blood and destroying lives in order to get dishonest gain. Her prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, 'Thus says the Lord GOD,' when the LORD has not spoken. The people of the land have practiced oppression and committed robbery, and they have wronged the poor and needy and have oppressed the sojourner without justice.

Then, true to his word, God saw to the downfall of Jerusalem. And God's people got the message loud and clear. And from then on, those who claimed to follow God never did any of those terrible things ever again. The end.

Sympathy from the devil

The other day I made the observation that pretty much all creationists think that the Earth is round, and are convinced that you have to be a little crazy to think that the Earth is flat--and, somehow, this observation seemed to take some people by surprise.

OK, context: Dawn and I were in a small group of grad students (from different parts of the arts and humanities), and for some reason or another it came out that there has been a debate in the letters section of some paper in Chattanooga, about whether the Earth is round or not. I expressed incredulity, but it was insisted that this debate really was happening, and that there was no indication that the flat-earther letter-writers were being ironic. So then we turned to the question of how there could be this vocal contingent of flat-earthers in Chattanooga, and someone suggested that it might have something to do with creationism getting in the news following the recent debate between Republican presidential candidates (in which a few expressed varying degrees of endorsement for creationism).

Well, I thought that was a weird connection to make: how could a debate about the shape of the Earth be sparked by creationism getting into the news? And that's when I made that observation: most creationists aren't flat-earthers.

And this actually surprised some people. I guess some people thought that maybe all creationists were also flat-earthers. One guy even said he couldn't see how thinking the Earth is flat is any more of a stretch than creationism.

That would be a problem.

Based on the general tone of the conversation, I would guess that we were all well aware of the existence of creationists, and that we all had negative views of creationism, and that we were all at least somewhat concerned about the prevalence of creationism in the American populace. And if you're a person like that, then, it seems to me, you should be moved to spend a moment or two pondering what might be going on in the minds of creationists. And if you spend even a little bit of time on this, then it surely ought to be pretty obvious how it's quite a bit less crazy to be a creationist than to be a flat-earther--that, in fact, the flat-earther would have to think some genuinely crazy things (e.g. that rather a lot of people around the world are lying about their travel experiences for no apparent reason), while a creationist could be merely wrong, and not crazy at all.

And if you can't see how that's so, then there is no way you could ever have any sort of constructive conversation with a creationist--you have made it quite impossible for yourself to imagine what it would be like to convince a creationist that he's wrong, because you imagine that the creationist is utterly crazy, and you can't even begin to reason with someone who's utterly crazy.

At another point in the conversation, someone tried to explain the existence of flat-earthers by pointing out that the Bible says that the Sun goes around the Earth. (Actually, I've seen self-described literalists assert that you need to interpret such passages metaphorically--but that's a different topic.) The problem here is that geocentrism, like creationism, is also quite a bit different from flat-earthism. I get the impression that, for quite a few liberals, including quite a few grad students in the arts and humanities, all these ideas (and more) get summarily thrown together in an undifferentiated mental box labeled "crazy fundamentalist Christian shit".

This is a complete failure of empathy that thoroughly undermines the possibility of civil discourse. Now, in some segments of society, this isn't so surprising to see. (Say, from a certain sort of Christian fundamentalist, who suspects that liberals are possessed by the spirit of the antichrist, and who lumps all liberal ideas into an undifferentiated mental box labeled "demonic liberal / secular humanist / feminist / homosexual poop".) But grad students in the arts and humanities? Come on. What the hell is the point of the humanities supposed to be, anyways?

Adventures in networking, flooring, and whatnot

What with my getting to be an old man and all, I'm inclined to be none too welcoming of this new fad of social networking websites. But recently Facebook has kinda sorta redeemed itself by getting me back in touch with old friends and acquaintances I thought I might never hear from again.

Then it also helped Dawn and I end a fairly unsuccessful and disappointing bout of apartment-hunting when I was able to look up a student in the college with a soon-to-be-but-not-yet-expired-lease (after having stolen some names from the property management office), and arrange a viewing of her apartment, and subsequently get dibs on the place.

If all goes well, I'll soon be making the switch from linoleum to hardwood floors, which I'm told is a matter of infinite importance, for reasons which are largely inscrutable. Apparently, linoleum's ability to lie flat under furniture and feet is insufficient to redeem it as worthy of constituting the upper layer of one's floor. I fear this issue may utterly transcend my intellect: as a child, I was tutored in Bert's school of linoleum appreciation (seriously, I had that song on tape or a 45 record or something).

The place also has balconies. Appreciation of this may be within my grasp.

Only believers can fight the spiritual battle

Sectarian militias, your days are numbered. Behold the Baghdad Prayer Patrol.

AzN is the new black

So this was pretty predictable:

"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said the teen's father, Albert Lee, referring to last week's massacre of 32 students by gunman Seung-Hui Cho. "I understand the situation."

But he added: "I don't see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions."

Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.

So, it seems clear that Lee was pretty dumb to have written this so soon after Virginia Tech, but, even so:

Unless somebody is holding back some important fact, this young man is getting a raw deal. He doesn't belong in the criminal justice system. And the main reason he was treated this way is that people are on edge because another young Asian-American student killed 32 people two weeks earlier in Virginia.

(I sure am glad my high school days are far behind me. If being a socially inept Asian student inclined towards dark and disturbing imagery had been the profile of a rampage-killer-in-the-making back then, I'd have been screwed. Actually, now that I think about it, I still fit that profile. Ooh, look out!)

I don' blame his teacher for alerting her supervisor at the school. I can see where she might have been worried.

By all means, pull him out of class the next day and try to figure out what's going on. Haul in his parents to find out what they know. Huddle with the rest of his teachers. Get him to a shrink for a psychiatric evaluation. Interview his friends, if it seems necessary.

Hell, call in the police if they honestly believe the young man poses some kind of a real danger and ask them to look into it.

But to have him arrested and criminally charged as the starting point of their response, based solely on what he wrote for a class assignment that instructed him not to censor himself, that's just outrageous.

Judging by the e-mails to the newspaper, I'd guess that at least half of you disagree with me. Lucky for me, you can't have me arrested.

Many of you are from the better safe than sorry school of thought.

Similarly, whenever I see a black man walking in my direction on the sidewalk, I always cross to the other side of the street. Better safe than sorry, I always say. (Crap, when I started writing this, I told myself I wouldn't turn it into some race thing. Oh, well.)

End of a scholarly era

Well, for Anglophone students of Kierkegaard, at least. Earlier today I was looking up pictures of Kierkegaard scholars Howard and Edna Hong in order to show Dawn how they aren't even a little Asian, and we ran across news of Edna Hong's fairly recent death.

The Hongs are best known for going approximately 30 years without sleep in order to produce probably the best available English translations of Kierkegaard's works, comprising just about every word he ever uttered. The results of their efforts currently make up a substantial and pleasantly coordinated section of my own little library.

Enough said

The Christian Century interviews Bill Moyers and asks:

Some people on the left think the Democratic Party needs to be more explicitly religious. What do you think about that counterstrategy?

If you have to talk about God to win elections, that doesn't speak well of God or elections. We are desperate today for cool thinking and clear analysis. What kind of country is it that wants its politicians to play tricks with faith?

(h/t JP)

"Finding Eternal Hope in Present Sorrow"

Are you bored of the garden variety empty platitudes and mindless punditry that quite naturally followed the Virginia Tech shootings? I have the cure for you: Doug's Blog: On the Horror at Virginia Tech. The writers at the Onion couldn't do a better job of coming up with a parody of a Christian Right analysis of the shooting spree.

The post starts out by addressing the "why" question. Now, talking about the "why" question doesn't make Doug's post stand out from the crowd (nor does his answer to the question), but I would like to say something about that general phenomenon. (Perhaps similar to this Slacktivist post.) When news-worthy tragedies like this happen, and people start talking about topics in the vicinity of the problem of evil, I get a little confused. Because I'm pretty sure that just about everyone knows that, say, the Holocaust happened. (I briefly considered picking a less trite example, but what the heck, let's not pussyfoot around.) And it seems to me that if you can believe in God despite the fact that the Holocaust happened, you ought to be able to believe in God in the face of any other tragedy or atrocity that current events can throw at you, without much breaking a spiritual sweat. (To be sure, if one had a special personal connection to one of the victims, I could see how that could create an especially deep emotional sting that could make an understandable difference here, but this is not the case in general.)

OK, so much for that.

What really makes Doug's post shine are such points as: Christians need to go out and convert people in this time of need:

We must be emboldened in our sense of urgency to communicate to others the only source of hope from death.

And we can probably lay some of the blame for the shootings on the secular humanist hegemony that permeates the American public sphere:

We have forsaken the law of God and have worshipped before false idols. We have sacrificed our children, not only spiritually and intellectually to the high priests of a new secular religion in our government schools...

And probably legalized abortion contributed to the shooting:

...but have quite literally sacrificed baby boys and girls to the gods of convenience in the abortuaries of America. One out of four Americans is not here because they were aborted by their mothers.

And let's not forget the theory of evolution:

Our children are being taught the Gospel of evolution and man. It is a religious faith that ultimately teaches that transcendent truth does not exist; life is meaningless, being the product of chance. Why are we surprised when the present generation acts upon the logical implications of this false gospel? If we do not see the connection between this false faith and the culture of death, we are blind bats, or willingly ignorant.

Plus this just goes to show how being armed all the time is a Christian duty:

A strong case can be made that in a violent society like our own, it is the duty of every Christian man to be armed such that he is ready, willing, and able to come to the immediate aid of his neighbor in the face of the ruthless behavior of lawless men.

And just to finish it off, an additional curiosity regarding how Doug makes that last point:

We have one of two futures — a police state full of regulation and controls, where only the state and criminals have access to guns, thus leaving most women and children defenseless to evildoers, or an informed, well-armed citizen population, which is, to my mind, the surest safeguard against lawless men.

What I find curious is that he picks out "women and children" in particular. Are unarmed men not, in general, defenseless when confronted by an armed "evildoer"? Plenty of dudes died at Virginia Tech. Testicles do not in fact provide any protection against bullets. Or maybe it's taken for granted that manly men only ever concern themselves with the protection of their offspring and womenfolk, never paying any regard to their own safety in the face of danger. I just dunno.

Now, is this the single stupidest thing to be written in response to the Virginia Tech shootings? I have enough faith in humanity to be confident that it's not. But it's still a remarkable piece of work.

(h/t Jesus Politics)