Positive Liberty

Responding to my post on Romans 13, Tom Van Dyke emails the following:

Some relevant and hopefully helpful stuff:

This, particularly “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I.”

I mean, if the English could kill their king in 1649, revolution in 1776 wasn’t that radical a step.

And of course, the always helpful Aquinas, who mentions Romans 13 specifically here, and who was studied at Harvard at least through the 1600s.

I’m not sure there was much theological handwringing over revolution among those who were already disposed toward it.

Happy birthday to Tim Sandefur’s Freespace celebrating its fifth. It was around four years ago that I got my start blogging there as a guest.

It’s no secret I think Steve Walsh of Kansas in his prime is the greatest rock tenor ever. Early in his career and presently he projects a “reserved” image behind the keyboards, singing. Sometime in the late 70s, perhaps drug fueled, he adopted an “Adidas” fitness look (and had the body to go with it) started moving around on stage, and really got a workout. From 1977, Carry On Wayward Son. Check out those socks!

George Washington was pro-Christian. He had a lot of positive things to say about the Christian religion. However, it is a non-sequitur to conclude, therefore, he was an orthodox Trinitarian Christian. Orthodox Trinitarian Christianity is an extremely narrow creed; it believes Jesus the only way to God and other religions false. Nothing in Washington’s praise for the Christian religion suggests he believed in this narrow form of Christianity. To the contrary, the best evidence shows Washington, if he can be termed Christian at all, held to a liberal Protestant theology in line with what the other key Founders — J. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin — believed.

All were pro-Christianity because they were “pro-religion” in general. They held the purpose of “religion” or “Christianity” was to make men moral (not necessarily to be saved through Christ’s blood atonement). Works were more important than faith for salvation. The test of “sound” religion was that it in fact made men moral. As such if the “ends” (morality) were achieved, the means (which religion you are) really didn’t matter. But Christianity had an edge over other world religions, not because of Jesus’ exclusive claim to God or His status as second person in the Trinity, but because He was the greatest moral teacher. Yet, they still saw a place at the table of “sound religion” for virtually all of the world’s religions as valid ways to God. Their creed, I believe, was key in making America a haven for non-Christian religions. Continue Reading »

… is a pretty good movie and (I’m told) a good novel, too, and Constant Viewer would definitely have given the movie a good review if he’d been old enough to see it and the internet was around in 1960, but this is all irrelevant to the purpose of this post. After a post on 21 and then on Romans 13, I just had to come up with something with “8″ in the title to keep the descending Fibonacci numbers going! Even if you’re not a real intellectual but only, like me, play one on the internet, you can’t let an esoteric reference like that go unmade, can you?

There! I feel better. Okay, the adults can go back to their conversation now.

I’ve done much studying and thinking about the passage of Romans 13 as it relates to the biblical view of government, especially the American Revolution. I’ve concluded there are alternate interpretations and will charitably concede that Romans 13 doesn’t stand in the way of traditional Christian supporting the American Revolution — and indeed many traditional orthodox Christians did support the American Revolution (and French Revolution!).

However, Romans 13 gives as much, arguably more support to the Tory position which demonstrates that the Bible or the Christian Religion spoke little to the cause of the American Revolution and consequent construction of the US Constitution. Sure traditional Christian ideas were *a* source of ideological principles. But not the primary source (other sources include Enlightenment, Whig, Common Law and Greco-Roman principles; Enlightenment and Whig were key).

It’s true that preachers did give sermons on behalf of the American Revolution, key to getting the Christian populace to go along with the notion of revolt against Great Britain. Continue Reading »

Hit me! Hit me again! Again! Just please, please don’t ever make me watch 21 again!

21 is the story of someone we can all identify with: the kind of poor struggling senior at MIT who has already been accepted at Harvard Medical School but can’t figure out how to pay for it (future Harvard MDs being such poor credit risks) until he is recruited into a card counting club that flies to Vegas on weekends, works the blackjack tables, indulges in a little partying and power shopping, then flies back to Cambridge in time for class on Monday morning. A regular Joe like you or me, in other words. And just like you or I would, he keeps his winnings in cash wrapped by rubber bands in plain sight above the suspended ceiling of his dorm room. College dorm rooms are, after all, famously private places and vastly safer than safety deposit boxes, not to mention his widowed mother’s house, apparently only a short commute away.

Like the rest of his MIT student card counting club, he is not only slightly smarter than the average Vegas gambler, he is also vastly more physically attractive, a fact that had heretofore been hidden back in Cambridge behind his expensive, preppy J. Press wardrobe.* Well, sure. When CV imagines a half dozen extremely attractive young high rollers, the first think that pops into his head is kids from M.I.T. You know, like Click and Clack from Car Talk and Richard Feynman – nonstop party animals! (Yes, CV knows Feynman actually did turn into a bit of a party animal eventually, but not as an undergraduate, fergawdsakes.)

And speaking of party animals, there’s Kevin Spacey as your typical M.I.T. professor. Well, assuming that the typical M.I.T. professor’s last name, if it isn’t Soze, is Moriarty. Oh, and in lieu of real action or dramatic tension there’s a bit of thuggery from Laurence Fishburne. Does he really need the work? Did he take all that Matrix money and put it on 21-Red to win?

21 claims to be “inspired by the true story of five students.” Hey, there’s even a book! CV just hopes the real kids took Vegas for more than 21 ‘wins’ from unsuspecting moviegoers but, life being what it is, he wouldn’t bet on it.

_______________

* Unless you are, yourself, something of an uber-prep who has also lived in New Haven, Cambridge, New York or Washington, you’ve probably never heard of J. Press before and are even now confusing it with J. Crew, the comparatively low-rent faux-preppy clothing chain that Old Navy would be if it sold button down collar shirts. How preppy is J. Press? Let’s put it this way, regular J. Press customers pop into the local Brooks Brothers when they need to pick up Christmas gifts for the servants. Constant Viewer doesn’t know how much money J. Press paid for this sort of product placement, but he wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn the store is on the verge of a major expansion and will be coming soon to a mall near you!

This is a really great project. Rare books previously available in college libraries in various parts of the world have been digitized on google. The collection grows daily. Unfortunately copyright laws prevent you from seeing the whole edition of newer books protected by copyright. But if one specializes in 18th and 19th Century history as I do, much of those works are public domain. When I first started researching the Founders and Religion not too long ago (5 years ago), I’d buy books from notable scholars who had to read the manuscripts themselves or earlier collections and who would excerpt portions of those particular sources. Now, I’m finding I’m able to confirm these sources through google books and in many instances, read the entire works in context not just the excerpts that scholars give. Continue Reading »

One major error of the “Christian America” crowd is to conflate America’s Planting (that is, its old colonial order from the 17th Century) with its Founding (1776-1800). In reality, the principles of the two are in great tension and the ideals of the Founding — the Novus Ordo Seclorum — represented a great break with past tradition. Dr. David Mazel made this point in this past post by comparing the wording of the Mayflower Compact with that of the US Constitution.

We can also use John Adams himself to illustrate the point. From Massachusetts, Adams, some believe, was a Puritan. Though he had Puritan roots, he was a clearly a different animal than the Puritans who landed on Plymouth rock. For one, they were hard core theocrats and he wasn’t. Secondly, they would have executed Adams for “high handed blasphemy.” Continue Reading »

Okay, so deep down inside I also think this is funny as hell and, yeah, I came across it on one of those weird news aggregators.

Except it’s not funny.

Herewith, a niche market: a greeting card line for prisoners.

For example, just like the nephews whom you feel guilted into slipping a few bucks into a cash card for when the family gets together for Christmas, now you can send your imprisoned friend or loved one a “Money On Your Books” card reading “I just wanted to tell you that I put some money on your books. Take care.”

For the record, I have absolutely no problem with incarcerating violent and dangerous criminals and I laugh out loud every time I read some asinine story in the New York Times or Washington Post bemoaning the ‘inexplicable’ fact that the prison population is at an all-time high “even though” the crime rate is down.

But a vast percentage of the U.S. prison population is there solely because of our absurd, idiotic, obscenely, nay, astronomically expensive and absolutely doomed to perpetual failure “War On Drugs.”

This is a product that shouldn’t be needed for a market that shouldn’t exist.

“I think our main problem is our unclear definition of value.”

I’d like to make a top-level reply to one of the most interesting comments we’ve gotten in weeks. Before we begin, readers should know that I’ve already laid my cards on the table in the global warming game: Several months ago I wrote that 1) global warming is apparently both real and manmade and 2) even so, the best option may still be to do nothing about it.

I argued that many people seem to become convinced on this issue — one way or the other — because they find a particular narrative appealing, even while discounting various possibilities that don’t line up neatly with the narrative they happen to like. “Scientists find a danger, stop it, and save the world” is a tremendously appealing story, even to me. “Scientists find a danger, try to stop it, spend enormous amounts of money, and we’re screwed anyway” — while not appealing — is also a possibility, and one that we should not dismiss. There’s even “Scientists find a danger, overcorrect it, and polar bears now rule the world,” which is a remote possibility, but then, the remote possibility of something horrible shouldn’t be discounted either.

The problem with seizing on a narrative is that it focuses our attention on one set of dangers and on one outcome only. This is unwise in the extreme, particularly when dealing with a system in which “we’ve warmed things up, but we don’t know how much” is the cutting edge of our knowledge. It might in fact be wisest to wait and see what new technologies — like cheap solar energy — may do to the question in the coming years.

Anyway, let’s get to Casey’s comment. I’ve interleaved my replies, so if you’d like to get the full effect of the comment before you see them, please do so now.

Continue Reading »

The infamous Shirley Phelps Roper replies to her brother Nate Phelps in the comments section at Positive Liberty.

But nothing in the science of economics suggests any fundamental difference between a preference for the Book of Common Prayer and a preference for a powerful shower spray. - Steven E. Landsburg

Over at a different venue I had occasion today to link to what I think is the absolutely brilliant and must read Why I Am Not An Environmentalist by Steven E. Landsburg.

Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist pretty much started the contemporary “popular economics” trend, remains one of the very best of its sort and spurred me on to reading more academic economics. (No, not Samuelson, but Smith and Ricardo and Marshall and even Keynes.)

On the topic of environmentalism in general and global warming in particular, I remain a strong skeptic about the real underlying motives of the first as a political and quasi-religious movement for the very reasons Landsburg articulates better than I can. As for the latter, I have allowed my old (and rapidly aging) friend Ronald Bailey to be my bellweather, lightening rod and canary in the cage. (Some mix of these metaphors works, I’m just not sure which.) As his critics gleefully note with seasonal regularity, Bailey is not himself a scientist; but as those who know him well know, he’s a meticulous researcher whose passion for being correct far exceeds any of his real but mostly reasonable political biases. So when he became convinced that the evidence supported the anthropogenic global warming thesis, I considered his shift from skepticism sufficient evidence, myself, to concur. (This, by the way, raises various interesting questions about the uses and misuses of argument from authority, but we’ll leave that for another occasion.)

What has yet to be explained to my satisfaction, however, is what calculations support, for example, Mr. Bailey’s now favored carbon tax or, for that matter, any of the other proposed solutions, ameliorations, abatements or other fixes, quasi or otherwise, to global warming. As I see it, it remains a purely economic issue. That is, no one is seriously claiming, at least as far as I know, that the current worst case global warming trend would make the planet entirely uninhabitable for human beings.

If that is correct, then even such worst case scenarios boil down to how expensive will the damage be versus how expensive would the fix be. That’s an interesting question and I’d like to know the answer if one is available. I’d also like to know if the question doesn’t boil down (no pun intended) to whether my generation or some subsequent generation bears those costs. All I promised my kids was money for college. I never said a word about paying to save the whole damned planet!

Nate Phelps, one of Fred Phelps’ sons — one of the estranged (that is, sane) children — checks in to criticize extreme Calvinist notions of Hell and his family’s tactics. Leaving the comment on my post about how the traditional notion of Hell as eternal torture corrupts the soul, he writes: Continue Reading »

It’s time once again to dust off the turban and present that All-Seeing, All-Knowing, Mystic Seer, Sage of the East and part-time Bijou Theater ticket-taker…

DARnac the Magnificent!

May we have the first envelope please?

The Nanny Diaries

. . . . . . . . . . What’s the source of Democratic domestic policy?

No Country For Old Men

. . . . . . . . . . Describe Hillary’s bedroom.

The Number 23

. . . . . . . . . . How many TV ads do Hillary and Obama each run per hour?

Feast of Love

. . . . . . . . . . What will the Democrats pretend their convention will be?

There Will Be Blood

. . . . . . . . . . What will it really be like?

300

. . . . . . . . . . Give or take a century, how old is John McCain?

Across The Universe

. . . . . . . . . . Where does the Weekly Standard want U.S. troops?

I’m Not There

. . . . . . . . . . What do we want George Bush to say about the White House?

Away From Her

. . . . . . . . . . What can’t Bill Clinton wait to be?

Hitman and Shooter

. . . . . . . . . . What do the Secret Service call Karl Rove and Dick Cheney?

American Gangster

. . . . . . . . . . And President Bush?

Gone Baby Gone

. . . . . . . . . . Describe Eliot Spitzer’s political future.

Planet Terror

. . . . . . . . . . What strategy do George Bush and Osama bin Laden share?

Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem

. . . . . . . . . . Describe the end of Tom Tancredo’s presidential candidacy.

The 11th Hour

. . . . . . . . . . What did Eliot Spitzer get free after every ten hookers?

Enchanted

. . . . . . . . . . What sort of voters is Barak Obama counting on?

Awake

. . . . . . . . . . What sort is he most worried about?

I Know Who Killed Me

. . . . . . . . . . If Obama loses, what will he say about Jeremiah Wright?

I Am Legend

. . . . . . . . . . What’s in McCain’s own mind.

Superbad

. . . . . . . . . . How badly is the media in the tank for Obama?