Toward Attention

Shining Baubles and Luminous Ideals

I remember being told once by a biology professor (an Ichthyologist) that Cichlids love shiny objects (confirmed here) -- if I recall correctly, he actually said that they will collect them if they can.

If I were a Nietzschean, I'd say that this is what our ideals and ascetical commitments are biologically founded in -- a love of shiny things. We love the shiny thing, and we seek to mould ourselves to it, as a form of consumption, a very strange kind of acquisitiveness.

If that's true, however, religion will never go away. The question of why a form of life should be "shiny" is also one worth asking.

Funneling the Cattle

Several years ago: in the aftermath of the ordination of the divorced, partnered and openly gay Gene Robinson to an episcopal seat in the Episcopal Church USA, an evangelical radio station with two or three hosts was airing call-ins to their station. The outward and apparent goal was to allow people to air their grievances, but it was just an example of typical evangelical theatrical opportunism: they wished to steer the herd of disaffected into the ranks of approved evangelical meeting-houses. It was obvious that these herders could not imagine any option but Secularism and Evangelicalism for the disaffected, and wanted to save them.

One woman called in, after several earlier "successful" re-directed call-ins, and said that she became Catholic, "because the Catholic Church will never ordain women or partnered homosexuals." The radio hosts were completely caught off-guard, and with their emotional defenses down they fully consented to this fact, and seemed bewildered by their own agreement with this rather plain woman of no remarkable intelligence (in another context they might have geared up to be hostile to such affiliation with Catholicism, but in this context they were forced to agree with her choice according to the logic of their own setup -- the drama of the options diminishes when you add third choices like "Catholicism" to Secularism vs. Evangelicalism for the disaffected -- play actors like to keep it simple, because it helps the drama.

Saints and gods

One of my (Secular Protestant) professors just spoke about "the Catholic pantheon of saints." Yikes!

Nominalism and Ideology

Nominalism is a movement within the late Medieval (Western/Latin/Roman) Church that stressed the priority of will over intellect (or mind). It is usually associated with the names of William of Occam (famous for Occam's Razor: "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity") and Duns Scotus. It is called Nominalism because the names used to signify thins and qualities are just that -- names. These common names for qualities and things do not refer to universals (i.e., there is no transcendent idea of blue unifying the multitude of differently blue things, there is no transcendent idea of color to unify the multitude of different colors, etc.). It was supposed by earlier Medievals (following the pagan Platonic tradition) that there must be a transcendent idea of color, otherwise the unity of the many intelligible colors would fall apart: what is the ground of calling all these colors colors if they are not unified in a timeless intelligible idea of color-as-such? For Nominalists, "color" or any other so-called "universal" is simply a name, something we do with our tongue and vocal cords and air: the names are convenient shorthands for organizing our experience into unities that only exist in our minds and in our speech -- these unities do not exist out there.

This also applies to the concept of the Good.

In terms of what that means for what things are (ontology), this means that there are no common natures -- you and I do not share a common human nature, but are rather radically individual bodies; politically speaking, this means that there is no common good: the vocalization "good" is simply the name we give to certain kinds of external conformities of will: if the will of the king is that you rise at five AM to offer incense to an image of him, then doing that is good, and not doing that is bad (unless there is a higher, divine will that trumps the king's). 

Now, this means that the mind cannot discern what is good transcendent of positive wills involved. There is no transcendent Good independent of the wills of men and the Will of God. God, in this model, can even will to hate Himself, and will that His creatures do the same, and then change it -- because there is nothing above God, in this model, and there is no idea of the Good internal to His Nature.

One can see how this leads to a horrible kind of Nihilsm. It also, I think, means that there cannot be philosophy in any classical sense of the term, but instead there can be only ideology. 

Under such a conception of life and human wills, the only option, for those whose wills are set to peace, for those whose appetite is for traquility rather than conflict, is to admit that there are multiple ends that variously satisfy and fulfil many different people, and that there is no singular end of human life that is natively the good of human life as such that can be thus commended to ("foisted on") others, and to recommend a kind of pluralism.

Nominalism + Appetite for Peace = Liberalism.

Lord Ahmed Disciplined

Read about it here. HT: Joe.

Conversations as Metaphors

I am in class at the moment: a visiting professor just mentioned an AAR meeting that brought up the theme of sexuality, and that the speakers at the conference weren't getting into it the way that some members of the audience wanted them to -- the visiting lecturer then said:

" ...lots of people in the room were fighting to be included in the conversation..."

Doesn't that make it sound like they're not really interested in having a conversation, but something else? Is it really that people weren't being listened to, or was it something else?

The Future Will Be Pagan

Public Orthodoxy and Private Heresy

From a New York Times article (here):

When religious commitments are more comprehensive and religious institutions more resilient, faith is more likely to call people out of private loyalties to public purposes, more likely to inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, more likely to inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether. But as orthodoxies weaken, churches split and their former adherents mix and match elements of various traditions to fit their preferences, religion is more likely to become indistinguishable from personal and ideological self-interest.

Interesting.

Peace and Pluralism in Egypt

I very much would like an explanation for things like this that would permit me to not lower my opinion of Islam further.

To be fair, the kid should not have been distributing that kind of material, but the reaction...way over the top...off the charts over the top.

Striving for Righteousness

He who follows righteousness and mercy

            finds life, righteousness, and honor.

--Prov. 21: 21

The plain sense of this verse is completely at odds with any notion of total depravity. I'm just sayin'.