Civil Commotion

Quick: Who claims to have special cosmic knowledge which you can use to align your life with the mysterious forces that rule our universe? Psychics? Preachers? None of the above? Both of the above?

• Vice‘s Jackie Hong decided it would be fun to invent a dead sister, then ask psychics to help her get in touch with the never-existed dead sister. Y’all will be comforted to know that, for a fee, the re-connection went just fine.

• A Manhattan psychic fleeced a man who wanted to restore a busted romance for more than $700,000. Imagine his surprise when he learned that the departed girlfriend had departed Big Time.

  The man recalled his disappointment upon meeting the new Michelle. “This caused me to start thinking,” he wrote, “that Delmaro wasn’t everything she was purporting to be.”

  Golly. Ya think?

• If you buy Pastor John Hagee’s book about the blood moons, you’ll know ahead of your neighbors when it’s time to clean-up your act and get right with Jesus so you don’t miss the Express Bus to eternal bliss.

The correct answer is D, both of the above: Same business, different schtick.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate

§325   Virtue is still the most expensive vice: let it remain so!

A Jehovah’s Witness couple discusses their shunning of one of their children.

You know how it is: Good, decent, truly Godly people are always ready to betray their family and friends on command — like Abraham. Applause! Applause!

Of the many odious teachings in the Abrahamic traditions, this is surely one of the foulest. I say again: If the pleasure of an Invisible Wizard is more important to you than the well-being and happiness of your spouse and children, then — psychologically, at least — you’re not married and you’re not a parent.

Which is exactly why clergy peddle that teaching so vigorously: Healthy families undermine ownership of their flock.

This is interesting: A bona fide theologian has published at Jerry Coyne’s blog a letter which reprises exactly my criticisms of theology.

What I ended up discovering is that there are no actual standards in theology. If there were, then there would be unity in the field, rather than division.

Right. As I said here, “reasoning from fairy tales and without epistemic standards forever disqualifies theology as a bona fide branch of knowledge amongst intellectually serious adults.”

Theologians have no way to settle their difference — and we have Niagaras of bloodshed to show for it.

We can only solve problems we experience in this world by reference to the world, not to otherworldly spirits whose existence has never been verified.

Longtime readers will recognize this as the ground of my refusal to accept that the so-called Problem of Evil is a legitimate, intellectually serious problem. Until you have proved that God exists, there is no basis but wishful-thinking for saying that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good — and then puzzling over why the world sure doesn’t look like it.

Theology is not an intellectually serious enterprise, and it is time to bring the nonsense, and the injury it does, to an end. No deference — ever.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate

§324   Virtue is no longer believed in; its powers of attraction are dead; what is needed is someone who will once more bring it into the market in the form of an outlandish kind of adventure and of dissipation. It exacts too much extravagance and narrow-mindedness from its believers not to have the conscience against it today. Certainly, for people without either consciences or scruples, this may constitute its new charm: — it is now what it has never been before, a vice.