I Thought Katrina Was Bushitler's Fault

Now that His Eminence St. Albert has officially won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize for discovering that the Law of Cause and Effect has been reversed when it comes to global warming (see Climate Myths), the truth about Hurricane Katrina is safely protected from the evil oil companies and the apologists they fund.  Yes, the Dark Lord Bushitler continues to be the servant of a much darker conspiracy, a secret society of global oil interests and their allies in the military industrial complex, bent on warming the oceans to the boiling point so that Super Storms wreak havoc throughout the world and plunge civilization into a totalitarian nightmare...errr...or something like that.

It shouldn't be a surprise that these evil forces have succeeded in fooling the ignorant folks in Louisiana.  The fair and balanced LA Times reports that Republican Bobby Jindal has won the Louisiana governor's race.  The LAT states:

Jindal, 36, will be the nation's youngest sitting governor. The son of Indian immigrants, he will also be the first Indian American governor in U.S. history, and the first nonwhite to hold the job in Louisiana since Reconstruction.

The LAT was not fooled.  These hicks may have elected a Conservative, but they couldn't quite buy into his heritage:

Jindal has made a few stylistic concessions to suit the electorate: For instance, he goes by Bobby, though his given name is Piyush.

That should at least take care of the NASCAR crowd.  So it's the Ballad of Piyush Bobby in Cajun Country.  Too bad his name isn't Barak.  Having served in the Bushitler Reich, he has all the Conservative credentials he needs, so in spite of his dark complexion, the David Duke state still managed to vote for him.  The most stunning factoid comes in this admission by the even handed LAT:

Democrats make up about half of the 2.8 million registered voters in Louisiana, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 2 to 1. But the number of registered Democrats has dropped by nearly 57,000 since the 2005 hurricanes. Residents have criticized the state government, which is dominated by Democrats, as incompetent and corrupt.

So there you have it.  Bushitler sends a vicious monster hurricane into the Democrat heart of Louisiana and in a few days erases all of the political progress made by those loving, caring Democrats.  For years they served up a hearty helping of panem et circenses to a voting block with undying loyalty to the memory of FDR; but the evil Bushitler literally washed them all away -- into the open arms of his home state Texas, no less.  It was a stroke of Rovian diabolical genius, and although they still managed to keep their pandering Mayor, the Governor was toast.  This was just enough margin to send the perfect Uncle Tom ( or is it Uncle Sambo ) to Baton Rouge to serve those evil corporate interests, especially the ones drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

There is one small problem.  How is it that the good folks of Louisiana blame their governor for incompetence, when everyone in the rest of the country knows it was Bush?  How can the victims of this climatic man-made outrage blame the innocent Kathleen Babineaux Blanco?  Didn't the Feds secretly blow holes in the levees?  Didn't Bush's failure to sign the Kyoto Protocols cause the Goddess of Tropical Cyclonic Activity to swirl and twirl and unleash the fury of Katrina on a hapless population?  Didn't Bush forbid federal aid from arriving until the outcry was impossible to ignore?  Didn't Sean Penn do more to awaken our numb consciousness than our own Commander in Chief, whose evil eyes was yet focused on oil grubbing escapades in Iraq?

One of the problems with creeping socialism is that it is run by creeps.  Those of us who just want to live our lives don't fully realize that inaction leads to further enslavement by those who think they are entitled to our property.  If New Orleans is one of the most illiterate cities in one of the most illiterate states in the United States, it doesn't take a Nobel Peace Prize to figure out the striking correlation between the condition of the city and the party affiliation of the people who have run it.  Perhaps there is a small element of truth to St. Albert's propaganda; the tragedy of Katrina was man-made, at least in part. New Orleans is a city below sea level protected by substandard levees and with a large population of families who have become either partially or totally dependent on a corrupt and cynical government run by populists and swindlers.  The Big One came as expected.  Everyone knew it would come eventually.  Nothing was done to prepare, and damn little when it was on their doorstep.  It must be Bushitler's fault.

So now the backlash has come.  By a large margin, the voters of Louisiana have elected a Conservative governor, not because of, or in spite of, his race, but because of his stated beliefs and intentions.  The Leftist template has trouble passing this data; how can ignorant rednecks vote for an Indian immigrant?  The answer to this question turns the Left on its pointed head.  Conservatives are far less racist than the Left.  The Left looks at politics though a fragmented lens of race, gender, ethnicity, class and sexual behavior.  Conservatives are searching for genuine champions for freedom: free markets, free speech, freedom from terror, freedom from the slavery of excessive taxation and intrusive government, even the freedom to fail.  This is the fault line in American politics.  Jindal is solidly against abortion, strongly supports the war in Iraq, and strongly supports the expansion of offshore drilling.  In other words, he has made no attempt to distance himself from Bushcheneyhalliburton.

Given the extent of the hydrocarbon riches of the state, there is no reason why the Louisiana economy and infrastructure should not be on par with Texas.  The main difference is years of poor government and corruption.  Louisiana is a microcosm of where the Leftists are taking us as a nation; a banana republic.  We can only pray that the new governor will be up to the task of genuine reform and reconstruction.  Good luck Bobby!

'til the End of Time

Although science does not claim any authority in the realm of good and evil, it is uncanny how the Fall of Man still echoes in our purely secular world view.  The Christian church continues to retreat on all fronts -- Secularism, Islam, Eastern mysticism, Hedonism and even Dialectical Materialism -- not because people reject the message, but because the Christian church is falling apart from the inside.  Yet the underlying message of the church still molds and nurtures new expressions of morality, salvation, and even eschatology.  Science fiction and futuristic drama have replaced Scripture as the vehicle for moral expression.  These expressions in turn inform the world view of the scientific academy as well as the increasingly blurred intersection between science and politics.  The greenhouse effect was once simply a quaint description of the electromagnetic transmission characteristics of atmospheric gases; now it has become one of the Four Horsemen (along with Nuclear War, Overpopulation, and the Coming Plague.) Mankind's greatest sin is not rebellion against God; oh no, that rebellion was fought and won in the 19th century.  Our greatest sin is the desecration of our planet, or perhaps even worse, if we are to believe Professors Krauss and Dent in their paper titled "The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States."

It is the last line of the paper's abstract which causes one's brows to knit:

"Several interesting open questions are raised,  including whether observing the cosmological configuration of a metastable universe can constrain its inferred lifetime."

Surely they had to know that this would bubble to the surface of popular scientific controversy.  Does humankind have the capacity to alter, or shall we say corrupt, the Universe simply by observing the deep forbidden secrets?  Have we, in our arrogance, already opened Pandora's box, or plucked the fruit from the Tree of the Unified Field Theory?  Perhaps this theory can be expanded.  For example, is it possible that the reason atheists don't believe in God is because the act of searching causes God to recede at ever increasing velocity (at least for an atheist)?

This is not the first time that scientists have speculated on the godlike powers of humanity.  In the mid 90s, Frank Tipler speculated on the possibility of future machines altering the heat death of the Universe, reversing entropy, and restoring physical replications of all humans who have ever existed, thereby presumably resurrecting the dead.  Tipler is the exceptional optimist, believing that a future of ever evolving machine intelligence will ultimately be moral and compassionate.  A more likely scenario would be Matrix or Terminator, in which machines prove to be almost as diabolical as humans.

If the balance of visible and dark matter and energy can be so easily and disastrously disturbed by the mere observation of the dark side, then perhaps this says something about the underlying cosmological framework, like maybe we are dividing by zero.  On the other hand, if it is at all possible that the lifespan of the Universe could be altered by mere observation, then why is resurrection from the dead so unbelievable to materialists?

We sneer at faith as superstition to be tolerated at best, or to be suppressed if possible, but then we turn to the High Priests of Cosmology and find that the Grand Fulcrum of the Universe is actually located right here on this speck of dust we call Earth.  Like Saruman peering into the palantir, we have searched too deeply and greedily for knowledge, and now the Great Eye has awakened and looked back at us.

But mankind's sin is not the desire for knowledge, but rather our desire to be God.  A man-become-God is a self negating reality because such a man would ultimately think a thought which would annihilate both himself and the Universe.  God gives us freedom but restrains our power because we cannot be trusted with it.  A God-become-man is a much more desirable situation...

It would seem that we are hopelessly trapped in our own mythos.  Even Freud filled his office with statues and figurines of gods and goddesses, after first denying the existence of the only God who matters.  So while Science appears to push back the frontiers of ignorance and superstition, it does so by recasting those superstitions as future horrors and man-made catastrophes.  We will not allow God to bring Apocalypse, but by God, we'll create our own Nuclear end time.  Noah was a Hebrew reinterpretation of Gilgamesh and no more than an exaggerated account of a real flood in ancient Mesopotamia, but the catastrophic man-made ice age caused by our evil consumption of fossil fuels is going to happen if we don't restrain the evil corporations and their evil accomplices.

Now our search for knowledge has stumbled upon the darkest secret of all.  If we observe the wrong thing, the Universe will die early.  It reminds me of the librarian Evelyn in "The Mummy"  as she reads the forbidden words in the Book of the Dead to awaken the monster.  Had Krauss and Dent not written their own magic incantation, perhaps there would not be a rip in the space-time fabric. Alas, it is too late.  The Force has been perturbed and the ripples will expand and amplify to the ends of the Universe.  Game over, man.

The Neurological Basis for Morality?

In a recent Wall Street Science Journal article, Robert Lee Hotz reports on recent findings by neuroscientists that there is a link between morality and neuroanatomy.  Before all you radical materialists allow your neuro-enthusiasm centers to be energized, let me first state that this is nothing new.  If you don't believe me, then just have a drink to calm yourself.

Regarding the findings, Hotz quotes Harvard philosophy student Liane Young, "It tells us there is some neurobiological basis for morality."  I doubt Ms. Young fully appreciates her own sleight of hand in using the words "basis for" rather than something less provocative like "linkage with".  It is one thing to say that there is a relationship between anatomical cognitive centers in the brain and their corresponding mental functions.  It is quite another to say that these centers form the basis for abstract thought.

A simple analogy will serve to illustrate the distinction between linkage and basis.  Software programs or operating systems can be reduced to ones and zeros, and ultimately these ones and zeros can be reduced to binary electronic (or now optical) signals.  There is clearly linkage between specific memory locations, firmware, video memory, processor memory, etc., and the code which runs on the hardware.  It is also obvious that the program will either be impaired or not run at all if certain hardware is defective.  Can we then extrapolate and say that the hardware is the basis for the code? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the code exists apart from the hardware, but requires the hardware in order to function?

It is a leap of faith to assert that linkage and origin are one and the same.  This is the science of merely, in this case, the mind is merely a neurological network.  So too, this short essay is merely a patterned collection of photons stimulating your retina.  (Sometimes we give more dignity to computers than we do to human beings.)

Harvard neuroscientist Joshua Greene states that the brain is split into competing neural networks, the altruistic and the selfish.  By disrupting the emotional center, moral judgment becomes sterile and logical.  One hundred years earlier, Sigmund Freud described a model of the human mind in which the Id, Ego and Superego exist in a dynamic but overall balanced tension.  This balance can be disrupted when we fail to resolve deep psychological conflict in our childhood, thereby impairing one of the three centers.  In the one case, we have a neurological model, in the other, a psychological model.  Although the models are very different, the underlying worldview is similar.  Our highest thoughts and concepts have mechanistic origins, and serve functions which at best have survival value for our species, or at worst, are vestigial.  I wonder what mutant twist in the double helix causes human beings to undermine their own humanity.  Perhaps one day we will identify the locus of neurons in the cortex which cause us to define ourselves downward.

Much like the professor who leaves the proof to the student, the materialist describes the material origins of non-material entities, then waves a magic wand and says "Presto!"  By taking the "proof" to ever more granular levels, the materialist believes that this narrows the ravine between the physical and the mental or spiritual.  He makes progress by expanding the boundaries of the known into the unknown in the belief that the unknown will lose its power and mystery.  This is the materialist creed, that science will tell us all we can possibly know, and the rest is simply unknown, unknowable or silly.  Unfortunately for the materialist, the unknown is as infinite as God, and progress is "merely" an illusion, or perhaps caused by an unresolved Oedipus complex or a conflict between neural networks.

Somewhere along the way, the modern scientist forgot the meaning of "meta" in metaphysics.  Materialism itself is wholly contained within a much larger reality of information, logic, thought, spirit and even Being itself.  An electron microscope will never extract the "two-ness" of the number "two" by ever increasing scrutiny of the paper, the ink, or the psychological difficulties of the person who wrote it on the paper.  Morality, moral truth, our ability as human beings to discern right from wrong; these are thoughts which exist apart from the firmware which supports the software.  Clearly our thoughts can be affected by material influences, and the interaction between the hardware and the software is very real and intimately so, but we should not confuse the two.

Why are materialists so desperate to ignore the truth that the Word existed before the Creation, that Information transcends space, time and matter?  If anything, it would provide some comfort to know that the act of knowing is not merely a meaningless interaction of electrochemical impulses.  Alas that peace and comfort themselves are illusions, perhaps a truce between warring neural networks.  Speaking of which, my neural networks are in a bit of a snit, so it must be time for a bourbon.  I wonder what sort of vapid audiovisual stimulation is on the tube tonight?

Losing His Religion

A Response to William Lobdell

When Job demands an account from God for his suffering, God's responds with a question:

"Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone -- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'?"

Job 38:2-11 New International Version

So God continues in four chapters to remind Job that he is but a creation, not the Creator.

As with a child who demands to know why he has to obey a father's command, the father replies, "Because I said so." Sovereignty doesn't answer the human longing for an explanation for suffering; yet the same God who giveth and taketh away also created us in His image. We pine for justice and an explanation for the misery in the world He created.

In his essay Religion Beat Became a Test of Faith, William Lobdell (LA Times) painfully recounts how he lost his Christian faith after a career of reporting on the horrible crimes and hypocrisy within the Church. From child molestation, rape and sodomy by Catholic priests to false teachings, fake healing and outright stealing by televangelists, Lobdell explains his disillusionment with organized religion. He ends his piece with these words:

As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

A Christian response to Mr. Lobdell's critique might be that he made the mistake of putting his faith in the church, rather than in Christ. The prophet Jeremiah asks who can understand the utter corruption of the human heart, be it popes or paupers. But Lobdell isn't questioning the human condition of sin; rather, why does God's transforming power seem so weak within the heart of His kingdom on earth? Why does the church itself exhibit such extreme corruption? How can people who profess Christ be so evil? His conclusion is unusual for a Catholic: faith is a gift rather than a choice. The elect will believe and the unelect will be damned. If you don't make the leap of faith, then it is because you don't have the gift which allows you to make the leap.

This creates a curious paradox for the doubter. If faith is a gift from God, but as a doubter, I assert that God did not give me that gift, how can I even make the statement since as a doubter, I doubt the existence of God? If God does not exist, then the "gift of faith" is nothing of the sort; it is merely a form of self deception. If I insist that God did not grant me the gift of faith, then I am a liar, because I still believe in God, albeit, a cruel and merciless God.

This is the God which Ivan presents to Alexey in the Brothers Karamazov. Ivan is an intellectual and a nihilist, while his brother Alexey is a novice monk. As the two brothers discuss their beliefs over dinner, Ivan explains that for him it is not a matter of faith. Like Mr. Lobdell, Ivan Karamazov taunts Alexey with stories of horrendous atrocities, mainly against children in 19th century Russia. Even if he believed in God, he could not accept God's justice.

"And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

The bedrock which underlies this house of outrage somehow does not get mentioned in Ivan's scorn. He talks about truth, oppressors, forgiveness, suffering, and harmony. By what standard does he measure the significance of the injustice? Who planted a longing for justice and truth in his skeptical soul? Who gave him the very opportunity to choose either submission or rebellion? And although he is a fictional character, Ivan represents us all. Inspired and informed by the standard of truth which God places in our hearts, we judge God and question His justice. God's response to Job is more than bluster, it cuts directly to the existential heart of the matter. Our questioning, our longing, our sorrows and joys, our suffering and ecstasy all derive from being itself, an infinite gift because it is an eternal one. As for God's means of righting the wrongs, Alexey says it best in his response to Ivan:

"...you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!' "

Every single day, a hundred local newscasts describe some horrific event in which an innocent child is brutally tortured, sexually assaulted, and/or murdered. We like to call it news, but it is really an acid eating away at our collective soul. It isn't really surprising that Mr. Lobdell has lost his religion by reporting on the macabre and twisted side of the church. We can even blame God, but in a strange and mysterious way, God has already taken the full blame. For every dark and sinister story about pedophile priests and kinky voyeuristic evangelists in hotel rooms, there are a thousand stories of goodness, kindness, love, service, worship, devotion, honor, humility and truth. The real leap of faith is believing that there are only naturalistic reasons for the vast majority of people to behave morally, with so many opportunities to be dastardly. It is the nature of journalism that the evils of the world get amplified, and the good things taken for granted. Earthquakes make news, but the solid earth beneath my feet is boring.

We all make a leap of faith. It is where our feet land that matters.