And what if not all disjuncts are settled?

Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?

What if future contingents do not all have truth values?

What if the future choices of free agents are not settled until the choices are made?

If the choices of free agents - God included - help settle what world we are in, rather than the other way around?

Things we can never know we can merely believe, unless we can abstain.

And if we cannot abstain are we not committed to faith?

So much more is faith than people realize, especially liberal cheerleaders for physicalism and natural sciences.

a contingentia mundi

What need not exist cannot and would not unless made to do so by something that cannot not exist.

Alternatively, only what cannot not exist can exist without being made to do so by something other than itself that cannot not exist.

A crucial premise in any argument for the existence of God a contingentia mundi.

Contemporary atheism supposes it is false, and that to the contrary contingent things, a whole world of contingent things, or a contingent (possible but not necessary) world can exist without being made to do so by anything necessary.

(Some put the point by saying existence is de trop or absurd.)

Or at any rate they refuse to believe otherwise absent proof.

But if you can prove everything you're going in a circle, someone wise once said.

And anyway nobody can prove most of the philosophically interesting - indeed crucial - claims by which we live.

People who go in for that sort of thing might even claim the thing is epistemologically basic.

Another age would have said self-evident.

Plantinga once suggested the existence of God, itself, be regarded as epistemologically basic.

That might be a bridge too far.

Gratitude without providence

Or, "Count your blessings and be glad of them" for atheists.

Epicurus advises that in old age, infirmity, or ill health we take pleasure in the grateful recollection of past times of pleasure and happiness, rather than bemoaning our current miseries or short and awful prospects.

But there is no providence in Epicurus' view, and so this is not a case of being grateful to, but only of being grateful that.

There need not be anyone to thank, you see.

And that is a most interesting observation, from a man who died so painfully.

The Mill on the Floss

Reading the introductory matter in a 1981 paperback, World Classics edition, from the Oxford University Press, I am put in mind that your true religious believer disbelieves in all Gods, gods, conceptions of God, and conceptions of gods, save his own.

It seems George Eliot, Mary Anne Evans, abandoned any style of orthodox Christianity in her early twenties for some form of Protestant religious liberalism.

She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and the partly biographical introduction says she remained deeply religious all her life, urging people to find consolation and guidance in The Imitation of Christ.

Your true atheist rejects all gods or Gods, disbelieving in them as according to some conceptions and rejecting other conceptions as ballocks.

Heather throws a rag, and Don Lemon makes the obvious point that the people in that church were already praying

Toxic feminist misandry of the left at C&L.

Texas Shooting? Paul Ryan Blames 'Secular Left' For 'Dividing America'

She quotes Ryan from TPM, thus.

“[Thoughts and prayers] is the right thing to do in moments like this because, you know what? Prayer works,” he said. 

“And I know you believe that and I believe that and when you hear the secular left doing this, think, no wonder you have so much polarization and disunity in this country when people think like that.”

And her reply?

. . . toxic masculinity in the Air Force had them look the other way when a wife beater and child skull-cracking stepdad should have had red flags all over his background check. 

And now another 26 people have been shot by a semi-automatic rifle.

At some point, mark my words, the courts are going to wake up to those words in the Second Amendment -- "well-regulated" -- and start regulating the FK out of semi-automatic weapons. 

It's past time.

Don Lemon: ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Didn’t Prevent TX Shooting — ‘They Were Already Praying’

I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment. 

I’ll say that again. 

I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment. 

I grew up with hunters, family members, friends, all around me. Louisiana it’s all about hunting.

I also think responsible adults should be able to protect their homes, their property and themselves. 

But think about this. 

How many guns and of what caliber does one person need? 

Does a civilian really need an arsenal? 

Does a civilian really need body armor?

As for Ryan, he was pleased to play the religion card against the gun controllers.

He and other GOP leaders have been castigated for offering prayers for the dead rather than action to protect the living.

Heather was right about this much.

He responded on Laura Ingraham's show by changing the subject and appealing to a stereotype popular on the right, claiming the atheist gun-controlling left doesn't understanding good Christian folks and is responsible for there being "so much polarization and disunity in this country".

“It’s disappointing, it’s sad, and this is what you’ll get from the far secular left. People who do not have faith don’t understand faith, I guess I’d have to say. And it is the right thing to do is to pray in moments like this, because you know what? Prayer works. And I know you believe that, and I believe that and when you hear the secular left doing this thing, it’s no wonder you have so much polarization and disunity in this country when people think like that.”

Sure, he called them faithless and secular and did not use the world "atheists", but all the same he went there and that's what he meant.

As to that, see this.

Scroll down pretty far.

Religiously unaffiliated in 2014 split 61% Dem/Lean Dem to 25% GOP/Lean GOP.

But see this, too.

29% of Dem/Dem leaners in 2016 were religiously unaffiliated, as compared to 12% of Repubs/Repub leaners.

Even before the Renaissance

Inferno, Canto X.

Dante's contemporary references all seem so out of place in this work.

A pair of 13th Century Florentine Epicureans is introduced.

Were they actual atheists?

Did they believe, of the pagan gods, what Epicurus did?

What did they believe of the Christian God?

Four centuries before Gassendi and Hobbes.

Five before La Mettrie, Helvetius, and Holbach.

Yet another idiotic remark of Holbach

Ce sont des fanatiques, des prêtres et des ignorans, qui font les revolutions ; les personnes éclairées, désintéressées et sensées, sont toujours amies du repos.

And here is a stupid non sequitur with a baleful future.

[I]l est aisé de voir que ce sont en particulier les préjugés religieux qui ont corrompu la politique et la morale.

Ne sont-ce pas des idées religieuses et surnaturelles qui firent regarder les souverains comme des dieux?

C’est donc la religion qui fit éclore les despotes et les tyrans[.]

Yes, these are harmful religious ideas.

Are they not also harmful political ideas?

And perhaps there are also political ideas that are not religious, but are nevertheless harmful?

See Fascism, Nazism, Communism.

The most ridiculous thing ever written by a philosophe?

Holbach, Le Christianisme dévoile, 1766.

Lettre de l’auteur à Monsieur.

Les livres ne sont faits que pour la partie d’une nation, que ses circonstances, son éducation, ses sentimens, mettent au-dessus du crime.

More.

Vous n’êtes point, monsieur, du nombre de ces penseurs pusillanimes, qui croyent que la vérité soit capable de nuire : elle ne nuit qu’à ceux qui trompent les hommes, et elle sera toujours utile au reste du genre humain.

Tout a dû vous convaincre depuis long-tems, que tous les maux, dont notre espéce est affligée, ne viennent que de nos erreurs, de nos intérêts mal entendus, de nos préjugés, des idées fausses que nous attachons aux objets.

God and fate

The following view would, I think, be acceptable to most, though not all, Western theists.

God exists necessarily and is necessarily whatever he is, including omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, perfectly just and moral and righteous.

But then how do things stand regarding God, so understood, and fate, whose other names are contingency and sometimes chance?

In the metaphysical sense, God could have created any possible world and, as modal metaphysicians might put it, in each possible world God creates exactly that world.

So God is, like everyone and everything else, the captive of contingency.

What he actually does, including which world he creates - it being understood that in each world God creates only its creatures, whatever is contingent within it - , depends upon which world is actual.

And not the other way around.

It is Whirl that rules, fate or chance, pure, baseless contingency.

It is fate that rules God, and not the other way around.

And the point is not altered if the set of worlds God could create, consistent with all aspects of his nature, is a proper subset of the set of all metaphysically possible worlds.

Not even if it's a unit set.

Or if it's not.

Though this is not how believing theists familiar with these and related issues in the philosophy of religion see things.

Too, these remarks are not without bearing on the free will defense, where both God and humans, for theist libertarians, escape fate and contingency by a free choice that, not determined by which world is actual, determines which is the actual world - God, by his nature, choosing the best he can and humans, by their nature, choosing not that.

A senseless though popular view among Christian theists, though of doubtful consistency with the at least equally popular argument a contigentia mundi, many of whom take it to be a successful refutation of the anti-theist argument from evil.

Reflections provoked by The Hunchback.

And Hugo's view?

Or Claude Frollo's?

Hugo in his preface says the entire work is based on the idea of fate.

Pretty dark, really

Just what was Conrad up to in his Heart of Darkness, 1899.

Yes, yes.

He opposed the massive hypocrisy of imperialism.

But not necessarily imperialism, nor even colonialism, judging just by this book.

Though obviously he saw and loathed all the horror of the Congo.

Via this book, he and white people in general have nevertheless been angrily denounced for racism.

As to the latter, racism - specifically, the idea of the racial inferiority of blacks to whites - has historically been used as an excuse for the most unspeakable crimes and the most inhuman rapacity.

That doesn't make it false, though it may well be that.

And it is certainly possible Conrad believed in the racial inferiority of blacks without for a moment buying it as an excuse.

In any case, he was a profound pessimist, atheist, amoralist, and even nihilist.

So what was he up to?

And a very fine writer.

In lieu of objective goodness

Goodness is subjective and relative, and right and wrong are a hoax.

So God's choice cannot follow objective value but only his own subjective desire.

So why does God desire what he desires?

Whence God's utility curve, so to speak?

How can it be necessarily the utility curve that a necessary and perfect being necessarily has?

If that makes no sense, God cannot be a person, and he cannot choose a world, and he cannot prefer one thing to another.

On Fideism

Many of the most fundamental things we believe, we believe without proof.

The external world, the past, the future, other minds, the general reliability of memory, that the future will resemble the past, that logic as we know it is reliable, and so on and on.

Why not God?

Especially me, with my crowded and colorful ontology of abstracta, possibilia, and immateria.

Which is not to say I have not, at various parts of my life, accepted arguments for God.

The argument a contingentia mundi, for example.

Or from the possibility of a necessary being.

But I don't actually see that it makes any practical difference.

No more than believing that there are sets, or propositions, or properties, say.

On hearing my granddaughter, age 12 today, practice the violin.

The Hallelujah Chorus.

It's not even Christmas.

It's her birthday.

The things skeptics say we believe without proof optimists describe as self-evident.

Look up Plantiga and whether the existence of God is self-evident.

And the picture of God presented by that beautiful chorus is wholly wrong.

The idea of God as a king and lawgiver derives from the mythology of the Bible, and is religious fiction with no basis in fact.

In fact, it is by no means clear that or why an infinite, necessary, perfect, immutable, eternal being would create a world of contingency, imperfection, and constant change, at all.

Let alone then ape a needy human monarch, commanding and threatening and posturing like some pathetic Trump.

Faith and nihilism

Assad finds Morck's nihilism (q.v.) unendurable, and fallaciously qualifies it, a matter of belief as is physics or economics or anything at all, including religion, as a faith in competition with his own Islam.

Assad complains, as believers in their childish self-centeredness do, that Carl's unbelief is arrogant and insulting to him personally, not at all seeing that historically and globally, and even in his own intrusive and demanding relationship to Carl, the shoe is and has nearly (but not quite) always been on quite the other foot.

Department Q.

The "you're another" defense

It is common for atheists with insignificant training in philosophy - or maybe they're just not very bright - to take natural science as the gold standard for rationality, truth, credibility, and unquestionable authority.

Kala Dandekar, a fascinating character in Sense8, was if not the first then the most amusing person to make an impertinent argument, not least because of her Hindu spin.

Challenged in her Hinduism by the German Wolfgang Bogdanow, an atheist whose reflexive deference to science is both uncritical and unshakable, she snaps at him that his faith in the absurdities of physics is no more rationally respectable than hers in Ganesha.

It is said there is going to be a Sense8 Christmas special this month, and a new season this coming year.

Les Miserables

Hugo spends about the first hundred pages or so of Les Miserables portraying for us the saintliness of Monseigneur Bienvenu, Bishop Myriel of Digne.

He declaims against atheism, which he identifies with Epicurus, Hobbes, and a vision of human life as an egoist war of all against all, and urges an empty theology that is not even a bare theism, and a view of Christ, poverty, and goodness that hears only Jesus's command to give all you have to the poor.

It's rather slow going, but then our author moves on and brilliantly tells the story of Jean Valjean's early life, crime, punishment, early days after his release, and rescue from his profound and repulsive badness by the brave and selfless Bienvenu.

Valjean as a young man lives with and is the sole support of his widowed young sister and her seven children, one a mere infant.

He is an illiterate and unskilled workman relying on day labor for all.

In the midst of one harsh winter there is no work and a day comes when there is nothing for the family to eat, literally nothing.

Valjean, consumed with hunger and desperation, punches through the glass window of a bakery and runs off with a loaf of bread.

The baker pursues and spreads alarm, and he is overtaken and captured.

Within days he is sent in chains to the galleys, sentenced to five years in conditions of inexpressible horror four attempts at escape from which earn him extension of his sentence to 19 years.

Hugo in words and Valjean wordlessly in his heart agree the theft was wrong, but damn society's heartlessness for the poverty and hunger that occasioned it and the appalling injustice of such punishment, and Valjean is crushed into remorseless hatred of society, mankind, and the whole creation.

Hugo ties that same heartless cruelty of society, that appalling punishment, and the profoundly vicious criminality of Valjean they have brought about, all three, to the vision of atheism, or atheist vision of the world, described above.

There is a brief section of those first hundred or so pages on Bienvenu in which the bishop visits a dying old revolutionary.

The fierce man of the people repudiates atheism and the bishop accepts the legitimacy of the Revolution, even conceding his own moral inferiority to the dying hero.

When he is self-righteous, religious, sentimental, moralistic, or even merely political, Hugo is awful.

But he is all the same a magnificent talent, and his narrations of incidents, actions, and events, as well as his revelations of character in them, are wonderful and compelling.

I have read Les Miserables unabridged in English twice and French once.

I am reading it again.

Ideology and religion

As atheism is to religion, so is political realism to secular ideology.

As religions, though all blather, vary from benign to genocidal or democidal, so too are and do secular political ideas.

The champ for devastation in the 20th Century was the entire family of Marxism-Leninism.

So far, Islam is tops in the 21st Century, though it's running well behind the reds.

That could change quickly, if they laid hands on nukes.

Reading that stupid red, Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror.

Orange is the new black

Jeez, really?

Netflix cannot resist putting extraordinary doses of porn, especially queer porn, into their shows, eh?

Sure, not all of them.

But a lot.

And the heroine is of course a secular humanist whose nemesis is a vicious and ignorant hillbilly who, after 5 abortions and out of personal resentment, accidentally becomes a heroine of the anti-abortionist Protestant Christian right and herself a true hillbilly believer.

And Catholicism?

It's represented by a lefty nun imprisoned for some sort of peacenik crime and a crowd of ignorant Hispanics devoted to spells and potions.

Good show, though.

Bah, humbug!

Back to substance dualism, or Berkelian idealism.

Or anyway the Augustinian/Platonic conception of the soul.

The immateriality of the self, the Ego, seems to me unnatural to deny.

No version of epiphenomenalism or event or property dualism seems credible to me.

Nor any Aristotelian/Thomist - or neo-Thomist - conception of the soul.

So, an atheist anti-physicalism, then.

And anti-nominalism.

Well, why not?

I could never give up appearances, propositions, properties, numbers, sets, or possibilia, anyway, and a whole lot more.

Given all those ontological commitments, why balk at souls?

Atheism

Atheism is where you are left when the concept of a necessary being breaks down in the face of a unique and contingent actual world.

But even then it can seem unacceptable that an arbitrary one contingent world could alone exist, while all others do not.

And so we get David Lewis.

But if the idea is acceptable that all possible worlds exist, then there is no need to shipwreck the idea of a necessary being on the reef of an unaccountable choice.

What an interesting thought.

Well, at this hour, anyway.

Too bad the idea has always struck me as wrong.

"Congress shall make no law . . . . "

His originalism is such ballocks.

Justice Antonin Scalia Tells Audience That the Constitution Favors Religion Over Atheism

So a federal law something like this would actually be constitutional?

The Countries Where They Kill You for Being an Atheist

Sure, the constitution does not forbid every form of political insanity.

Not even some of the forms struck down from US law in its name.

But I'm pretty sure it does forbid these.

And I think some court cases have (mistakenly relying on incorporation, which Scalia actually accepts) struck these down.

In at least seven U.S. states, constitutional provisions are in place that bar atheists from public office and one state, Arkansas, has a law that bars an atheist from testifying as a witness at a trial, the report said.