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  • Who can rule Britain now?

    I never imagined I’d feel profound grief at the passing of a public figure. At those points in my life where someone close to me has died, the hours …

    Who can rule Britain now?
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  • When Morning Gilds the Skies from @StJohnsPriest

    It’s a little late in the liturgical calendar, but I present this hymn, not well known outside of proper circles, from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, my usual “go-to” for proper High Church procedure:

    On a separate note, one of the thing necessitated by the Daily Office is prayers for the country and its leadership, which have been a trying business these last few years. But Steven Kelly, St. John’s Rector, is a better man than I am because, at Evening Prayer, in addition to our officials in Washington, he also must include Gretchen Whitmer.

    Those that have gone before us in the faith have prayed for the likes of Nero, Domitian, Decius and Diocletian, so must we pray for those who have come after them, too.

  • Joe Biden Finds Out the Police are Eternal

    It was inevitable:

    Biden explained how his plan is based on one specific tenet: giving law enforcement the resources and funds necessary to engage safely in public policing.

    He’s found out what his Chinese counterparts could have told him a long time ago: “All police forces get buffeted from time to time, but they know one thing: through revolutions, political-line changes and the fall of governments, the police are eternal.”

    But, as I’ve pointed out, stating the obvious to Americans is a good way to get people angry. His progressive wing and others, oblivious to the experiences of their counterparts elsewhere, have put their own moral sensibility above reality, not understanding this:

    Given the totalitarian urges out and about in our own society, for us–on the left or the right–to think we’re immune from this, or that we can abolish the police at will, is foolish.  The police exist, among other things, to uphold the existing order, and it’s reasonable to say that, if that existing order were to radically change, whatever replaces it will need the police as much as the one it displaces.

  • RIP Mikhail Gorbachev

    The former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is gone:

    Alongside Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev was a key protagonist in a global drama that many thought impossible and, for those who lived through it, seemed almost surreal.

    Under Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall crumbled, thousands of political prisoners were released and millions of people who had known only communism got their first real taste of freedom. But he was unable to control the forces he unleashed — and ultimately waged a losing battle to salvage a crumbling empire.

    Gorbachev died Tuesday at a Moscow hospital at 91.

    My family business had extensive activity in what started out as the Soviet Union and ended up as the Russian Federation in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. There were strange moments such as Who’s this idiot? That’s me!, He is Prepared to Sign Anything and Half a Million Roubles. Is it Enough?. Neither the Soviet Union nor the company survived the era, but it was a way to see an important country in a new light, something that our so-called “experts” would have done well to do.

    My Russian colleagues weren’t much impressed with the General Secretary. The Russians a) preferred a stronger leader and b) have a deep distrust of their government, an interesting combination which would have been a challenge for anyone. One thing he gets credit for that he probably doesn’t deserve is the “smooth” transition from the Soviet Union to what came after. I was always amazed at how life “went on” through the upheaval that was the end of the Soviet Union. I doubt that, when the time comes for our superpower to face the moment of truth, the transition will be that smooth. Americans are always trying to “do something” when it’s too late to do the “something” that they should have done a long time ago. The Russians, more used to major changes in government, were more phlegmatic and adaptable.

    But, as the Russians say, may the ground be down for him.

  • The Trigger Warning for a Criminal Justice Course

    Got this in my university email inbox, from a professor in the criminal justice program, it’s the trigger warning he puts in his (maybe her) syllabus:

    As with most criminal justice-related courses, the subject matter contained within the class is often shocking and controversial. While I understand that each individual is affected differently by topics discussed, the material is designed to help meet student learning outcomes and prepare students for employment within the field. Thus, topics addressing the realities of police violence, addiction, sexual violence, abuse, and the consequences of engaging in deviant and criminal behaviors is necessary as the field in which you enter is not sterile and anything discussed in this class cannot compare to the realities that you, as a professional, will encounter. Thus, while I am empathetic to any discomfort, the material is necessary. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

    When you’re in a tough field, you need to address tough issues.

  • Pushing Back Against “Waist Down Religion”

    Charles R. Beach

    One of the people I was honoured to work with at Church of God Lay Ministries was Charles R. Beach. Lee College/University students remember him has a professor in modern languages but they also remember him as heading up Pioneers for Christ, leading students out in what we would call now short-term mission trips. He was also a key developer (along with Leonard Albert) in developing the personal evangelism programs that the department promoted and taught for many years.

    Of special interest to Beach were the Mormons, with whom he had extensive contact and whose idea he had studied extensively. Boiled down to the essentials, anyone who wants to share the Gospel to a group of people need to understand a) the Gospel itself (not a given amongst our minsters) and b) the religion or thought process of the people themselves, also not a given amongst our ministers.

    The LDS church has some very interesting teachings, especially dating from their early years, which they’re not forthcoming in presenting to the outside world. Probably as good of a summary of those can be found in Thelma “Granny” Gear’s Momma, Mormonism and Me, but some of these are as follows:

    • God was once a man.
    • God is flesh and bone.
    • There are many gods.
    • Adam is God.
    • There is a Mother God.
    • Jesus had many wives — He was a polygamist.
    • Man can become a god.

    All of this and more caused Beach to characterise LDS/Mormonism as a “waist down religion.” The whole thing is based on procreation, from god(s) on down. Polygamy was a key part of that until it became evident that they would have to sacrifice it on the altar of respectability (another Mormon obsession) and admission of Utah to the Union.

    One of the saddest things my generation has inflicted on Christianity is, in the face of the sexual revolution and the subsequent saturating sexualisation of our society, the fact they they’ve tried to turn Evangelical Christianity into a “waist down religion.” People like Mark Driscoll come to mind first, but there are many others. The usual victims of this mentality are women. As is common in “culture war” conflicts, both sides bitterly oppose each other but at the same time have some common underlying assumptions. In this case the sexualisation of the Godhead underpins both, and some feminists have countered with referring to God as a woman, somewhat in the spirit of the Mormon “mother god.”

    We can go back to the days of the Israelites and their opposing the male/female fertility pantheons around them with pure monotheism. Or we can look at the Christian Church in the wide open mores of the Roman Empire, emphasising sexual purity and abstinence in the face of that society. But no one who seriously looks at the subject can say that the God who inspired and walked through the pages of the Scriptures has a body, a gender in the proper sense of the word, or procreates sexually. That doesn’t stop the distortions that we must deal with at the present, but it certainly doesn’t justify them either.

    It is evident that what we have here is a systemic failure of our Christian institutions, from the local churches to our seminaries, to properly teach the nature of God, and it is a deep shame that we have to debate them the way that we are doing now.

    “I see, Sir, that you are a Prophet!” exclaimed the woman. “It was on this mountain that our ancestors worshiped; and yet you Jews say that the proper place for worship is in Jerusalem.” “Believe me,” replied Jesus, “a time is coming when it will be neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem that you will worship the Father. You Samaritans do not know what you worship; we know what we worship, for Salvation comes from the Jews. But a time is coming, indeed it is already here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father spiritually and truly; for such are the worshipers that the Father desires. God is Spirit; and those who worship him must worship spiritually and truly.”

    (John 4:19-24 TCNT)

  • Twenty Five Years of Positive Infinity

    Twenty-five years ago I received the following notification from Geocities, the free website provider:

    Sat Aug 23 13:59:46 1997…

    Welcome, DON, to GeoCities Personal Home Page Program!
    Please write down or save the following information for future use.

    Your Member Name is: penlay.
    Your Neighborhood is: Athens/Parthenon.
    Your Address is: 4799.
    Your Current Password is: ******

    ********
    NOTE: WE WILL NEVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PASSWORD. We have access to the database and can get it at any time. Please be sure not to give it out to anyone else.
    ********

    The URL for your Personal Home Page is:
    http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/4799

    If you want to change your password use our editor at http://www.geocities.com/homestead/homeprof.html

    At this location you can also make all other changes to your account profile, including changing your member name and directory listing.

    Some of the very early history of the site–including some of its graphics–is in our “About” page.   A summary of the site after its conversion to a WordPress blog is here.

    Twenty-five years is an eternity on the internet.  Many things have changed since this site was started.  The purpose of the site has not: to be a blessing to those who visit, to be informative in a world where it’s too easy to uncritically accept the “pap” that we’re expected to embrace.

    It took some time to get a structure put together, but by the time this site migrated to WordPress the basic topical structure of the site was pretty much as it is now; you can see this in the “Categories” list on the left.  Several of its features have been migrated to other sites.  The Bossuet Project has its own site now and the Island Chronicles (my fiction) and the Palm Beach Experience have gone to Chet Aero Marine.  This site was self-hosted from the time it left Geocities until earlier this year, when it migrated to wordpress.com.

    At the last anniversary I noted that things were closing in on sites like this.  Most of that censorship has taken place on social media, although some have spilled over into the hosted world.  The corporatist style of mind of those coming up doesn’t bode well for freedom of speech in this country.

    When we first moved to Palm Beach, my parents placed me in Palm Beach Public School, whose principal was Clifford Ripley (believe it or not!)  He placed many pithy sayings in the school handbook, one of which was “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday; make each day count.”  God has given us one day at a time; we need to make it count while we are still here.  This blog is part of my attempt to do just that the last twenty-five years; I trust it has been a blessing to you.

  • The Challenge from Aquinas That Changed Mathematics

    A few years back, in my post If You Really Want to Get Into Trouble, Read the Mediaevals, I quoted Carl Boyer’s A History of Mathematics as follows:

    The son Georg (Cantor) took a strong interest in the finespun arguments of medieval theologians concerning continuity and the infinite, and this militated against his pursuing a mundane career in engineering as suggested by his father. 

    Until fairly recently I didn’t have the information to “flesh this out,” but David Foster Wallace, in his book Everything and More, did just that:

    Elsewhere in Summa Theologiae, though, Thomas (Aquinas) advances a more original argument:

    The existence of an actually infinite multitude is impossible. For any set of things one considers must be a specific set. And sets of things are specified by the numbers of things in them. Now, no number is infinite, for number results from counting through a set in units. So no set of things can actually be inherently unlimited, nor can it happen to be unlimited. (Summa Theologiae, I.a., 7.4)

    This passage gets quoted by G. Cantor himself in his “Mitteilungen zur Lehre vom Transfiniten,” (Contributions to the Study of the Transfinite) wherein he calls it history’s only really significant objection to the existence of an actual ∞. For our purposes, there are two significant things about Thomas’s argument: (1) It treats of ∞ in terms of “sets of things,” which is what Cantor and R. Dedekind will do 600 years hence (plus Thomas’ third sentence is pretty much exactly the way Cantor will define a set’s cardinal number.) (2) Even more important, it reduces all of Aristotle’s metaphysical distinctions and complications to the issue of whether infinite numbers exist. It’s easy to see that what Cantor really likes here is feature (2), which makes the argument a kind of tailormade challenge, since the only really plausible rebuttal to Thomas will consist in someone giving a rigorous, coherent theory of infinite numbers and their properties.

    David Foster Wallace, Everything and More, pp. 92-94

    There are a few things worth noting here:

    • Aquinas didn’t actually argue that the infinite didn’t exist, he argued that it was restricted to God.
    • Wallace really paraphrases Aquinas; for a more exact translation, read it here.
    • It’s tempting to dismiss Aquinas because Cantor disproved him; however, that’s based on the concept of “science” that’s set forth these days. Today we are told that science didn’t begin until we broke off the shackles of religious and philosophical limitations, something that “happened” around the Renaissance. We’ve been doing science from the beginning of civilisation. For example, how is it possible to discuss non-Euclidean geometry, another advance in the nineteenth century, unless we had Euclidean geometry to start with? It’s the same here. Our advances start with what we have, and they don’t always proceed in the nice, straight lines that we’d like to think that they do.
    • It’s highly unlikely that the musings of modern or post-modern theologians will inspire the kinds of advances that Aquinas inspired in Cantor.
    • As noted in this piece, Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers was controversial, but ultimately won the day. David Hilbert’s famous quote that “From the paradise created for us by Cantor, no one will drive us out” is still valid. Today there are people who are trying to drive us out of that paradise by challenging the whole concepts of infinites and infinitesimals, saying that these don’t exist in the physical world. In a sense they are going back to Aquinas, which is an amusing thought.
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  • Britain’s elites have lost control

    Britain may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war …

    Britain’s elites have lost control

  • Should My Students Be Here?

    Last year, before the Fall semester started, I posted Teaching Secular Blasphemy, where I attacked the whole “perfect life” concept that pervades our culture, inflates our expectations and makes us depressed and angry when they don’t work out. I didn’t attack this idea because of their psychological or sociological damage (which are evident) but because it is inherently unscientific.

    We’re facing the beginning of another Fall semester, and once again I’m up against concepts which are at the same time unscientific and damaging to us individually and collectively. At the tip of this iceberg is the anti-natalist sentiment that pervades the upper reaches of our society. Taken to its natural conclusion, that means that my classrooms should be empty because most of my students are “traditional students,” i.e., people who graduate from high school and start college within a short time. Since their birth was after the Dinosaur Age, and since people being born are bad for the planet, they shouldn’t be there. (Such logic should give academics who advocate for progressive policies pause, but…)

    At the root of this sentiment is the American environmental movement. Now I have students who will go into environmental work, and that’s a good thing. In the fog of amnesia that pervades our society, what they don’t realise is that a great deal of the environmental movement in this country is not fuelled by science but by a system of thought (if you can call it that) which is deeply unscientific and, like the perfect life idea, harmful to us all around. Let me give a few of these assumptions:

    • The world was a pristine, paradisaical wilderness before the arrival of humans. That’s especially pervasive in the U.S., where the presence of the Native Americans is blithely ignored to perpetuate this idea, to say nothing of catastrophic natural events.
    • This leads to the next conclusion: humans are intruders on this earthly paradise. Their footprint needs to be reduced or eliminated to rectify this problem.
    • There are too many humans and the number needs to be reduced, a concept I discuss in We’re Looking for a Volunteer, Ted. (To some extent this problem is solving itself with declining general fertility, but for Americans problems never solve themselves, they have to be eradicated through social campaigns and acts of Congress.)
    • The suburbs take up too much space because of “urban sprawl” and need to be eliminated. Suburbs are additionally the generators of “phonies” which are the bane of a society which values authenticity. To replace these it is necessary to house our people differently, something I discuss in Barack Obama: Dreaming of the 50 Square Metre Apartment.
    • Our solutions should be “natural” and “from the earth.” That’s why renewables are such an article of faith amongst our ruling class, never mind that there are solutions which practically eliminate the carbon output while providing the energy.
    • The only way to get to these results is for everyone’s (well, almost everyone’s) living standards to seriously go in reverse or, put another way, back to poverty.

    There are signs that the generation coming up is starting to put things together on these issues. The most prominent sign of this is the budding pro-nuclear power movement. Boomer environmentalists (with exceptions) made nuclear power into technological pornography for about forty years. This orthodoxy is being challenged, especially in places like Germany, where the reality of a winter without Russian gas is starting to sink in.

    As an engineer and a Christian, I realise that a) problems are made to the solved, and solve effectively and b) God has given us a brain and stewardship over the Earth, and we should exercise both. Additionally I know that my students are created in the image of God and that, although we frustrate each other, they deserve better than the thin gruel they’re served by their elders. My students will do more on a practical level than these myriads of activists will ever hope to accomplish.

    I’m looking forward to this semester, and seeing my students in front of me.

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