First third of a video by Mr. Zod against CSL as Apologist ·
Same Video on CSL as Apologist, Roughly Up to Rest of First Half ·
Coming to Lunatic, Liar or Lord in the End ... and Breaking Off, as Comments Get Invisible ·
Lunatic, Liar or Lord ... Resuming
Same video by Zod.
14:33 Treat one person similar to the other.
Well, that's the thing. IF this is a valid universal obligation, the problem for Christianity or any Theism (what he became Atheist about) is, "why is God" (seemingly) "not taking advantage of omnipotence to get doing that?"
BUT, if it is a valid universal obligation, the problem for Materialist Atheism is, how do atoms in brains come across universal valid obligations?
And before you say "there are exceptions" that's not what I mean by universal valid obligations, these can be conditional and can include room for exceptions.
15:00 The problem isn't, how we do that.
Given we have reason, given we have a reason that applies to obligations and not just facts, it's clearly possible.
The problem is, in a Materialist and Atheist universe, how do we get either a reason or that reason applying to obligations?
What is the
ontological status of fairness?
CSL had a point that if it's just a very commonly shared preference among men, like everyone agrees it is at least that, but if it's just that, and that could be explained by evolution, why should someone sacrifice his other preferences, that might be stronger, to this one?
Concretely, one Epstein seems to have thought of it is a commonly shared preference, and he thought of certain other preferences as more interesting to him.
And, no, he was not known to be a Theist and he certainly was known to promote Evolution, among his philanthropic funding, yes, some went to medical expenses for the poor, but some to fund Evolution. CSL saw this coming.
15:39 The problem is, any Materialistic
ontology of the straight line reduces the straight line to a preference.
Again, CSL basically predicted Epstein.
And by the way, he doesn't identify the straight line with God, more like God's reflection in each human man, including an Atheist.
So, he would object to Eric Hovind's asking "how does an Atheist know what's right?" as trying to solve two problems at (apparently) "one" question.
What universe we exist in and what universe someone believes in are two different things. In either universe, there are Christians and Atheists. But Atheism doesn't make sense of that.
16:03 "the universe doesn't think"
That's taking Atheism for granted, not just against Christianity, but even against Pantheism.
In a Theistic view, the universe is in the hands of Someone Who Thinks. (In a Pantheistic one, the universe itself and each being in it is that one, CSL has other arguments against Pantheism, but you are still on chapter 4 of Miracles, before that one).
In an Atheistic view, explain "the concept of treating people equally" (even if it's not to your immediate advantage) as anything we are
obliged to, whether we like or not.
An Atheist in a Christian Universe can be explained as fair, because God created him such that being unfair would be going against his (better) grain (now some people fall below that, and all do on occasions).
A Christian in an Atheist universe dying as kind of a martyr for fairness, can only be explained as "Darwin award" (slang for "less fit" eliminating themselves), because, on Materialistic views, there is nothing in it in fairness apart from the rewards it can get you from people sharing the preference.
But the problem is, if fairness cannot warrant martyrdom, how much hardship can you take for it before it's a hardship too many?
And another problem, if a fake show of fairness can earn you the same awards, but fairness can't, why not tweak fairness to that circumstance?
To some judges "the victim was black" means less exoneration and "the victim was Nazi" means more such*, but judges are in themselves a testimony to mankind already in some way believing in some kind of fairness. They are a thing distinct from raw power. Now, they do wield more raw power than people who can stand before judges and not pay excellent lawyers. But Epstein was from a family that always could pay excellent lawyers.
How is a man more powerful than lots of courtrooms to be held to fairness? One option is, if he believes in Heaven and Hell. But that option also involves a distinct possibility of him sponsoring Christian preachers to tell the general public of Heaven and Hell, and to discourage belief in for instance "a universe that doesn't think" or "we evolved from beings close to amoebas or at least close to yeast cells" (procaryote and eucaryote ancestry, give or take my accuracy, according to Evolution).
Now, in this context, a certain man called Andrew Carnegie, who died more than 100 years ago, wanted to do business unhampered by certain concepts of fairness (like anti-usury "prejudice" or Sherman act). Guess what he promoted, while donating to universities? Well, Evolution. The idea that our idea of fairness is an evolved preference, and that evolution happens in ways that can change preferences. How do you impose fairness on a transhumanist, in argument?
16:11 "it just lacks justice"
Well, exactly. CSL's fall into Atheism was about a "universe" that "lacks justice" and therefore isn't in the hands of a
just creator and ruler.
I don't think CSL's case was unique, even if it wasn't your case.
And I think it is especially prone to happen in people who from Christian (or any Theism with a strong concept of God's justice) go Atheist in years like late preteens or early teens.
Again, where is the sense, in such a universe, that we owe justice in
any deeper sense than owning our turn at the beer round in order to keep our friends at the pub?
But that round of beer in the pub only exists, like courtrooms and judges, because a sense of justice is deeply anchored in man.
And exploring that, CSL abandoned Atheism for Hegel's Absolute, Hegel's Absolute for God, and God in a very general sense for the God of Christian Revelation, but that last conversion had another reason, which you'll come to, I hope.
Because, we are not just before the practical problem of maintaining a sense of justice without Christian monarchs, but also of the theoretical one of explaining this fanatic or nearly taste for justice in a being which is known to like being unjust when that gives himself pleasure or advantages prone for future pleasures.
"I can see that as an emotional 16:43 outburst. Uh it does nothing to get you 16:45 toward God."
In the immediate, it got a very young Jack or Clive
away from God.
The reason CSL
ultimately thought it did is a testimony to his capacity to say "wait a minute, that wasn't quite consistent on my part, was it?"
A Christian expects the universe to be,
ultimately fair. An Atheist can explain the
Christian expectation as a piece of mythology. But what does he do with the motivation behind the Christian expectation, namely, again, the human taste for justice? Because without it, the mythology wouldn't exist even as wishful thinking, because there would be no such wish.
Again, the universe is not something we observe at close hand, it's something we for the most part deduce. And deduction is about the reasons being valid as such, like valid syllogisms, not just where you observe, but next door behind a wall, and as far away as Sirius or Aldebaran. Reason, like justice, is a thing that man can oppose from passion, but also obey against passions, and both are things the validity of which cannot be simply observed at close hand, because the validity in question is one way beyond observation at close hand.
17:42 "Atheist in any meaningful sense"
He was as much an Atheist as Swinburn and as Percy Byshe Shelley.
He was as much an Atheist as Epicure.
This Atheism has some historic precedence over a combination of Darwin and Russell, which seems more like your
teapot.
18:15 "a narrow group of stupid atheists"
May have become narrow after 9/11 and New Atheism being the go to towted over the internet forums and vlogs and blogs perhaps too, but those Atheists were the guys who prepared the road for Darwin. And plenty of the guys who had just accepted Darwin the decades after he published.
"to 18:32 reduce that very rational and meaningful 18:36 form of anger"
When AronRa** promotes abortion, that anger is very far from either rational or meaningful.
It's too bad Secularist Pro-Lifers don't see contraception as the stupidity it is (from one generation to the next or one after that, it's like not paying your round, but hoping others will pay the round when you turn up next weekend), but there are even Atheists who realise abortion is deeply irrational and meaningless. It's wanton destruction, for which there may always be some kind of sentimental motive,
as for so many other murders. And like less immediately destructive contraception, it's also stupid.
18:56 Yeah, right ... opposing abortion is "theocratic" ...
On a purely "rational" Atheist view, what's wrong with Theocracy?
Oh, it's theoretically incorrect to believe in God? OK, so a government becomes responsible, not for what it can provide in terms of security for people to enjoy the lives they can form, but to abstract truth ...
and on top of that, Atheism is by now (since when?) so blatantly known to be true that the government cannot have an excuse (except stupidity, which is inexcusible in government) to believe otherwise.
I don't see how either of them would flow from an Atheistic world view. I do see how they both flow from modern Atheism being a reaction against and offshot off Christianity, in a passionate rejection of the origin.
19:15 It becomes blatantly obvious to me, that the
only Atheists you take seriously yourself are modern Left Leaning Evolution based ones, with a heavy dose of Russell, isn't that your
teapot?
CSL was an Atheist at a time when Churchill was an Atheist. At a time when the Victorian court was Atheist. Not in the sense of boycotting the Church of England, but in the sense of believing it was myth and ceremony, with no real doctrine on the universe and no real doctrine of justice to offer.
Get a documentary on how at the Victorian court a certain Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was raised, at the Victorian court. You might like to read up in the complaint by a younger brother of a now Prince of Wales, that younger brother being married to a Meghan. I specifically mean the school years in this case.
Now, recall, the first full blooded intellectual input CSL had of Atheism was a former headmaster of a school in that kingdom, to which Ireland then belonged, not a current one in the US.
And before you think that you are a better Atheist than CSL ever was, how about asking why the UK has so many more Atheists per capita than the US, and why it's the US and not the UK that has Creationist homeschoolers or Pro-Life politicians. How come the late Charlie Kirk is from Chicago and not from Chichester or Glasgow?
No, Atheism as such may be a prerequisite for certain left wing fads today, like abortion, but it has nothing to offer any movement dedicated to Social or Personal Justice as an added inspiration for such goals over an above Christianity. It flourishes in the kind of upper class environment that CSL portrayed as Charn. It doesn't exactly flourish quite as well in rural areas, like Beaversdam.
19:59 No, he absolutely didn't say "Atheists are poorely read" ...
He did say they have to be careful about what they read. There are more than one way to be so.
One is reading certain things not at all. But another is reading them "with dampers" ... being prepared one is going to meet "Christian propaganda" and determined to not be carried off by it (like quite a lot of people read Narnia, if from Atheist backgrounds).
But apart from that, he was unusually well read, and one can be lots less well read and still not poorely read, so, one could make one's way around those books (to which nowadays Seven Chronicles of Narnia also belong) without being poorely read.
It was more of a friendly tip. If you are
determined to find Milton's Satan a heroic rebel against a Cosmic tyrant, best way is to not read Paradise Lost. BUT the second best way is to read Paradise Lost after reading loads of Byron or (more recently) Sandemo.***
20:06 Oh, he certainly wasn't saying there was no popular culture or science books to inspire Atheism.
Especially contemporary ones.
He was speaking mainly of older and mainly narrative prose, epics, novels, drama, classic views of things. If you wish people to go on exploring the last issue of Nature, he'd obviously agree that that is pretty safe reading for Atheists.
But you are yourself (judging from a comment near
3:14 on this video) not too keen on allowing your listeners to explore Paradise Lost after CSL's input without yours.
20:49 CSL wasn't saying what you attribute to him.
As I recall ... yes, I went back to 19:50 to check ... it is in
Surprised by Joy.
Now, if you had actually read the book, as opposed to just reading the quote out of context, you would be very well aware that CSL was far from saying Atheists have to be illiterate. The next few lines or sentences, which I don't recall in detail, give some indications on what Atheists can safely read.
He had himself examplified in earlier chapters.
The Golden Bough is a classic for Atheists. Freud has come to the aid of Frazer. If you are an Atheist, lots of modern pop culture is your friend. Go to Greek and Norse myth with the attitude Atheists inherited from late Protestants that
nothing in these stories happened
anything like what the story looks like, and those Pagan stories are a great
Atheism inspiring perspective on Christianity.
And obviously, it's not just psychology and economics, but also some hard science stuff that will invariably, in modern media not specifically niched for Christians be presented in an Atheist way. Anything like that is obviously safe reading for an Atheist wanting to stay such, and CSL very well knew that and said so. But somehow you seem to agree with him, since you seem to want Atheists to stay clear of CSL, other than, possibly, the author of Narnian Chronicles. And if you read them, you'd obviously be well adviced to get in with lots of feminism (ready to be indignated about the Problem of Susan) and have your Atheist answers ready about points that LWW, PC or SC may raise about Christian faith as belief beyond immediate rational confirmation. It may ruin your pleasure, but ... why would that stop an Atheist from imposing those precautions?
24:33 There is a huge difference between "divine to some extent" in the sense a Hindu could consider himself as (part of) Brahman, and saying "before Abraham was, I AM" in a context of the Hebrew religion, of Second Temple Judaism, which, believe it or not, was not the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.
I would be as deluded if I accepted to say I was Elijah. I recall a childhood in Vienna with busses and trams, with shirts and trousers. And Christmas celebrations. I do not recall a childhood in a world where you typically wear a tunic reaching to the ankles and a coat about as long with no buttons, but held together around you by the belt ... or you had the belt below it if you wanted the coat closer. Nor do I recall rumours of a city 419 km to the NW where they worshipped Baal and had sacrifices to Moloch, even before importing them to my own country, and that this Tyre 419 km to the NW was at the Mediterranean. No, I would be a "poached egg" case if I pretended to be Elijah.
Same thing is true of a claim of being the God who created and made promises to Abraham. If that's not what you are, you can't reasonably be less than mad for saying it.
25:22 Noting your quote is from
Mere Christianity and not from (the second part of)
Miracles.
In Miracles, which I anyway recall better, CSL goes into detail on why the Gospels are good biography.
Because, if not, someone in the first C. had discovered the art of modern realistic novel writing.
I'd qualify that, he means inclusion of plot irrelevant and even mood irrelevant matter of fact minor details.
The modern novel also has a length and wordiness of description (usually) that wasn't feasible for papyrus based° writings.
26:08 A little bit deluded or a little bit sleazy are also incompatible with great, but just human, moral teacher.
You know, a version pretty popular at the Victorian court.
[comments of mine started to disappear, so I take a break, but next comment will deal with exorbitant and onesided demands for nuance without providing clear examples of missed such]
* In case you do not catch my drift, that is, on my view,
unfair. In peace time, what violence or threat someone showed before being killed should neither be compounded with nor contrasted with either skin colour or "hair colour bald" ** An Anti-Theist with loads of anger, sometimes
at least verbally directed against God rather than against Christians. Also, a politician. *** Back in February 6th, two days after the video came out, or the day before even, I posted a comment at
3:14 about Zod's view on the matter, he still hasn't told me who has been saying his stuff between Byron and back to Milton (see
First third of a video by Mr. Zod against CSL as Apologist). It can be mentioned, I haven't read Paradise Lost myself. ° And hand written.
