Days go by and still I think of you.

Most Bible quotes are KJV or ESV.

 
An Attempted Definition of Total Depravity

Eve Tushnet on Original Sin.

She closed by asking:

I'd also like to ask believers in "total depravity": That's fine. But what do you call our knowledge that something has gone wrong? What do you call the memory of beauty, the memory of self and sureness, that is our only possible link to truth and the only thing that allows us to discern the difference between truth and insufficiency?

I would call it common grace.

I think here she's making a common misinterpretation of total depravity. The "total" doesn't talk about the degree of depravity -- no one, not even Hitler, has ever been as bad as he could be every single day of his life (but only because they -- we -- are restrained by the grace of God). It refers to extent. That is, the doctrine holds there is no part of you which is naturally neutral, let alone good. Which part is righteous apart from the grace of God? The body? The passions? The intellect? Nothing. Not even our memory is untainted by depravity. And there's more. Someone once said the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. This isn't a bad thing for the self-righteous to hear, so that they'll introspect a little more honestly, but it gives false hope to the one who knows he's evil. He can imagine that sure, part of his heart is evil, but part is pure and clean, and flatter himself that he contains, on his own, a corner of untainted goodness. It's not true. The taint is in the whole.

Take a bottle of the finest wine on the market and put in a spoonful of sewage; where's the uncontaminated, pure wine? There isn't any. It's not pure sewage, so it's not as bad as it could be -- but is there any part you would willingly drink? Of course not. As it is, it's fit only to be discarded. It would take a miracle for it to be good wine again. But Jesus is in the miracle business. If He can make good wine out of water, why not good wine out of bad wine?
posted by Aaron at 1:37 PM

 
When Kittens Turn Evil

Scary.
posted by Aaron at 12:30 PM

 
Andrew Sullivan Demands My Pauperization, Implicitly Demands My Incarceration

Not by name, and not in so many words, but that's exactly what he's called for here (via Lileks).

Lileks does a good job explaining how stupid Sullivan's gas tax proposal is, but there's a few things I'd like to add.

The case for a gas tax is a straightforward one. Gas prices are strikingly lower in America than anywhere else in the world;

If he is to be consistent, Sullivan must call for the immediate repeal of the First Amendment, because if this "straightforward" argument applies in favor of high gas taxes it must do so with 70 times the force for censorship.

In the first place, applied to censorship it's actually true. Do you know how much gas costs in Kuwait? Like 5¢ a gallon. There are parts of Saudi Arabia where water costs more than gas does. What Sullivan means is that gas costs less here than it does anywhere in Europe. This is what provincialism looks like -- if Sullivan knows about the big world beyond America and Europe, it never enters his mind unless they're killing us or we're killing them, but as soon as we pass beyond terrorism, suddenly the Earth shrinks. The unstated premise of the liberal urban elite is that Europe is not merely the proper frame of reference, but normative. If we aren't simply Europeans on the other side of the Atlantic, there's something wrong with us. It's downright immoral to go around acting like we're our own people. And what do these normative Euros do? They crush dissent.

But, unlike high gas prices, it extends past Europe. Canada, for one. And I don't think you need links to know about places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc.

In the second place, censorship has history on its side in every single country in the world, without exception. If we're to ape foreigners, why not dead foreigners (and our own ancestors)?

Obviously, if Sullivan follows his logic to its conclusion, the kind of censorship he'd call for is Sweden-style rather than Iran-style, which is why people like me would be the ones going to jail.

since an overwhelming majority of Americans drive, few avoid the tax;

Lileks hints at this with comments about a "cab tax", but I'll come out and say it: one of these few is none other than Sullivan himself. This is more than a simple ad hom, for reasons I'll get into later.

So why is it so unpopular? Some say it's inherently regressive — that it affects the poor more than the rich. In reality, it tends to affect the middle class more than anyone else, especially those in the suburbs with more than one car. The truly needy tend to consume less gas than their middle-class compatriots.

This argument cannot survive contact with an actual poor person.

Here, I'll volunteer. I'm a college student. I live at home, so I don't need to pay for a place to stay and I don't need to pay for much food (I usually even bring my lunches from home). I can't afford it. How about a guy that has kids to feed and a roof to keep over his head? What does Sullivan answer? "Oh, yeah, it may be ruinously expensive for you, but that's fine because the guy in the SUV one lane over will be able to afford less time up in Door County this summer." What kind of sick argument is that? It doesn't even work as class warfare.

Let me add one further reason, and it's a simple one. We're at war. So far, the Bush Administration has refused to ask for a general sacrifice to pay for this effort. But that leads to a sense that we're not all involved, that we do not all owe the troops our support.

When Sullivan says "we" and "all" and "general sacrifice", he doesn't tell you that it doesn't include him. As Lileks pointed out, high gas taxes would add to the price of literally everything, because it all gets hauled over the interstates, but Sullivan still devises a tax the exempts him from any direct cost. That's why his membership in the few that don't drive matters: when he calls for sacrifice, he actually means for the rest of us to make sacrifices while he keeps his precious self pampered and sacrifice free.

If we do not owe it to our fellow citizens, to the environment, to greater fuel efficiency, can we at least owe it to the troops? Or is that minimal level of personal sacrifice too much to ask of ourselves?

The answer, for Sullivan, is that it most certainly is too much to ask of any "ourselves" of which he is a member, but he's more than happy to ask it of everyone else.
posted by Aaron at 10:30 PM

 
Those Wacky Muslims

What kind of question is this?! Is she that ugly?

And the answer:

Having a baby is not based on one’s actions of intimacy. It is the sole will of Allah.

Um, I hate to break it to them, but unless you happen to be giving birth to the Messiah, it just doesn't work like that.

I can just see this: "Hey honey, you were right. I'm pregnant anyway! It must be the will of Allah!" And then the kid looks like the mailman.
posted by Aaron at 7:59 PM

 
More Fun with Caffeine

This time, I used X-it Ice mints. Rather than boil it in a pan like I did last time, I put about 25 in a coffee cup and poured hot water in. I put in a little less than half, and stirred it a little. It didn't seem to do much to the mints, but when I put a little more in they all dissolved. I filled the cup the rest of the way and put it in the fridge for today (since it was late-ish).

It tasted very minty and a little mediciney. The effect was like three cans of Red Bull in quick succession (which I've also had).

OO requested information about the caffeine content. Unfortunately, they usually don't list it. Erowid puts it at ~12 mg per serving, which fits what I've heard before and what the overall experience is. So, since X-its are one mint per serving, I probably had something around 300 mgs, which sounds about right.
posted by Aaron at 9:27 PM

 
Priests and Philosophers

I was reading Leo Strauss when I came across a statement I've seen him make several times; that priests are the only (or highest) teachers who as such are part of the city, while philosophers as such are not part of the city, even if they live in a city, since their concern, rational perfection or the understanding of all of life by means of reason, is inaccessible to the city. I think he's wrong. Or rather, I think the classical philosophers he follows on this point were right, but that the situation has changed. I am not relying on historicism here, but simple history. If, say, someone said in 1859 that "Slavery is legal in the United States", that statement wouldn't be true ten years later. By "priests", you don't necessarily need to understand it in any sacramental or liturgical sense, because the thought concerns all religious leaders.

Three things, I think, changed the situation.

1) Christianity. The Christian simply as a Christian is concerned with things that no human city can be concerned with (and therefore so are Christian leaders of all varieties). The city as such is concerned with the things of this world, but for the Christian (if he is a good Christian) the things of this world are at best a medium through which to glorify God, and at worst a collection of sins. Against the City of God is the City of Man.

2) The separation of church and state, or the rise of the modern liberal state; also persecution. An Anglican priest, say, is by definition a servant of the government. Not so an American Christian leader. Far less so a Christian leader in China, or in Rome before Constantine. This is a good thing: to become subservient to the state automatically corrupts Christianity, since the state and the city it serves are concerned with the things of this world and true Christians concerned with the things of the Lord.

3) The taming of philosophy. I'm thinking here of historicism (one of Strauss' themes) and its modern form, post-modernism. This sort of philosophy is incapable of providing any serious reason to be concerned with anything beyond gratification through consumer items, which also happens to be the chief concern of the modern state.

In modern societies, it's exactly the reverse: religious leaders are not part of the city, while philosophers are.
posted by Aaron at 8:37 PM

 
Watch This Blog

Matt Weber, who was born in the same year I was, looks promising.
posted by Aaron at 1:38 PM

 
Baptist Liturgy

Deacon: So, um, I'm supposed to say "He is risen."

Congregation: HE IS RISEN INDEED!

Deacon: Hey, it worked!
posted by Aaron at 1:30 PM

 
Is One Link a Blogwatch?

I guess I'll just say for now that the statement, "God is love," ought to change your view of love at least as much as it changes your view of God. If it doesn't... look again.

From Eve Tushnet.
posted by Aaron at 11:38 PM

 
Culinary Experiments

I have now officially eaten low-carb bread. It's... surprisingly lifelike.

I finally finished an experiment inspired by the Old Oligarch, who suggested a "caffeine syrup" based on caffeine pills as an avenue of investigation. Now, I don't have any caffeine pills, but I did have another source of caffeine, besides coffee: Green-T variety Warp mints. I love the cinnamon Warp mints, but I couldn't stand the Green-Ts, so I had the tin sitting around for, probably, over a year. At some point water got in and made the inside of the tin emit an evil smell whenever it was opened, which made eating them seem unwise. So they were sitting there, on top of the breadbox for reasons I've forgotten, when I read OO's post. So I went and boiled them. The result was more of a drink than a syrup, so I put it in a beer mug, and then, growing less brave, I stuck it in the fridge and left it.

My Mom started complaining about it taking up space, so, adding some vodka, I drank it. Nice! Tastes okay, but too sweet. Good buzz, caffeiny and beer-like at once.

I think I'll try it with new, straight mint favored caffeinated mints next.
posted by Aaron at 5:32 PM

 
Political Enmity

In the Chronicle of Higher Education (link via ALD), Alan Wolfe directs our attention to Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who knew Leo Strauss before he came to America (to answer the obvious question, yes, Schmitt joined the Nazi party).

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics.

"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.

So, is Schmitt right? Wolfe asserts that he is not, while providing tons of evidence to the contrary. As soon as he wrote the above, he started the lying.

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals... Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state [YES! He has the chutzpah to say it!]... Conservatives are not bothered by injustice because they recognize that politics means maximizing your side's advantages, not giving them away. If unity can be achieved only by repressing dissent, even at risk of violating the rule of law, that is how conservatives will achieve it... Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

Wolfe is obviously writing about idealized, perfect liberals. Less obviously, he's writing about idealized, perfect conservatives. After all, the crusader for perfect good needs a totally-evil enemy as a foil to display his own splendid goodness. Who needs a knight when all the dragons are dead? So in place of the real flesh and blood conservatives, he puts his dream-enemy, who are theatrically base so he can be theatrically virtuous.

The irony is, the left and the Democrats much more closely resemble the ruthless political faction bent on power uber alles and feeding them pleasing lies about how they are innocent of their crimes and the other side guilty will only make them worse.

He says:

To the degree that conservatives bring to this country something like Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, they stand against not only liberals but America's historic liberal heritage.

Seemingly blind to the irony. He just spent multiple paragraphs trying to prove that conservatives are the enemy, while considering liberals friends.

Wolfe admits:

And, on the other side of the fence, there are liberals and leftists who want to fight back against conservatives as ruthlessly as conservatives fight against them.

But this is only the same lie repeated again. Those eviiiiiiiil conservatives aggressing and (can you imagine?) even corrupting the liberals. Who is it, then, even now plotting to supress it's declared enemies using the First Amendment (!) as an excuse? Liberals. The question almost answers itself: the Right is "literal" and "fundamentalist" and so protected from such a morally degraded "interpretation" of a text.

The Left always accuses the Right of whatever it's guilty of.

Which, perhaps, is why a look at Schmitt's stuff is worthwhile. If you ask a conservative who we're at war with, he'll say terrorists (or Islamists or some variation); a liberal will probably say Bush. They've been aggressing against us for a long time, and by now they long to begin open persecution.
posted by Aaron at 5:10 PM