I was surprised at the reaction to the President’s Prayer Meeting comments this past week in which he related some of Christianity’s historic violence to contextualize what is likely an ephemeral eruption of Islamic extremism practiced by a much smaller percentage of that religion’s adherents than once found myriad and diverse cause to purvey violence under the umbrella of the Christian crusades. I thought his contention that bad people often use religion to do bad things, was at worst by turns both apt and innocuous rhetoric.
The overwhelming masses of self-identifying religious people have always gravitated to the doctrines of peace found in their respective manuscripts, rather than the few spastic calls to violence by God in (his?) fits of pique. It’s just in this age of technology and potent weapons, together with the force magnifier of instant universal media, a few fanatics or frauds, on either side, can parlay acts of barbarism inflicted on a few, or one, into a Potemkin Village of world-wide terror threat in order to serve or advance their respective objectives. If anything, the President may have been attempting to suggest that since the transition from the dark to the enlightened age, rational man’s penchant for religious conversion or acting as realtors for God by way of military conquest, may have assumed it’s more correct and appropriate aspect as secular ambition which simply employs religion to convince unthinking recruits they are cannon fodder for a “higher purpose”. The peaceful majority of rational humanity has come to understand from reason, and even scripture, that God’s mythical omnipotent lethal capability requires no human agency for His will to be done on earth. If he wants people killed, he is perfectly capable of doing it himself. Thus, by force of historic evidence it appears, as with politics, that all warfare is local, and is empirically entirely terrestrial. So, let’s put this “religious war” stuff to rest.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Thomas Sowell and Questions
Although I have an on-going interest in the subject of 9/11, I recently quite accidentally stumbled across months old articles by Thomas Sowell, in which he asserted in one that the certitude of “facts” are being ignored by 9/11 Truther’s, and in the second that antipathy towards the torture regime illegally employed by our government must be mitigated by what ‘might’ have happened without it‘s saving grace.
I must admit to once admiring the intellectual audacity that made him an outlier academic in our black community. He attacked attitudes and beliefs which may possibly have been too routinely stipulated to by a thoughtless consensus suborned by what he calls “race hustlers”. The questioning of any philosophy or dogma that congeals for whatever reason into an authoritative creed, is always healthy. But Mr. Sowell, like other mortals are wont to do, has adopted an affinity for his own conclusions which seem to me to have been transmuted into the requirements of betrothed loyalty rather than the otherwise expected skepticism which might be called the mother of intellectual invention.
My intention today is not to read the role of anomalies that are undeniably part and parcel of the 9/11 scenario, but to inquire why a supposedly inquisitive academic can so blithely suggest that their existence [the anomalies] is so mundane and inevitable in a momentous event that their apportioned relevance to the official version of truth is, and must be, accessed as only ignoble and lunatic flotsam? Why wouldn’t any concerned citizen desire to assuage such nagging discomfort engendered by a scenario that has rendered so many unalienable constitutional expectations absolutely and fundamentally ‘conditional‘? What elocution or publication by government concerning the events of 9/11 meets any standard which can wear the garment called “proof”? No, when contemplated, our modern Council of Nicaea, like it’s predecessor, was never impaneled to conduct a process to ‘prove’ anything, but rather to ordain the acquiescence of a universal liturgy. Isn’t this procedurally and logically similar to Mr. Sowell’s other supposed “hustle”? And isn’t this post hoc syllogism molded from the proof-less liturgy and the awkward, hypocritical justification for our ‘good torture’?
Though not as old or as educated as Mr. Sowell I am nonetheless a “senior citizen”, and believe am as entitled as any other to opinionate on the peculiarities of human nature, of which I don’t see a special category for Americans. When confronted by the inane question, “Do you think our leaders would kill 3000 of our own citizens?”, I don’t believe I’m displaying any actionable mental impairment to speculate that those possessing an agenda propped up by the flimsy lies justifying the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing murder of millions of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children, don’t especially distinguish the value of a comparatively few American lives, even if circumspect for practical political reasons, in how they gamble them. They didn’t in the bloody, pointless, and as yet inadequately legitimized adventure in Vietnam, and they don’t now. If history teaches anything, there are always those who think their greatness and separation from the masses, their right to rule and lead, is sourced in a ruthless vision that can’t be comprehended, only mule-d along by “little people”. There is a different, indifferent morality for Supermen obviously not profitably serviced by the certitude of facts.
To this day I am baffled by the magnitude of the “terrorists” success and the total abjectness of our failure on 9/11. Unimpeded by a technologically and financially engorged security apparatus, and contrary to experience or practical imagination they allegedly destroyed big things with little things, and sowed widespread confusion in settled scientific disciplines. You’d think, regarding those holding positions of pertinent responsibility, such upset and failure would be perceived as an incentive to lie by those examiners familiar with human nature. But not by Mr. Sowell, who has repeatedly questioned orthodoxy on many other fronts.
What is this unusual force that prevents inquisitive people from being normally inquisitive? Why in a political culture constructed at its inception to mechanically encourage, if not force, the distrust of the tendencies of those borrowing government power, is there such fervent retreat from associating failed wars with questionable beginnings?
It may be that the continuity of reward for philosophical or ideological loyalties calcifies the ability to question those loyalties. Or so once spake Thomas Sowell.
I must admit to once admiring the intellectual audacity that made him an outlier academic in our black community. He attacked attitudes and beliefs which may possibly have been too routinely stipulated to by a thoughtless consensus suborned by what he calls “race hustlers”. The questioning of any philosophy or dogma that congeals for whatever reason into an authoritative creed, is always healthy. But Mr. Sowell, like other mortals are wont to do, has adopted an affinity for his own conclusions which seem to me to have been transmuted into the requirements of betrothed loyalty rather than the otherwise expected skepticism which might be called the mother of intellectual invention.
My intention today is not to read the role of anomalies that are undeniably part and parcel of the 9/11 scenario, but to inquire why a supposedly inquisitive academic can so blithely suggest that their existence [the anomalies] is so mundane and inevitable in a momentous event that their apportioned relevance to the official version of truth is, and must be, accessed as only ignoble and lunatic flotsam? Why wouldn’t any concerned citizen desire to assuage such nagging discomfort engendered by a scenario that has rendered so many unalienable constitutional expectations absolutely and fundamentally ‘conditional‘? What elocution or publication by government concerning the events of 9/11 meets any standard which can wear the garment called “proof”? No, when contemplated, our modern Council of Nicaea, like it’s predecessor, was never impaneled to conduct a process to ‘prove’ anything, but rather to ordain the acquiescence of a universal liturgy. Isn’t this procedurally and logically similar to Mr. Sowell’s other supposed “hustle”? And isn’t this post hoc syllogism molded from the proof-less liturgy and the awkward, hypocritical justification for our ‘good torture’?
Though not as old or as educated as Mr. Sowell I am nonetheless a “senior citizen”, and believe am as entitled as any other to opinionate on the peculiarities of human nature, of which I don’t see a special category for Americans. When confronted by the inane question, “Do you think our leaders would kill 3000 of our own citizens?”, I don’t believe I’m displaying any actionable mental impairment to speculate that those possessing an agenda propped up by the flimsy lies justifying the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing murder of millions of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children, don’t especially distinguish the value of a comparatively few American lives, even if circumspect for practical political reasons, in how they gamble them. They didn’t in the bloody, pointless, and as yet inadequately legitimized adventure in Vietnam, and they don’t now. If history teaches anything, there are always those who think their greatness and separation from the masses, their right to rule and lead, is sourced in a ruthless vision that can’t be comprehended, only mule-d along by “little people”. There is a different, indifferent morality for Supermen obviously not profitably serviced by the certitude of facts.
To this day I am baffled by the magnitude of the “terrorists” success and the total abjectness of our failure on 9/11. Unimpeded by a technologically and financially engorged security apparatus, and contrary to experience or practical imagination they allegedly destroyed big things with little things, and sowed widespread confusion in settled scientific disciplines. You’d think, regarding those holding positions of pertinent responsibility, such upset and failure would be perceived as an incentive to lie by those examiners familiar with human nature. But not by Mr. Sowell, who has repeatedly questioned orthodoxy on many other fronts.
What is this unusual force that prevents inquisitive people from being normally inquisitive? Why in a political culture constructed at its inception to mechanically encourage, if not force, the distrust of the tendencies of those borrowing government power, is there such fervent retreat from associating failed wars with questionable beginnings?
It may be that the continuity of reward for philosophical or ideological loyalties calcifies the ability to question those loyalties. Or so once spake Thomas Sowell.
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