Civil Commotion

Though medical organizations are unanimous that neither IUDs nor the so-called ‘morning after’ pill are abortifacients, Wheaton College — Billy Graham’s alma mater, and Bart Ehrman’s — has elected to discontinue sponsoring health insurance for its students rather than ‘facilitate’ provision of contraception to them by writing a one-paragraph letter to Uncle Sam.

An opinion piece at Huffington Post gets the significance of the decision exactly right.

When Belief Becomes More Important Than People

[ … ]

Nonetheless, the College has made a profound choice — belief over people. While claiming a position that values life, the College has made choices that value the potential life of a possible fertilized egg over the actual lives of students who may well require insurance coverage in the present to avoid or treat life-threatening and health-compromising conditions. So in the name of fidelity to a theological belief, the College has prioritized potential human beings over actual ones.

I’m not saying theological beliefs are unimportant, but I am disturbed that in the name of Christianity, a college would put its principles over its people.

She should not be surprised. Conservative Christians believe that even wedding vows are expendable in the name of pleasing the Invisible Wizard, and forget entirely that moral principles are mutable and arise out of circumstance with the aim of preserving the tribe; they have forgotten the goal that their principles are meant to serve.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities

§374   Every society has a tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures at, least in its own imagination, as also to starve them. As an example of this sort of caricature we have our “criminal”. Within the aristocratic Roman order of values, the Jew was reduced to a caricature. Among artists, “the philistine and the bourgeois” become caricatures; while among pious people it is the heretics and among aristocrats, the plebeian. Among immoralists it is the moralist. Plato, for instance, in my books becomes a caricature.

This is what you get to listen to when you attend a Baptist seminary where facts don’t matter and the Bible is taken seriously.

I’d Rather Be A Saved Sinner than an Unfallen Angel

Today I’m scheduled to record a lecture on angels for a class this fall. As I prepared my notes two thoughts became clear to me: angels are remarkably mysterious beings and I wouldn’t want to be one. Yes, the Bible teaches that they have amazing “superhero” abilities that would be really cool to possess, but there is so much missing from their lives that you and I enjoy as redeemed humans. Being embodied has its advantages.

I’ve thought quite seriously through the years of enrolling and auditing some of the classes at Southeastern, just to find out what lectures and exams about make-believe are like; it’s got to be more entertaining than predicting the resting place of all of the balls on a billiard table when the cue ball strikes the rack with this force at that location and with such-and-such a trajectory.

But I’m afraid I’d end-up being thrown out.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities

§373   The origin of moral values. Egoism has as much value as the physiological value of he who possesses it.

Each individual represents the whole course of Evolution and he is not, as morals teach, something that begins at his birth. If he represents the ascent of the line of mankind, his value is, in fact, very great; and the concern about his maintenance and the promoting of his growth may even be extreme. (It is the concern about the promise of the future in him which gives the well-constituted individual such an extraordinary right to egoism). If he represents descending development, decay, chronic sickening, he has little worth: and the greatest fairness would have him take as little room, strength and sunshine as possible from the well-constituted. In this case society’s duty is to suppress egoism (for the latter may sometimes manifest itself in an absurd, morbid and seditious manner): whether it be a question of the decline and pining away of single individuals or of whole classes of mankind. A morality and a religion of “love”, the curbing of the self-affirming spirit and a doctrine encouraging patience, resignation, helpfulness and co-operation in word and deed may be of the highest value within the confines of such classes, even in the eyes of their rulers: for it restrains the feelings of rivalry, of resentment and of envy, feelings which are only too natural in the ill-constituted and the malformed and it even deifies them under the ideal of humility, of obedience, of slave-life, of being ruled, of poverty, of illness and of lowliness. This explains why the ruling classes (or races) and individuals of all ages have always upheld the cult of unselfishness, the gospel of the lowly and of “God on the Cross”.

The preponderance of an altruistic way of valuing is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is the ill-constituted and bungled. Upon examination, this point of view turns out to be: “I am not worth much”, simply a psychological valuation; more plainly still: it is the feeling of impotence, the lack of the great self-asserting impulses of power (in muscles, nerves and ganglia). This valuation gets translated, according to the particular culture of these classes, into a moral or religious principle (the pre-eminence of religious or moral precepts is always a sign of low culture): it tries to justify itself in spheres whence, as far as it is concerned, the notion “value” hails. The interpretation by means of which the Christian sinner tries to understand himself, is an attempt at justifying his lack of power and of self-confidence: he prefers to feel himself a sinner rather than feel bad for nothing: it is in itself a symptom of decay when interpretations of this sort are used at all.

In some cases the ill-constituted and the malformed do not look for the reason of their unfortunate condition in their own guilt (as the Christian does), but in society: when, however, the Socialist, the Anarchist and the Nihilist are conscious that their existence is something for which someone must be guilty, they are very closely related to the Christian, who also believes that he can more easily endure his ill ease and his wretched constitution when he has found someone whom he can hold responsible for it. The instinct of revenge and resentment appears in both cases here as a means of enduring life, as a self-preservative measure, as is also the favour shown to altruistic theory and practice.

The hatred of egoism whether it be one’s own (as in the case of the Christian), or another’s (as in the case of the Socialists), thus appears as a valuation reached under the predominance of revenge; and also as an act of prudence on the part of the preservative instinct of the suffering, the form of an increase in their feelings of co-operation and unity —

At bottom, as I have already suggested, the discharge of resentment which takes place in the act of judging, rejecting and punishing egoism (one’s own or that of others) is yet another self-preservative instinct on the part of the ill-constituted and the malformed. In short: the cult of altruism is merely a particular form of egoism, which regularly appears under certain definite physiological circumstances.

When the Socialist, with righteous indignation, cries for “justice”, “rights”, “equal rights”, it only shows that he is oppressed by his inadequate culture and is unable to understand why he suffers: he also finds pleasure in crying; if he were more at ease he would take jolly good care not to cry in that way: in that case he would seek his pleasure elsewhere. The same holds good of the Christian: he curses, condemns and slanders the “world” and does not even except himself. But that is no reason for taking him seriously. In both cases we are in the presence of invalids who feel better for crying and who find relief in slander.

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

Sinclair Lewis (attr.)

Mike Huckabee has been in the news a lot lately, mainly for saying stupid, false, and repellent things.

July 26^th, on the Iran deal:

This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.

July 27^th, doubling down:

If we don’t take seriously the threat of Iran, God help us all. It is Neville Chamberlain all over again.

Well.

The Iran deal is hardly a one-act play with only one character. The negotiations began in 2006, midway through George Bush’s second term, and involve five other countries. The Munich Agreement, contrarily, was the summary abandonment at gunpoint by Chamberlain of a mutual defense treaty between Great Britain and Czechoslovakia. The comparison is so grotesquely inapt that one inevitably wonders where Huckabee learned his history. At the knee of gen-u-ine pseudo-historian David Barton, perhaps?

But Huckabee really showed what he’s made of with these remarks:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee indicated Thursday that if elected, he wouldn’t rule out employing federal troops or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to stop abortions from taking place in the United States.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against bans on abortion, Huckabee said past presidents have defied Supreme Court rulings.

Oh? Mike Huckabee, Holy Man, won’t summarily dismiss the deranged notion of calling-up the National Guard to scare pregnant women away from abortion clinics?

And he thinks he is morally fit to head-up the designedly-secular nation governed by the world’s oldest constitution?

Undoubtedly, there are many millions of Americans just like Huckabee, people who think it’s time to quit messing around with the puny and inadequate instruments of man-made law and revert to the Higher Law discovered millennia ago by a tribe of Bronze Age anonymities. They are going to get worse, too, more strident and unreasoning, as society’s inevitable evolution forces them to the margins of civic life — as they are seen for the malicious fools that they are at their core.

The evangelical right is forming into a fifth column, an internal enemy driven by hatred of all modernity, all knowledge and education, all … change. Huckabee, an amoral cynic who plays to and plunders them, is their face. You think I overstate? Fine. Send me the name of just one Southern Baptist church anywhere in America that wouldn’t gladly turn-over its pulpit to Huckabee any Sunday he asked, and follow-up with a ‘love offering’ for his mighty work.