Wife's A Good Shot (6 out of 5) At 20 Yards

Family Friday: Tending the Farm

Our Choice Today Matters, In a Sense

The single most damning objection raised by atheists is this: Why would a loving, omnipotent God permit sin, suffering, and the eternal damnation of souls? And our answer is stark and comfortless: For the sake of freedom. To give our choices consequence and meaning. To make our existence real.

Our reason accepts this. One's frontal lobe can process the logical steps entailed and determine the absence of fallacies. But our hearts aren't always moved. Personally, I don't think it's worth the risk. If God were to offer me Limbo, or certain annihilation after death, in return for the guarantee that I would never spend five minutes in Hell, I would jump on that offer as fast as I could.

But that's not the way things work. As I've explained more than once to Catholics who dissent over birth control: "I don't make the Natural Law, I just explain it."

Likewise in the economy of salvation: We may think what we wish about God's decision to give man a lethal freedom. But wishing won't make it so.

And so we must decide. Readers of this site have heard about the extremes to which Sen. Obama pushes his support of legal abortion. They know that he is likely to appoint enough justices to the Supreme Court to keep abortion out of the hands of democratic lawmaking for 20 or 30 years - in other words, indefinitely.

Failing a campaign promise by another candidate to start a nuclear war that would kill more people than the four million children who face legal execution during an Obama administration, the abortion issue alone should convince every orthodox Christian that voting for Obama is a grave sin - the kind to damn one's soul. Yes, even if you're black and voting for him out of racial solidarity, or white and voting for him out of racial guilt. Apart from simple ignorance, there's simply no excuse.

I want to go further and explain another implication of an Obama victory, one that should convince Catholic voters: I'll tell you one thing, just one, that will happen, if Obama is elected with a large congressional majority - with perhaps enough votes in the Senate to quash a filibuster. And that one thing should be enough.

Senator Obama has promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) which would repeal every restriction on abortion in every American state, right up through the ninth month. But then, we knew that about Obama, the whole infanticide thing. But there's more. The FOCA raises abortion to (in its own words) a "fundamental right." According to legal analysts at the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the act's language is so sweeping that it will snuff out any state's "conscience" clause - the laws allowing hospitals, doctors, and nurses not to take part in abortions. To do so would amount to illegal discrimination, denying a citizen her fundamental right. Christian hospitals could no more decline to perform abortions than they can currently refuse to operate on black people.

So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, and nurse either to abandon their faith or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.

History tells us that steps such as this aren't where religious persecutions end; it's where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighboring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the "fundamental right" of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgments and have to close?

It can happen here. It is about to happen here.

What should we make of Catholics who vote for the persecution of their Church and the ongoing killing of millions of unborn children? That's between them and God. I'll just offer this little catechetical reminder: Holy Communion received in a state of mortal sin is itself a still graver sin - one of blasphemy. Perhaps when Obama Catholics see their local Catholic hospitals close, or their Catholic friends in nursing get jobs giving pedicures, they'll throng the confession lines. Let's pray that they do.

By this evening we will have a good idea of whether Christians have any lasting place in this country. In a few months - if FOCA passes, and is applied as the bishops predict - we'll know whether we should continue to participate as citizens, serve in America's armed forces, pay taxes except under protest, or think of our government as anything but an occupier - like the Hungarian or Czech regimes from 1948-1989. We will know if the democracy our military exports to other countries is any better than the tyrannies it replaces. We will know if there is any future, however fraught and fragile, for pro-life laws - or if the Berlin Wall constructed by Roe v. Wade will stand unchallenged for yet another guilty generation.

If the persecutors take power on the anger of voters rightly outraged by eight years of mismanagement, arrogance, constitutional abuse, and unjust wars, we must face the consequences - as the Israelites did when God answered their sins with the Assyrians. Like the Israelites, we will have lost our country. Unlike them, we'll have no Covenant that promises we'll ever get it back. With God's grace, we'll be ignored and tolerated, like the Amish. To assume that we'll always be safe is, well . . . gratuitous.

It will be time to make some choices - the kind that redound to eternity. It will be time, after 35 years of noble effort, to stop expending our energies trying to change abortion laws, or to fight for a vanished public "morality." We should keep on running pro-life pregnancy centers as long as they're legal. We should go on voting against all anti-life candidates and speaking our minds. But our time and treasure should be withdrawn from the bottomless pit of politics and transferred to fighting on the only ground where we have the advantage. Let us turn from the bloodied public square of an illegitimate regime to the care of souls, and focus our efforts on the propaganda fidei - the propagation of the Faith.

Verily Prosaic readers know that I've argued it's in America's national interest to restrict immigration. If America turns to persecution of the Church, I will turn on a dime from trying to save the country from immigrants to saving the immigrants from the country (though this does not mean I will no longer favor immigration restrictions). I hope that other Catholics will drop their various political efforts and do the same - pour their thwarted civic energies into a massive, lay-directed campaign to offer orthodox catechesis to incoming immigrants and evangelizing those of other faiths. (Do they print the Baltimore Catechism in Spanish? In Arabic?) If we showed one-tenth the energy and courage of the underground Church that survives a far worse persecution in China, our work would benefit numberless souls. Made subjects in our own country, we could prove ourselves patriotic citizens of heaven.

I dread this prospect, of course. I wish for a long and comfy, moderately fruitless life - one that peters out in a state of grace and a haze of fine whiskey and wine, in a house full of happy children and dogs, my wife by my side. Like the English Catholics who followed the marital prospects of Henry VIII, I nervously hope for the best - and pray to be spared the worst. Like most of you, I'd rather schlep my way to purgatory than sweat blood storming heaven. But wishing won't make it so.

Good News

. . . for my wife, daughter and all the other children in the US.

Birthday Bash

Gotta share it: so much fun. My wife: my daughter. Life is good.

Great New Blog

Classify this under shameless promotion.
The blog: The Old Battle Axe
Shameless because it is my wife's blog.
The downside? Her blog is better than mine.
Become a subscriber.

This Just Kills The BattleAxe

Best Breast Feeding Slogan

"I make milk, what's your superpower?"

My Wife the Philosopher

Another thought by my wife:

The theory of human determinism - plausibly, that human decisions are entirely shaped by heredity and environment - appears self-defeating in this sense: it lacks the force necessary to compel belief. An intellectual argument for determinism, by its very nature, will remain compellingly unconvincing. Insofar as the theory claims to be true, it is self-defeating in that the firm belief in the validity of the argument for determinism is itself determined. It is, it seems, difficult to be vindicated in believing one’s argument for determinism is true when the firm belief in the validity of the argument for determinism itself is supposedly determined by hereditary or environmental factors. One wonders, can a theory of determinism properly even claim to be true?

But the apparently self-defeating nature of a theory of determinism is not its most important weakness. Instead, the most compelling reason a theory of human determinism is inadequate is due to the violence it does to basic data of human experience. The phenomena of acts of love, regret, and questioning among countless other human acts (e.g., acceptance, courage, cowardice, doubt, faith, forgiveness, gratitude, hope, impiety, integrity, justice, loyalty, mercy, piety, remorse, repentance, responsibility, restraint, sin, tolerance, etc.), are foundational experiential data that any theory of determinism must radically reinterpret in favor of a theory-driven (as opposed to observation-driven) cheap plausibility. A theory of human determinism is not really a theory at all; rather, it is something more akin to blind ideology.

One’s prior commitment to a theory can never serve as the starting point for an explanation of an encounter with some datum of experience. A person must look to the datum itself that one wants to investigate; only after the datum has been understood with its own characteristic features and in a way not failing to do justice to the experience, can one then seek to relate it in some grander theory.

Consider an act of love. What is presupposed if love is to have real meaning? In the experience of an act of love itself, certain things outside the experience are presupposed as real in order to make the experience meaningful. One such thing is freedom. Love presupposes freedom. Insofar as one asserts that an act of love is determined by hereditary or environmental factors, however, the intrinsic meaningfulness of the act is destroyed. What would be an act of love where the act was determined and not a free gift of self? What would this mean? The very architecture of the term – much less the act – loses its meaning when this essential presupposition is denied; but this is what determinism does. Love without freedom is no longer love. Now, a determinist might respond that this is fine. Love as we believe we experience it – as a free act – is just an illusion, the evidence to the contrary. What we call love is something other than what we experience it to be. But why should we accept this? Why should we alter the presentation of the evidence of our experience? Our experience of the datum of an act of love is the regulating moment, not one’s prior commitment to a theory that must do violence to our experience in order to justify itself. This latter approach is ideology, not science. It is to construct reality, not to be receptive to it.

Similarly with regret: what is the meaning of an act of regret, what is an experience of regret – which is always essentially temporally ordered to some event in the past – in which the event for which we experience the regret (that to which our regret is ordered) could not have been otherwise? If the past event is determined in such a way that one’s power to have influenced the outcome of the event is removed, then in what sense can one regret one’s own action in the event? It is important here not to conflate regret with guilt. One can indeed feel guilt regarding one’s participation in the determined event. One could even admit that the guilt-feeling itself could be determined. But we must distinguish between a guilt-feeling and being guilty; to feel guilty is not synonymous with being guilty. This can be seen in the case with the criminal who does not feel guilt for his past act, but nevertheless a judge and jury rightly convict him for his crime; his being guilty is different in real meaning from his feeling guilty. This realization illumines something important about regret too. We usually consider that apologizing corresponds to feeling regret for something for which one is responsible. Now, the determinist may claim that feeling regret can be determined. But once again he does violence to the relevant datum of experience. When we experience regret we just do experience it as regarding something that could have been otherwise by our own power. The determinist must deny this possibility and must instead seek to redefine this regret as an illusion. Once again we see the determinist allowing his theory to alter the data to save his theory.

Consider that even in asking a question is freedom presupposed. The very act of genuinely asking a question presupposes a certain freedom; a questioner assumes the ability of the one questioned to carefully consider which of some alternatives is the case. But this ability to carefully consider, the ability to deliberate, itself suggests the real power to perform an action according to one’s choice – in the immediate case, to choose between alternative answers. What is this power if it is not somehow what we call the freedom associated with the will (this is not to suggest that the exercise of free will is limited to the exercise of choice)?

Might it be that our experiences of the acts that strictly presuppose freedom, and our experience of freedom itself, simply outweigh any claim for determinism? Could we not, in this light, suggest that perhaps the only real reason for doubting so fundamental a conviction as the reality of the freedom of the will is merely that it seems incompatible with determinism, a theory that alters the data of human experience to better comport with itself?

Umm, wow.

Wherever I Go . . .

. . . I always take a little part of you with me Aletheia:

Thank you Lizz - you always take care of me.

Family Christmas

Well, Lizz really enjoyed Santa.

Aletheia Through Christmas 2007

Mother and Daughter

Causality

This:

Leads to this:

A husband's humor is seldom properly appreciated.

I Love My Pouting Wife

And she loves me for putting her favorite pics on the internet:

Pre-Labor Torture

Okay, we've tried seemingly everything: walking, rocking, stretching, lunging, squatting, breast stimulation, evening primrose, intercourse, membrane sweeping, even pineapples . . . the boy just doesn't want to get out.

I tried another tactic this evening. (Habanero) spicy, bad, Mexican food. Any food with the title "El Diablo" as a prefix isn't going to be good:

I don't think it made Lizz feel very good:


I think it might have been hot:


At least hot enough to use sour cream as a lip-balm:


And a tortilla as a tongue-scraper:

Once again, proof of my love for my wife.

My Beautiful Wife II

My Wife Doesn't Want Me to Put These Up

So I did:

Yeah, she just adores me.

My Wife the Theologian III

As before here, and here, my wife has done it again. She was asked to sketch a brief paper on this question: "William Rowe critiques Freud's arguments that religious ideas are merely illusions. Discuss Rowe's critique; in light of his ideas, is Freud wrong about the nature of religious beliefs? Does Rowe manage to disprove Freud? Why or why not?"

Typically, people would think that as a faithful Christian, my wife would be on the attack with Freud. They would, however, be wrong. Take a look at this nuanced short:

Freud’s thesis about the nature of religious belief can be situated in the wider context of the conflict between our understanding of the natural and the supernatural, between nature and grace, between the immanent and transcendent, between psychology and religion. One might ask, was Moses right, or Xenophanes? Did God make man in his image, or is it not rather man who has made God in his?

Freud’s influential attack on religion came in his work The Future of an Illusion. The illusion was, of course, religion, and Freud’s conclusion was that it did not have much of a future. His concern was not one in which theology was debated and rationally evaluated: he claimed that to assess the truth value of particular religious doctrines did not lie within the scope of his inquiry (though as we shall see, Freud did indeed – even if unwittingly – relate his critique to particular religious doctrines vis-à-vis others). Instead, Freud’s concern was with a general psychological interpretation of the motives or wishes that lie behind religious beliefs.

Granting the proper situating of Freud’s thesis, it must clearly be kept in mind that Freud’s critique was a psychological one. He argued that religion is untrustworthy because it is based on a person’s childish needs and wishes: desires, mostly of an unconscious kind, heavily influenced by early neurotic experience. The particulars of his attack were aimed not so much at the reasonableness of the beliefs themselves, but at the unreasonableness of the presumed motives behind them. Underlying Freud’s thesis is the concept of “unconscious” motivation, a force or an agency by which behavior might be controlled independently of one’s will. It is through employing this concept Freud established in a comprehensive, scientific manner the central relevance of a person’s early life for an understanding of her later religious beliefs.

Freud claimed that religious ideas protect us from our greatest anxieties: from the fear of natural forces, from the threat of injury inflicted by other men, from the terror of death. Religion provides a higher purpose in life and makes us feel all is well, that justice triumphs, that in life after death all evil is punished and good rewarded. Freud claimed that these ideas are convenient illusions, that religious “truths” just happen to be exactly what we would want there to be. Freud was careful to note, however, that an illusion is not necessarily an error. It is conceivable that an illusion might be true. As an interesting historical and sociological aside, it is probably not widely appreciated enough, the idea that “religion is a projection of human needs, and thus an illusion” was also expressed by Ludwig Feuerbach, in his historic attack on Christianity, The Essence of Christianity.

William Rowe (Shatz 327) does not so much critique Freud’s argument that religious ideas are merely illusions, as he critiques two intellectual stances one may take from a Freudian point-of-view. In short, Rowe argues more against latter day Freudian-inspired atheists (here-on-out, “Freudians”), than he does against Freud himself.

Rowe first addresses a possible confusion into which Freudian’s may fall: a fallacy of diversion; that is, someone may inadvertently (or otherwise) attempt to turn attention away from the truth claim at hand and toward something else. Specifically, Rowe identifies the fallacy of diversion as the genetic fallacy: that fallacy which consists in “refuting” an idea by showing some suspicious psychological origin of it. This fallacy is a fallacy not because it is psychological, but because it is a confusion between logic and psychology: between two different meanings of the word “because.” “Because” can refer to either a cause, or a reason, for a conclusion. “The genetic fallacy” consists – loosely put – in substituting a personal motive for a logical reason. In Rowe’s tighter formulation: “To suppose that from whatever is the cause of someone’s holding a belief we can determine whether the belief is true or false, is to commit the genetic fallacy” (Shatz 328). No matter how egregious the psychological origins of a belief may be, the logic of the argument for it is independent of the psychology. If one were to be brainwashed by murderous thugs in a Gulag since birth that 7 + 5 = 12, that would not prove that 7 + 5 = 12 is not true. It is important to note at this point, again, that Rowe does not critique Freud for committing the genetic fallacy. Rather, one could infer that even if Freud’s explanation of religious beliefs is true, this does nothing to disprove the existence of God or show that God is a myth.

Rowe next attempts to formulate a Freudian argument against the truth of certain religious claims – not something Freud himself appeared to do – by articulating what he supposes to be “an unexpressed argument for the view that religious beliefs are false” (Shatz 328), the conclusion of which is at most probabilistic, and at best simply false.

While Rowe concludes from his argument that many do not have good reasons for their religious beliefs (Shatz 329), this is too strong. The truth-value of his syllogism’s two premises can be challenged: why, for instance, must we acknowledge that the majority of beliefs we hold because they satisfy certain profound wishes be false? What evidence is there for this? What are the mechanisms that might cause such acts of self-deception? Furthermore, what non-question-begging evidence is there that religious beliefs are beliefs we accept – solely or otherwise – because they satisfy certain profound wishes? Evidence is needed that the Freudian explanatory theory really works. To assume that it works is to assume that religious beliefs are not true, which simply begs the question. Usually, we only seek explanations of why someone believes something in cases where we are convinced that what the person believes is false.

In light of the above, Rowe does not so much disprove Freud (Rowe does not challenge Freud’s claim that religious ideas are “illusions”); rather, he attacks arguments which Freudians may employ. In one case, he successfully undermines those who may commit the “genetic fallacy,” but in the other he gives too much away.

What Rowe does not do is offer other – perhaps more challenging – arguments against Freudians. I draw attention to five:

(1) Even if religious beliefs were caused in some as yet unknown way by human needs, it would seem to follow that they would be uniformly pleasant and comforting. But the fact is that they are sometimes profoundly unpleasant and troubling. History is replete with stories of saints who suffered greatly precisely through their religious beliefs (and experiences: e.g., the phenomenon of the “dark night of the soul”).

(2) Even if Freud calls attention to a true feature of human beings a believer might well accept this. Augustine was happy to suggest that the human heart remains restless until it rests in God. The question is the explanation given for such psychological facts. It is one thing to say that religious beliefs correspond to deep, psychological needs in ourselves, and quite another to say that God is simply an idealized projection of these needs.

(3) The Freudian explanation of religious beliefs seems to presuppose a form of behavioral (or psychological) determinism. But if human beings have free will, their behavior is not to be entirely explained in Freudian categories.

(4) Is not Freud’s illusion theory too dependent on problematic notions of proof and verifiability (Shatz 325)? Is Freud relying too heavily on the long-discredited verification principle - a principle which itself cannot be (empirically) verified? Freud seems to have tacitly assumed an understanding of proof as always and only empirical proof. But why should we accept this? What evidence could be marshaled to warrant the belief that evidence can only be empirical? What proof could prove that a proof must be empirically proven?

(5) Finally, we could offer a fun bit of you-too-ism; of turn-about as fair play: could it be that perhaps religious beliefs are not so much wish-fulfilling projections, as Freudian antireligious beliefs (or beliefs about religious beliefs) are themselves expressions of unconscious needs and traumatic childhood experiences: themselves wish-fulfilling projections?

In conclusion, I suggest that the religious believer is warranted in remaining agnostic about, being ambivalent towards, accepting, or rejecting whether Freud was right or wrong about the nature of religious beliefs: a believer remains free to accept that religious beliefs are the result of deep psychological needs within the human heart, or to reject the thesis that our religious beliefs are so formed.

My Beautiful Wife

And her beautiful tummy: