Archive for September, 2012

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The Outrageous Claim

Posted September 28, 2012 By John C Wright

Alan Silverman, one of the few men on the Internet who uses a human name, writes:

Though I do not follow the dictates of Jesus, I do not hold Christianity or its scripture in contempt. I merely disagree with certain points.

Friend, I am glad you do not hold Jesus or His servants in contempt. However, I am also surprised, even shocked that you do not, and disappointed.

I do not mean to seem impolite, but my surprise is because there is simply no such thing as disagreeing with Christianity on certain points. The claims Christianity makes are too extreme and large for that. One is either a baptized Christian, and saved, or one is not, and damned.

We are either telling the one, holy, universal and supreme truth, or we are mad as hatters and evil as imps. Malign madness, like supremely holy truth, is not something with which it is possible to disagree on certain points.

Nor are you the one in whom I am disappointed. If you are not a Christian and yet regard Christians as reasonable people, we are doing something wrong.

We are not a political party or a philosophical movement.We are not making a claim someone can partly agree with and partly disagree with.

If you are not a Christian and do not hold Christianity in contempt, the outrageous nature of our love and our demands, our desire to change you and save you and make you a saint, should scandalize and offend you.

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Vocabulary word of the Day

Posted September 27, 2012 By John C Wright

Borborygmus

(plural borborygmi) Noun:a rumbling or gurgling sound caused by the movement of gas in the intestines.

My comment: my next Dark Lord in my next book shall certainly be called Balthrog the Borborygmus.

I am so totally kidding. My next Dark Lord is actually named Enmeduranki Nimrod-nipu Shitimgal Duhumunamaru, He Who Binds Earth to Heaven, Son of the Mighty Hunter, Architect of the Tower of Darkness Absolute.

Borborgymus is the name of his Dark Land. It is beneath the shadow of Mount Eructation.

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What is this Election About?

Posted September 27, 2012 By John C Wright

I don’t think people who have not studied economics can grasp the magnitude of what’s been done to us, and how swiftly all our modern world-wide extended order can grind to a halt.

I hope everyone understands that the money, including all future earnings of your children and grandchildren, has been spent, and that we are SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS in the hole. (This is but the federal debt: state and local debts may be ten times this.)

Borrowed money represents a promise against future labor.

That means that no labor performed for the next several decades will have any value. The result is the same whether the debt is paid or repudiated: the result in either case is a collapse of the credit market and an end of the holding value of the dollar.

The collapse will happen as suddenly as a run on the bank. Foreign lenders who are currently bankrolling most of our National Debt will suddenly realize that they are unlikely to get repaid. And so they will sell treasury bonds and other loan instruments as fast as they can; and once one debtor sees the other selling, the price will drop precipitously, causing more to sell quickly and below cost.

Do you remember what caused the recession we are in? Since the newspapers bent heaven and earth to hide the causes, perhaps even well informed people do not know, but ask any sober (i.e. non-Keynesian) economist.

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For the Undecided Catholic Voter

Posted September 26, 2012 By John C Wright

Perhaps you say the two Parties are too similar to make any vote between them make a difference. Perhaps in other areas, this may or may not be so. But turn your eyes to those issues where you may have to answer on Judgment Day before the Great White Throne for your words and deeds. Christ will likely not question you about tax policy or stump speech gaffes.

Democratic Party Platform on Abortion (source http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Democratic_Party_Abortion.htm)

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.

The Republican Party Platform on Abortion (http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Republican_Party_Abortion.htm)

Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church on Abortion (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm)

2270 Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.

2271 Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law:

2272 Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.

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The Prospects of Victory in Long War

Posted September 26, 2012 By John C Wright

Referring my previous essay, Teretia asks:

Do you have much hope that we will accomplish your last sentence? Or are we fighting the long defeat?

The last sentence to which this refers is the observation that when war comes upon you, the only options are to fight, or to surrender. We should fight because we have so much to fight for.

To quote a better man than I:

Actually I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’- though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”
–Letter to Amy Ronald , 15 December 1956

As the Bard of Oxford says, all of history is a long defeat, But the end is not entropy, by victory and joy and power beyond all words to express and vision to imagine. What war, what childbirth, what worthy act is not this way? Before joy, sorrow; before triumph, loss; before the harvest, the plowing and sowing.

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Saint James Matamoros, Lead Us in Crusade!

Posted September 22, 2012 By John C Wright

Perhaps there are readers who are shocked, or at least puzzled, that I and all men of good will call for a Crusade against the Islamist enemy currently troubling the peace of the world.

Part of this is merely verbal disorder. A generation raised with no ability to read or speak the English language, and who use Orwellian Newspeak in lieu of thought, cannot apprehend the meaning of a common sense proposition because they cannot understand the meaning of ordinary words. It is for this reason that their masters (let us call them “The Conditioners”) have trained them.

To the properly conditioned politically correct leftist moron, the word “Crusade” means “Racist Genocide” and their every reaction, emotion and rational, to the common sense proposition is false to facts. They are shocked and astonished that anyone would be advocating genocide, when, of course, no one is; no one, of course, save the antisemites among the enemy.

Part of this, a more sinister part, is historical. We in the West enjoy all the benefits of Christian civilization, from classical art to modern science, from democracy to free enterprise to the academic freedom of the university system. The Left has made an astonishing effort over the last two centuries, an effort which has proved to be astonishingly successful, to hide the Christian origin and Christian nature of all these institutions from the modern generation.

The effort has been so successful that it is the default assumption of the modern day that Christianity opposes freedom of religion (when indeed it is the only religion that insists upon it and always has) and opposes science and academic freedom (when indeed it is the only religion that invented and promoted the university system, and the only world view in which modern physics mades metaphysical sense).

Christianity, in short, is Western civilization. Western civilization is Christianity.

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Loyalty to the Unknown Reader

Posted September 21, 2012 By John C Wright

I was giving writing advice to a friend of mine. Here is a snippet of the conversation I’d like to share in case it inspires another would-be author out there:

“But you will not do better unless you take up your pen and write. Set yourself a quota of a page count or a number of hours devoted to the novel. Eliminate all distractions during that time and hold it sacrosanct.

“You need your wife’s permission and cooperation to do this.

“If you feel writer’s block coming on, go out, away from all distractions, and do lawn work or chop wood or do pushups or other hard manual labor until the ideas start flowing again.”

I did not tell my friend, but this is the advice of Gene Wolfe, not my own. When I have writer’s block, I merely talk to my wife, my pet muse, and command her to solve it for me, imperiously snapping my masculine fingers. She then works out how to solve my writing problems, and I chain her up in the kitchen again, barefoot, until needed. (I think Neil Gaiman wrote an episode of SANDMAN about me. I come to a messy end.) 

((NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: that was a joke. The guy in the Gaiman story kept his mused chained up in his attic, not his kitchen. Completely different person.))

“So called writer’s block is inevitably a sign that your muse is telling you something you don’t want to hear (usually, you don’t want to hear that   whatever you just wrote is going down the wrong track). When that happens, throw out the chapter and start again from ten or twenty pages ago.

“Write! Your future fans are weeping and waiting! Have pity on them!”

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The 47% Solution

Posted September 20, 2012 By John C Wright

The news, both on the rightwing and leftwing channels, these last few days has been preoccupied with either attacking or defending a rather unexceptional statement by Mitt Romney, that 47% of the voters are addicted to the government teat and the cult of victimhood, and it is not worthwhile to seek their votes.

I would not have even wagered that the Left found this statement objectionable, except that they seem to object to all true statements just on principle.

I am flabbergasted: I honestly thought they would be pleased, and would have parades to celebrate the day when all men were beholden to the government. Everything for the state, nothing outside the state: that is the motto and the operating principle of the Left.

Don’t the communally-minded collectivists rejoice to hear the news that the collective has grown ever greater and stronger? Where is the insult?

What part of the obviously true and truly obvious statement does anyone have any objection to?

It astonishes me that commentators and pundits whose opinion I otherwise respect also find the statement objectionable or coldhearted or somehow ungood in some unspecified way. Some think it needs explaining or explaining away: others were actually, for some reason unclear to me, offended by it.

I don’t get it.

Why is anyone discussing Mitt Romney’s comment instead of discussing attacks by the Jihad against British, German and America embassies in embassy attacks Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Yemen?

That I do get: it is a sign of severe and radical civilizational decline. It is the Romans in the final days bickering and gossiping about the latest trivial scandal among the Patricians while the Goths are putting ladders up against the walls of the Eternal City.

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America Ended on 9/11

Posted September 19, 2012 By John C Wright

9/11 of Anno Domini 2012, I mean, when the nation submitted to Dar-al-Islam, the House of Submission, reacting to riots burning our consulates and killing our ambassador not with a Declaration of War (as would be the logical and just and minimally prudent retaliation for such a naked act of war) but instead with the sacrifice of a scapegoat and an apology for our freedom of speech.

America is ended when a full score of stormtroopers (I will not call them police officers) at midnight show up at a free man’s house to punish him for a use or misuse of the First Amendment; and the entire Executive Branch, from the President to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, humiliate and crush the offender, and offer his name and address to the vigilantes of the Dar-al-Islam.

Some imperium may continue for a time occupying the same terrain, and calling itself the United States of America for years and decades to come, but, in truth, the thing is dead when the spirit is dead.

I pass along these opinions to you as an expression, if understated, of my own.

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Is CS Lewis a Science Fiction writer?

Posted September 19, 2012 By John C Wright

Sean Michael, one of the few men on the Internet who uses his real name, writes this comment:

My view is the reason why so many SF fans don’t seem to consider CS Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” to be SF is because Lewis was a convinced and devout Christian. IOW, some fans fell for the false line that Christianity is opposed to science.

“Fell for it” is putting it mildly. Anyone who falls for the line of argument that science fiction can only be written by secularists, or by or about secular topics, displays an alarming gullibility, not to mention an ignorance of the origins of the genre.

Jules Verne, the founder of the genre, was a Roman Catholic; HG Wells was a committed atheist and socialist, and delighted in penning desolate visions of a godless world drifting as a speck through an indifferent universe; but on the other hand Olaf Stapledon (the forgotten third of the trio of SF founders) put a monotheistic Creator-god of the Gnostic sort on stage as a character in STARMAKER, and made spiritual development one of the central themes of man’s future evolution (along with, risibly enough, communism) in his majestic LAST AND FIRST MEN.

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Not another picture of Catwoman!

Posted September 17, 2012 By John C Wright

Expect no new posts this week. My dayjob has a looming deadline this month, and my next manuscript is due at the editor’s in January, so I have not had as much time to post editorial, rants, screeds, jests and drollery here.

I have been rereading CS Lewis’ PERELANDRA — and I can tell you it certainly reads differently sees as a grownup Christian than as a atheist teen, which was the last time I read it. The parallels between Perelandra and Milton’s PARADISE LOST are clear to all, but there are also parallels between this book and THE TIME TRAVELER by HG Wells, and A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay. Time permitting, I’d like to write a post on this next week.

No doubt readers expect me in such a situation to post yet another picture of the Catwoman in her evil skintight leather evilsuit. Not so! Am I as shallow as that? No, instead, I will post a picture of Rogue from the X-Men.

This is a picture of a statue taken from a Japanime-version of a Chris Claremont character. Our world is odd, Earthlings, no matter to what other world we compare it.

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A thousand roads lead men to Rome

Posted September 6, 2012 By John C Wright

I want to have one of my characters in AD 11055 discovering that the only language he has in common with the posthuman self-aware machinery covering the earth from pole to pole is Latin say to himself “All roads lead men forever to Rome.”

What is the correct grammatical way to say this? My untutored guess is

Omnes via ducunt homines per saecula Romam

— but if any of ya’ll Latin scholars out there can help me not embarrass myself before I go to press, I’d be grateful.

 

 

 

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My Eldest Son Survived the Abortion Holocaust

Posted September 6, 2012 By John C Wright

My eldest child was diagnosed, before his birth,with spina bifeda. Rather than raise an inferior genetic product, the doctor gently suggested we “examine our options”, which included the modern equivalent of the Spartan practice of flinging the inferior births into a chasm on Mount Taygetos, called Apothetae.

Of course, I am white, and of Germanic descent, so the doctor who tried to talk me into murdering my unborn son did not try as hard as he might, and Thank God my wife who was a Christian (at that time I was not) would not even heed nor consider such a thing.

To this day I regret and with revulsion and horror that I even contemplated such a thing even for a moment; I despise and I hate — no softer word will do — that I live in a nation of Morlocks who make such conversations as I had with my doctor, and such temptations, possible.

I feel as you would feel if you were living among barbaric, savage and sadistic Aztecs, all of whom thought mass human sacrifice by means of grisly torture atop dark and smoking pyramids was not only tolerable, but right and just.

As it turns out, the doctor’s advice to murder my child was based on a faulty diagnosis. He was, and is, perfectly healthy.

At no point did the doctor suggest taking the fetus from my wife and frying it in grease with onions to consume on a sourdough bun with a pint of beer, albeit, logically, if the meat-product is not a human being, and if I have no fatherly duty to love, care for, and protect the meat-product before birth magically bestows humanity upon it, then there could be no objection in law or custom to such a feast.

If the mental image of such a meal revolts you, either your sense of revulsion is incorrect — for it is no crime to eat the flesh of livestock — or your belief that unborn human being are livestock owned by the mother is incorrect.

With all this in mind, with great interest I read the account of 11-year-old Zoe Griffin, who was driven to tears by pro-abort ‘activists’ as she stood praying outside the Democrat national convention.

I hope you will also read: http://www.standtrue.com/zoegriffin/

I am not interested in comments on this page. The time for civil  discussion is over. Aborticide must be destroyed. This is the last generation that shall suffer it.

Let the Apothetae consume our children no more.

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On the Same Topic Again

Posted September 5, 2012 By John C Wright

The next installment of the never-ending argument:

“additionally, if it is true that empirical properties have inherent meaning, then it is not true that metaphysical theories cannot be tested by empirical measurement. The argument runs in circles: You assert that metaphysical theories are not empirical, and then you use this to further assert that the opposite theory is self-refuting, because it cannot be tested empirically, which is due to the first assertion. So your whole argument amounts to just a plain denial of the other guy’s axiom.”

Not so. You are mistaking my conclusion for my axiom here. I take it as an axiom that the word “empirical” means “depending upon experience or observation alone.” Observation involves the five senses and what can be deduced from them. I take it as granted that no observation can support anything other than contingent and conditional truths.

Example: we can say the sun rose yesterday, but to say the sun will rise tomorrow, whatever else it may be, is not an empirically proven truth. It is not an absolute statement, true under all times, conditions, places circumstances. It requires no great imagination to picture a tide locked world of the remote future when rotation has stopped, and the sun will not rise. Such a counter-factual is possible.

Metaphysical statements are those which concern the subject matter of first principles necessary to other disciplines, such as the first principles of physics or epistemology. This is the definition: whether there are any members of the set or no remains to be seen.

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More of the Same

Posted September 4, 2012 By John C Wright

Part of an ongoing conversation. Nostreculsus writes:

Mr wrf3 is making an interesting claim.

Imagine that radio antennae pick up a series of radio signals – intervals of activity (above a certain threshold) alternating with periods of radio silence. It can be transcribed as a sequence of ones and zeroes. If the sequence is long enough, we can ascertain its statistical properties. Hence we can measure its degree of disorder (its entropy).

The information per symbol and the distribution of information throughout the sequence are therefore measurable physical properties. But Mr wrf3 goes one step further. He quotes Douglas Hofstadter approvingly and claims that we can deduce the “inherent meaning, i.e. where the symbols alone [are] enough to convey their meaning” purely from the message. We can tell if it is a message and not some natural phenomenon.

Isn’t this akin to the claim of those who believe in “intelligent design”? They assert that by measuring the complexity of DNA sequences they can decide whether or not the sequence is designed. But Mr Wright contends that “Meaningfulness is not a material property.”

Let me stipulate that the sequence is not a transmission directed from the space aliens to us. So there is no allusion to areas of common knowledge: no lists of primes or encoded star maps. If it is a message, it is an intercepted signal from one group of aliens to another, discussing some alien topic. But we can download as much of it as we wish.

So, I ask, how does the intrinsic meaning of a sequence “emerge” from its bare material description?

Mr wrf3 asked me to be rude to him when I was trying my best to be polite by being aloof from his flippant snipes and dishonest accusations. He seemed to think my courteous reserve was funny, and he mocked it by daring me to be rude to him, saying it would amuse him. I thought the rudest thing I could do was ban him, which I have. Perhaps he is amused, perhaps not.

If any reader can find a way to argue his position perhaps more clearly than he did, I am happy to reply.

Before we begin, let me state my basic thesis.

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