Opus 2025-288: Free for All

I finished reading a book by Roger Forster and Paul Marston, and one of the things that struck me at the end was how they talked about Augustine and his influence down through the ages.  He changed the direction of the early church on several key doctrines.  One belief he had in common with the Reformation was that the dominant religious forces all advocated a lack of human free will.  Another was the application of political and physical pressure to enforce the will of the dominant religion be it Roman Catholic or Lutheran.

Islam also has that belief and attitude.  Do it their way or die.  A sense of a fatalism is also part of their principle beliefs.

They all share this with the socialists whether it be from Marx or Hitler.  The state must dominate and individuals must submit.  So you have the state as God and they cut out the middleman.

I am rereading the books and hope to respond to them more.

Forster, Roger and Marston, Paul.  God’s Strategy in Human History, Volume II, Reconsidering Key Biblical Ideas.  England:  PUSH Publishing, 2013.

homo unius libris

Opus 2018-137: I Find a New Author

How do you know if a writer is a liberal?  There are lots of clues.  I am recently working through the novels of David Baldacci.  He writes an entertaining story.  The first couple I read I enjoyed with no qualifications but as I began to read through the different series he is working on I began to see certain patterns.

In one book he continually used the acronym ISIL instead of ISIS.  As far as I know President Obama is the main one who used this term in trying to push the legitimate cause of Islam in the Middle East.  ISIS stand for “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”.  ISIL stands for “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”.  To geographically challenged Americans the question is, “So what?”  Using the term Levant is granting that the Islamic state has a legitimate claim to the land of Israel.  If you question this, Google “Levant”.  When the results come up you will see some maps on the right that include Israel.  When you look at the major cities of the Levant you will find Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  Obama was making a political statement by his choice of words.  I have to feel Baldacci was doing the same.  The other possibility is he only reads the New York Times.

There are a lot of other clues.  The tone he takes on issues like business, medicine and such.  So far the balance between irritating liberal doggerel and a good story are coming down on the side of the story, so I will continue reading.  He seems to have a theme in some of the books.  He dealt with human trafficking in one.  The one I am reading now seems to highlight the problems in foster care.  Another dealt with secret government programs that seemed to be developing cyborg soldiers.  Good topics that need to be highlighted.  Somehow I don’t think he will ever deal with the Planned Parenthood scandal of selling baby body parts or the lack of credibility in the media.  That would be too much to hope for but I will hope anyway.

I continue reading with my baloney meter turned on and my mind in gear.

homo unius libri

Opus 2014-270: Intellectual Depth or Silly Sophistry?

I read a book called Scaling the Secular City, A Defense of Christianity by J.P. Moreland.  It left me scratching my head.  I would get it when I read it but could not put it all together.  For instance he wrote about the difference in mathematics between the definitions of potential and actual infinities.  When you start thinking you are pretty smart you read something that makes you say, “What?”  I read it.  I kind of understood it, but I don’t get what it all means.

I was able to dress myself and do my job in spite of the confusion.

Every once in awhile it does us good to read something that sits on the verge of understanding but refuses to cross the line.  It stretches us.  But be careful.  Just because you don’t understand does not mean it is deeper than you are.  Much of what masquerades for intellectual depth is really silly sophistry.  I run into stuff that liberals want me to read.  When I give it a try I realize after a few pages that it is nothing but phoney charades.  It is nonsense.  It is based on smoke and mirrors. 

Keep in mind that much that is written is not just beyond your grasp, it was beyond the author’s grasp first.

homo unius libri

Opus 2012-286, Discernment Watch: Fanatics

I am reading a book called The Gunpowder Plot.  It is about, surprisingly enough, the Gunpowder Plot.  Go figure.

I came across an interesting sentence that I thought reflects the thinking of our elitist classes.  It went like this,

“One might add in parenthesis that a conversion of this sort, a rejection of youthful misdemeanours (sic), a ricochet towards ardent piety, has been the sign of many fanatics in history, not all evil but some sanctified (such as St. Augustine).”, p. 50

The comment is about a young Catholic raised in Protestant England in the 16th century.  As he grew older he lived a wild life until he seems to have become serious about his faith.  At that point he reformed his behavior and later became involved in a plot to blow up Parliament and King James.

I will concede that blowing up the government might be a bit over the top, but what we see here is a popular and successful author labeling as fanatics all people who become serious about their faith and try to live it.  Notice that she labels Augustine as a fanatic.  It would follow that anyone who gets devout in their faith and lets it influence how they live is a fanatic. 

It is this thinking that brings forth comments like “cling to their Bibles and their guns.”  It is this thinking that goes through life with the assumption that anyone who seriously believes in Jesus and allows that to reform their life is a simple minded, red-necked, naive boob.

Be aware of how this thinking pervades our culture.  Keep in mind that these “fanatics” are the ones who built colleges, founded hospitals, ended slavery, and countless other staples in our lives that we take for granted.

I guess I am a fanatic and have no problem with that.

Fraser, Antonia.  The Gunpowder Plot, Terror and Faith in 1605.  London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.

homo unius libri

Opus 2011-7, Book Notes: A Conflict of Visions

Notes from
A Conflict of Visions
by Thomas Sowell

p. 4, “A vision is our sense of how the world works.”

p. 9, “Social visions differ in their basic conceptions of the nature of man.”

p. 10, “...two broad categories – the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.”

pp. 11ff, people with a constrained vision
    Adam Smith
    Edmund Burke
    Alexander Hamilton
    Malthus
    John Randolf

pp. 12-13, “Instead of regarding man’s nature as something that could or should be changed, Smith attempted to determine how moral and social benefits desired could be produced in the most efficient way, within that constraint.”  (EO)

p. 14, “one of the hallmarks of the constrained vision is that it deals in trade-offs rather than solutions.”

pp. 15ff, People with an unconstrained vision
    William Godwin,
    Thomas Paine
    Rousseau
    John Stewart Mill
    Harold Laski
    Thomas Jefferson

p. 16, “Unlike Smith, who regarded human selfishness as a given, Godwin regarded it as being promoted by the very system of rewards used to cope with it.”

p. 27, “The unconstrained vision promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solutions.  By contrast, the constrained vision sees the best as the enemy of the good – a vain attempt to reach the unattainable being seen as not only futile but often counterproductive, while the same efforts could have produced a more viable and beneficial trade-off.”

p. 40, “It was the eighteenth century exemplars of the unconstrained vision who created ‘the age of reason,’ as expressed in the title of Thomas Paine’s famous book of that era.  Reason was as paramount in their vision as experience was in the constrained vision.”

p. 40, “Therefore, the wisdom of the ages was seen by Godwin as largely the illusions of the ignorant.”

p. 41, “Implicit in the unconstrained vision is a profound inequality between the conclusions of ‘persons of narrow views’ and those with ‘cultivated’ minds.”


p. 41, “...in the unconstrained vision, the best conduct of social activities depend on the special knowledge of the few being used to guide the actions of the many....Along with it has often gone a vision of intellectuals as disinterested advisers.”

pp. 47-48, two types of reason

p. 47, “The power of specifically articulated  rationality is central to the unconstrained vision.  The power of unarticulated social processes to mobilize and coordinate knowledge is central to the constrained vision.”

 p. 49, In economics the constrained vision admits there are reasons for change, but the reasons “...cannot be specified in such concrete detail as to make it feasible for any individual or group to plan or control the actual process.”  The relates to what is happening in education.

pp. 50-51, insight:  common law based on the precedent is constrained vision

p. 54, “Yet those who argue for deliberate law making through judicial activism do so not on the basis of having a democratic majority, even in a given generation, but rather on having an intellectually and morally superior process for decision making.”

p. 56, “The clash over judicial activism reflect a much more general clash over the best way to contribute to the social good.  In the unconstrained vision, wise and conscientious individuals should strive to shape the best outcomes in particular issues that come within their jurisdiction.  In the constrained vision, the inherent limitations of individuals mean that each individual’s best contribution to society is to adhere to the special duties of its institutional role, and let the systemic processes determine outcomes.”

p. 56, “Just as the unconstrained vision urges judicial activism on its judges, it urges ‘social responsibility’ on businessmen– that they should hire, invest, donate and otherwise conduct their businesses with an eye to producing specific benefits to society at large.”

p. 57, “It is the systemic effect of competition rather than the individual intentions of businessmen which this vision relies on to produce social benefit.”

pp. 58ff, contrast between sincerity and fidelity
    sincerity - doing what you judge best for society as a whole
    fidelity - doing your duty as expected by those you serve

p. 59, “Sincerity is so central to the unconstrained vision that it is not readily conceded to adversaries, who are often depicted as apologists, if not venal.”

p. 60, “Within the unconstrained vision, sincerity is a great concession to make, while those with the constrained vision can more readily make that concession, since it means so much less to them.  Nor do adversaries need be depicted as stupid by those with the constrained vision, for they conceive of the social process as so complex that it is easy, even for wise and moral individuals, to be mistaken – and dangerously so.”

pp. 63-64, The unconstrained vision trusts youth, the constrained vision trusts age

p. 67, “The common man, according to Hobbes, seldom engaged in meaningless words, which he saw as the hallmark of intellectuals.”

p. 70, “The constrained vision puts little faith in deliberately designed social processes, since it has little faith that any manageable set of decision-makers could effectively cope with the enormous complexities of designing a whole blueprint for an economic system, a legal system, or a system of morality or politics.  The constrained vision relies instead on historically evolved social processes and evaluates them in terms of their systemic characteristics- their incentives and modes of interaction- rather than their goals or intentions.”

pp. 80-81, From this perspective, loyalty, promises, patriotism, gratitude, precedents, oaths of fidelity, constitutions, marriage, social traditions, and international treaties are all constrictions imposed earlier, when knowledge was less, on options to be exercised later, when knowledge will be greater.”

p. 86, “Patriotism and treason thus become a meaningless distinction at the extremes of the unconstrained vision, while this distinction is one of the most central and most powerful distinction in the constrained vision.”

p. 96, “According to the unconstrained vision, the patterned behavior of society is successful, just, and progressive insofar as it reflects the articulated rationality of man in general and of the most intellectually and morally advance people in particular.”

p. 96, “In the constrained vision, where man - individually and collectively - lacks both the intellectual and moral prerequisites for such deliberate, comprehensive planning, order evolves historically without design, and more effectively then when it is designed.”

p. 97, “The unconstrained vision tends to judge processes by their results - ‘is it right? Is it good?’ in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren,  The constrained vision judges rightness and goodness as process characteristics rather than as results:  A foot race is fair if it is run under the proper conditons - regardless of who wins or loses, or how often the same person win.”  (EO)

p. 98, “In the constrained vision, freedom is a process characteristic - the absence of externally imposed impediments.”

p. 126, “Adherents to both the constrained and the unconstrained visions each see fascism as the logical extension of the adversary’s vision.”  (EO)

p. 133, “A social process which assures equal treatment thus represents equality, as seen in the constrained vision, whether or not the actual results are equal.”

p. 135, The unconstrained - “To them, equality of opportunity means equalized probabilities of achieving given results, whether in education, employment or courtroom.”  (EO)

p. 144, “The moral justification of the market process rests on the general prosperity and freedom it produces.”

p. 150, “The view that races, classes or sexes innately differ greatly in capabilities would be a conclusion for which a constrained vision would be necessary, but not sufficient, and is in fact rejected by many for whom intellectual or moral constraints apply to all human beings, without group distinction.”  (EO)

p. 159, “Like other evils, war was seen by those with the constrained vision as originating in human nature and as being contained by institutions.  To those with the unconstrained vision, war was seen as being at variance with human nature and caused by institutions.”

p. 173, “The unconstrained vision argues that this in not how the economy operated, that it is currently obeying the power of particular interests and should therefore be made in future to obey the power of the public interest.”  (EO)

p,. 181, Term “the locus of discretion” means who will decide

p. 197, “Here, as in other areas of the constrained vision, it is the experience of the many rather than the brilliance of the few that is to be relied upon,...”

p. 207, “From the standpoint of the constrained vision, the scope of those boundaries of immunity from public authority are the scope of people’s rights.”

p. 214, “Whatever its mechanisms or details, social justice has been the dominant theme of the unconstrained vision from Godwin to Rawls.”

p. 215, “The concept of social justice thus represents the extremes of the conflict of visions – an idea of the highest importance in one vision and beneath contempt in the other.”

p. 225, Discusses difference between “rights” and “interests”, “Interest therefore give way to rights, which are ‘trumps.’...Once again, in this vision, rights take precedence over interests.”

p. 226, “Much of what the unconstrained vision sees as morally imperative to do, the constrained vision sees man as incapable of doing.”

p. 231, “The fundamental difference between science and social theory is not at the level of visions, or even paradigms, but at the point where theories produce empirically testable hypothesis.”

p. 233, “Evidence need not be falsified in order to be evaded.”

p. 239, “The ability to sustain assertions without an evidence is another sign of the strength and persistence of visions.”

p. 244, “People with the same moral values readily reach differing political conclusions.”

p. 256-7  The unconstrained demonize those who disagree, the constrained consider opponents well meaning but wrong.

p. 260, “All these issues turn ultimately on whether or to what extent, surrogate decision-makers can make better decisions than those directly transacting.”

(EO) emphasis in original

Sowell, Thomas, A Conflict of Visions, New York:  Basic Books, 2007.

Opus 37, Book Notes: Mere Christianity

Notes from
Mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis

Book 1, Chapter 2

p. 13, “Progress means not just changing but changing for the better.  If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised (sic) morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.”

Book 1, Chapter 5

pp. 28-9, “We all want progress.  But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be.  And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer....There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.”

p. 32, “Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.  If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:  if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth...”

Book 2, Chapter 1

p. 35, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.  If you are an atheist you have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world is simply one huge mistake.  If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.  When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.  But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.  As in arithmetic - there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer right than others.”

Book 2, Chapter 2

p. 40, “It is not good asking for a simple religion.  After all, real things are not simple.  They look simple, but they are not.”

p. 41, “Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack.”

p. 41, “Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.”

p. 41, “Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed.  That is one reason I believe Christianity.  It is a religion you could not have guessed.”  Hugh Ross said much the same in The Fingerprint of God.

Book 2, Chapter 3

p. 48, “Some people think they can imagine a creature which is free but has no possibility of doing wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

p. 52, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God:  or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronising (sic)  nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

Book 2, Chapter 5

p. 61, “We have to take reality as it comes to us:  there is not good jabbering about what it ought to be lie or what we should have expected it to be like.”

pp. 62-63, Discussion of free will in the context of physical life

Book 3, Chapter 1

p. 69, “Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or friction, in the running of that machine.”

p. 72, “Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things.  Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals.  Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual.  Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole:  what man was made for:  what course the whole fleet ought to be on:  what tune the conductor of the band wants to play.”

p. 74, “Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about seriously if I am going to live forever.”

Book 3, Chapter 3

p. 87, “Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says:  we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.”

Book 3, Chapter 4

p. 91, “Human beings judge one another by their external actions.  God judges them on their moral choices.”

p. 93, “Good people know about both good and evil:  bad people do not know either.”

Book 3, Chapter 5

p. 94, “Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes.”

Book 3, Chapter 6

p. 109, “But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.”

p. 110, “Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.”

p. 112, statement about marriage

Book 3, Chapter 7

p. 119, “All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.”

Book 3, Chapter 9

p. 129, “But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion.”

Book 3, Chapter 10

p. 134, “Hope is one of the theological virtues.  This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not...a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do....  If you read history you will find that Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

pp. 136-7, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

p. 137, “The answer for such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.”

p. 137, “People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

Book 3, Chapter 11

p. 139, “The batle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”

Book 3, Chapter 12

p. 148, On the tension between faith and obedience:  “...but it does seem like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.”

Book 4, Chapter 1

p. 155, “For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected.”

Book 4, Chapter 3

pp.  166-71, Explains the paradox of free will and foreknowledge in terms of God being outside time.

Book 4, Chapter 5

p. 178, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

p. 178, “But that is guesswork.  You and I are concerned with the way things work now.”

Book 4, Chapter 6

p. 183, “Have the words ‘could have been’ any sense at all when applied to God?”

p. 186, The Devil:  “He always sends errors into the world in pairs - pairs of opposites.”

Book 4, Chapter 8

p. 198, Wheat vs. grass

p. 198, “It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.”  - take this to why salt added in cooking is better than at the table or why marinades give more flavor than a shaker

pp. 198-199, “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird:  it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.  We are like eggs at present.  And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg.  We must be hatched or go bad.”

Book 4, Chapter 9

p. 201-6, A chapter on Christian Perfection

p. 203, Quoting George MacDonald, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

p. 205, “The command “Be ye perfect” is not idealistic gas.  Nor is it a command to do the impossible.”

Book 4, Chapter 10

p. 208-9, Controversial comments on salvation

p. 209, “But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only the two vague ideas which we got from novels and newspapers.”

p. 210, “To judge the management of a factory, you must consider not only the output but the plant.”  I would add raw materials also.

Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.