Days go by and still I think of you.

Most Bible quotes are KJV or ESV.

 
Market Codes

David Sucher at City Comforts has two posts (here and here) about the earthquake in Iran, both to the effect that it proves how much we need the government to set building standards. The second is sarcastically titled, "We really don't need codes; the market will take care of it."

First of all, jumping on a tragedy to push his anti-libertarian point strikes me as unseemly, but I've probably been guilty of the same sort of thing myself.

Second, while we do really need codes, the market is capable of providing those codes. The fact that it didn't in that case hardly proves that it can't as a matter of abstract principle. Suppose Underwriters Laboratory had never been created, and instead we now had a Bureau of Electronic Standards which did the same work. Libertarians would be denounced as dreamers for suggesting that the free market could do the work -- no, that's not right. We'd be denounced for wanting to leave the work undone, for opposing safe electronics, for positively wishing for harm to poor children putting up Christmas lights. And yet it was created, and no one disputes that the free market can regulate electronics. If kosher foods had to be certified as such by the government, any proposal to abolish that would provoke outrage that anyone would want to make Jews eat non-kosher foods. But there are private certifiers with varying levels of strictness, and the people who keep kosher know what to look for. The idea of private building codes with private certification for compliance only looks radical if you don't know that the model is already in use and works fine.

UPDATE: He has a reply added to the second post, which notes that he did admit the possibility of private, free market codes in the first post, which I was uncareful enough to miss.

Sure, it might be theoertically possible to have another system. I could offer Lloyds as an example of what I think is a private standard-setting agency. But why bother? As a matter of "abstract principle?"

Well, yeah.

On a whole other approach to the question, if the market is capable, why has it not? Do we really think that the insurance magnates of the early 20th century willingly & freely gave up a lucrative market to some pointy-headed bureaucrats? Government ends up doing a lot of stuff simply because no one actually can do it profitably.

I'm not sure what insurance would have to do with it, except maybe refusing to insure uncertified structures. You could just as easily ask why standards of sanitary food are set by the government, while standards of kosher food are free market (well, sort of, but you get the idea). You'd think that the market for sanitary food would be larger than (and include) the market for kosher food. I'm guessing municipal building codes got there first, just as the FDA got there first.
posted by Aaron at 12:08 AM

 
Scene From a Restaurant

I got Wolves of the Calla for Christmas and finished it about 4:30 this afternoon. Afterward we went out for dinner with my grandparents. At a table next to ours there was a family with several small children. Not long before they left, one of the girls excitedly stirred her soda, and yelled out, "This makes it more caffeinish!"
posted by Aaron at 8:08 PM

 
Christ, the Perfect Mediator

In Plato's dialogue the Symposium, Socrates repeats the speech of Diotima, who said that the mediator between men and the Olympian gods the Greeks imagined was Eros, the personification of longing, who she called a daemon. This might perhaps be enough for Olympians, but they never really existed. And Eros was suitable for men (after a fashion) mainly because he didn't exist either.

The truth of matters is that for a true mediator, an intermediate or hybrid being is too little for God, and too much for us. When men see an angel, they typically fall down and quake. But for God, Micheal, or Gabriel, or all the angels together, or all the angels plus the whole rest of creation, is a trifle. Only a fellow man can come to us, and be our example and save us and be our friend. Only God can plead our case before God.
posted by Aaron at 10:21 PM

 
Born is the King of Israel

2 Samuel 7:16: And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever.

Luke 1:32-33: He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
posted by Aaron at 7:21 PM

 
The Virgin God-Bearer

And Mary said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." And the angel departed from her.

And so Mary, blessed among women, carried God inside her for nine months.
posted by Aaron at 5:46 PM

 
A Brief Argument Against Mormonism

From the beginning of Mormonism until 1978, no black person, nor any person who was part black to any degree, was allowed to hold the Mormon priesthood. Allegedly, God reversed this in 1978, but before then the divine rule was as Brigham Young said: "No person having the least particle of Negro blood can hold the Priesthood." It turns out to be the case that everyone has such particles. It follows that every Mormon endowment from Joe Smith until 1978 was invalid. And since a Mormon priesthood can only be granted by one who already holds it, it follows that every endowment since is also invalid.
posted by Aaron at 6:34 PM

 
The Little Birdie Was Mistaken

George Ryan was indicted today!

Illinois Leader

Trib (registration required)


posted by Aaron at 2:32 PM

 
The Trial of Saddam Hussein

My father was on a jury for a murder trial once. A gay man had murdered his boyfriend with a steak knife he grabbed off a kitchen table. The issue wasn't guilt -- the man was obviously guilty -- but the degree of guilt. The prosecution said it was first degree murder, the defense said it was either second degree, or manslaughter (I forget which). Eventually he was found guilty of first degree murder.

Saddam Hussein's trial will be like that, except for the part about Dad being on the jury.

Bush is, of course, entirely right to have the trial conducted by Iraqis. It's not enough that America defeated the Saddam regime; the Iraqi civic order itself must be seen in triumph over the old tyranic order. An order with teeth, a real order, must be capable of killing its own enemies. I believe that the trial should wait until the elections are over and the transfer of sovereignty to a democratic government is complete. If the Iraqis are too impatient for that, at least the trial should take long enough that the execution will happen afterward.

"And this will always be known by those who read ancient history, that after a change of State, either from a Republic to a Tyranny, or from a Tyranny to a Republic, a memorable execution against the enemies of the existing conditions is necessary." --Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
posted by Aaron at 10:26 PM

 
News From a Little Birdie

Rumor has it that Illinois' disgraced former governor George Ryan is going to be indicted next month.

When they look for him, he'll be gone. Eventually they'll find him... in a hole...
posted by Aaron at 5:12 PM

 
Why Syncretism Cannot Save Us (Not Even From Terrorism)

Concerning the "American empire":

The problem is caused by the fact that it is a militantly secularist and pragmatic empire and, as such, the pressure is already being applied to the Christian church to abandon its exclusivist claims concerning the Faith. The logic of such empires always insists upon joint worship of various gods in the pantheon. This, above all else, places us at odds with the current religious climate.

(From here, in the fourth section.)

The tricky part is, the American form won't steal the Ark and set it next to the idols. It's not a simple pantheon. It's more like Hinduism, where each god is understood as a manifestation of the same underlying reality, and the important thing is devotion. It doesn't matter to who. The pantheon is a menu. Pick one, and give it your lifelong devotion. Or maybe meditate until you think that you too are a manifestation of the same underlying reality. This is the direction Bush travels in when he says Muslims worship the same God Christians do, whether he means to or not.

The reason, of course, is so we can get along in perfect harmony, just like the colors of the rainbow, singing "We Are the World" and swaying in our ethnic outfits. It won't work. Not only will Christians in America and elsewhere know that regardless of whether there's some sense in which Muslims worship "the same god", if they don't accept that God took on human flesh and paid the penalty for sin on the cross, they will be damned. The Muslims themselves won't buy it. The issue they have with us has never been the same god or a different one, it's the claim that we have a faulty, corrupted revelation, and they have the final, pure, uncorrupt revelation. That's been enough difference to kill over from Mohammed's day forward.
posted by Aaron at 10:19 PM

 
Islam Needs a Rick Warren, or Something

Hey, seeker-sensitive mullahs makes as much sense as the debate over whether Islam needs a Pope or a Luther.

The striking thing, at least to me, is that the claims are fairly orthogonal. The people saying that Islam needs a Reformation are saying that Muslims should abandon the bad, reactionary, anti-democratic aspects of Islam and keep (or add) the good, modernity-friendly, pro-democratic aspects. That neither Protestants nor Catholics would subscribe to their depiction of the Reformation doesn't change the fact that that's what the Islam-needs-a-Reformation people mean. The people calling for an Islamic Pope (a Caliph, but I haven't seen anyone use that term, maybe because the most famous aspirant to that title is Osama bin Laden) mean that all Muslims should be under a single leader who'll keep them in line. The Pope of Rome never lead all Christians like that, and the Eastern and Western halves of the original liturgical church excommunicated each other over the attempt (the East has a Pope too, the Pope of Alexandria), but that's what they mean. The two could happen together as one movement, the wished-for Islamic Reformation could happen as a reaction against a restored Caliphate, or some other combination.

In my opinion, the debate is simply a cover for polemics over the Reformation. The latest, from Tech Central Station by Edward Feser, is more or less nothing but the standard anti-Protestant polemic, with a helping of Hayek. Noah Millman's answer is excellent. Even he, someone with no religious interest in whether we should like Luther or the Pope more (since he's Jewish) mainly writes about specifically Christian events in the West. Go read it and come back here.

Now, since the piece isn't really about Islam at all, it's about Protestantism and especially sola Scriptura, I'll reply to it as such.

Consider that the debate between Protestants and Catholics has always at bottom been about authority: does it lie ultimately in the Church or in the Bible? At first glance it might seem that the Protestant answer is a distinctly Hayekian one: the Bible, rather than the Church or the Pope, ought to be the believer's guide in all things, and as such the believer might seem to be liberated from the arbitrary will of those holding ecclesiastical power.
 
But appearances are deceiving. For the Bible does not, of course, in any literal sense interpret itself. And yet each believer, being his own "priest," is supposed to have direct access to the meaning of the text, without the need for guidance by an authoritative Church.
 
So what are believers to do when they are not sure what the Bible means, or when they disagree as to its meaning? The standard Protestant answer is that the Holy Spirit will lead the believer into understanding. But what criteria are there for determining exactly what the Spirit is saying, or whether He is really speaking to one at all? Here the believer must inevitably fall back on his own private judgment. The result, notoriously, has been the splintering of Protestantism into thousands of denominations. The Bible ends up saying whatever the individual believer thinks it says -- however ill-educated or bigoted that believer might be, and whatever extra-Biblical agenda he may unconsciously be reading into it. Every man becomes, in practice, his own authority -- which means, in effect, that there is no authority at all.

This attack is primarily against the doctrine of perspicuity. I wrote a brief argument for perspicuity. I think perhaps, instead of launching right into the argument or fisking Feser in detail, I should give an example of a perspicuous Biblical text.

Romans 9.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Paul had intended, when he wrote this passage, to say that the explaination for the fact that not all Jews of the day were Christians is that predestination is true and that many Jews weren't elect and were always predestined for Hell (this is what he did intend, but the fact that something's true is no reason not to suppose it for the sake of argument). Could he have taught predestination more clearly, unambiguously, and perspicuously than he did? I submit that the answer is no. Had he written out the five points of the Synod of Dordt, it would have been no clearer than the text he actually wrote. If you read Romans 9 and think it doesn't teach predestination, you're defective. I say that as someone who once read it and thought, "No, that can't be it, it has to mean something else, it just can't mean that." I wasn't ready to admit the full truth, and that was a defect.

Think back to the brief argument: there's a strong element of condemnation in the refusal to send back Lazarus. It's not that the rich man's brothers are merely unable to understand, they would willfully refuse to be persuaded by even a man risen from the dead to send them the message.

One of their favorite verses against perspicuity is 2 Peter 3:16, which says Paul's epistles have "some things hard to be understood". But see what comes next: "which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction." There's real exigetical difficulty with some of Paul's writing, which no one denies, but that only sets us up for the real trouble, which is eisegesis.

I say, the Papacy and the Magisterium do nothing to deal with the problem. Even if Catholicism were right and the Pope were the Vicar of Christ, the same moral flaws that prevent people from submitting to the teachings of Scripture would keep them from following the Pope. I suppose Catholics must believe something along this line to account for the existence of non-Catholic Christians.

This is not a full defense of sola Scriptura, but it does, I think, go a long way toward answering the claim that an adequate final authority must prevent divergence and factions.
posted by Aaron at 4:43 PM

 
Oddly Interesting

From the Times Literary Supplement (via ALD):

In Mein Kampf Hitler had described the US as a “giant state” and saw its rise as a threat to Britain. Now, in the Second Book, he claimed that “with the American Union a new power factor has emerged on a scale that threatens to nullify all the previous state power relationships and hierarchies”. Arguing that emigration had represented a form of selection of the fittest, Hitler claimed that this “menacing American hegemonic position” was “determined primarily by the quality of the American people and only secondarily by its Lebensraum”. This view of the American people from 1928 was very different from Hitler’s opinion on January 7, 1942, when he told his entourage: “I don’t see much future for the Americans. In my view it’s a decayed country . . . everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it’s half judaized and the other half negrified”.

Hitler then addressed the question of how the threat of the United States’ “menacing hegemonic position” could be met. He poured scorn on the attempt by the founder of the Pan European Union, the Austrian Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, to create a united Europe “through a purely formal union of European peoples”. Since the US’s position was determined primarily by the quality of its people, it could not be seriously challenged by “a pacifist, democratic, pan European muddled state”. Such a union would lead to “an entity whose entire strength and energy would be absorbed by internal rivalries”, like the German Confederation of 1815–66. Hitler claimed that lasting unions could only occur when the nations involved were of equal racial quality and related, and when the union took the form of a slow struggle for hegemony with one state emerging as dominant, as occurred with Prussia in Germany. This would take centuries and lead to a very different union to that envisaged by the Pan European Union. Moreover, the final achievement “would signify the racial decline of its founders”, presumably as a result of racial mixing. Instead of such a “utopia”, Hitler argued that the only state that would “be able to stand up to North America” would be the one that had managed “to raise the racial value of its people”. He then asserted that it was “the duty of the National Socialist movement to strengthen and prepare our own fatherland to the greatest degree possible for this task”, his first mention of the United States as a future opponent.

I wonder how the leaders of Europe will take it, knowing that not only did Hitler have exactly the same attitude to the then-future American "hyperpower", he had a better understanding of the situation, the racialist stuff notwithstanding.
posted by Aaron at 2:56 PM