Moonstruck Bovinity 1980 - Critique of Marxism and the West

"If someone really wants to perform a service, he should make comfortable people uncomfortable, and calm people agitated. He should plant contradiction and conflict in stagnant people. By God, it would be a thousand times over a greater service to sow doubt among some of these people than to sow certainty, since that certainty is being injected into people at such a rate that it acts like a narcotic; it is worthless. We 700 million Muslims have a certainty that is not worth two bits. What comes into existence after doubt, anxiety, and agitation has value: "Belief after unbelief!"

. . . We see the other kind of certainty all through history, and it is worthless. . . . The prophets came essentially to produce controversy. Otherwise, the people would have gone right on grazing peacefully in their folly."


--Ali Shari'Ati, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, Mizan, 1980, page 99. Just came across this today, and there is some kind of translation and or language issue in this English version, but I'm going to have to read it at some point.

Theistic Enthymeme

Just off the top of my head at this point in time, if asked why I believe in God, I say, "Because the principles necessary for me to evaluate any universal claims, including atheistic and skeptical claims, imply a personal mind which is the universally and ultimately referenced standard of all thought, including the recognition of mind."

Vacation Entropics

Every problem is a market. That's the fascinating thing about recognizing a distinction between universal ideals and their mere approximation caused by defections from them. Suddenly it's a capitalism of arguments about possible alternatives. The fallibility of finite beings and their tendency to will self-contradiction in an entropic universe requires it.

Epistemic Aspergers Syndrome

The questions and objections themselves always point in the right directions, they just aren't followed out as far as the questioners want to go. Instead there are dismissals and or loops. Of course there are necessary logical loops and existential loops. But they’re not the presets used by the loop gurus. They’re the loops discovered by following out the questions and objections, simply following the responses in the natural order of knowing through discussion. Moreover, either be up front and specific about it and capable of justifying it in some sense,  or expect to get accused of begging the question---in addition to looping presets. Consequently, an adequate philosophy of logic has to be called in as arbiter, when reason and logic themselves come under scrutiny. There's nothing else left.

Moreover, when logical sequence and existential reality are conflated as a means of determining truth, and a logical question about inferential sequence gets answered with something involving what was supposedly in question and now being argued for---that is frustrating and, for many, infuriating, regardless of belief or disbelief in God. Is -that- good news?

For the self-fulfilling martyrs out there, of course, it's a sign from God to commence personal judgments.

Balking on Command

For all the lambasting of the mainstream media, it's almost an unwritten rule that until an issue is raised in that media vocal advocates on any side simply will not talk about it. I first raised the following issue in 2006.

If an argument for a claim about the ontological status of certain objects is made, the question is how to arbitrate that ontology without self-exempting both the criteria and the premises based on that criteria. If they are self-exempting, the same question arises about them. If they're not self-exempting, then their own authority to arbitrate ontology is merely question-begging as long as the issue is not even being addressed.

Not sure why theists, as well as atheists, continue to ignore this issue.  Philosophers and apologists are remiss in posturing about logicality and yet maintaining mutual silence about this. It's like a secret agreement to just collectively whistle past the epistemic graveyard. I can guarantee that these questions will only loom larger as they continue to be ignored.

Tell-Tale Atheism: Still Aping Paranoid Fundies

If I was still an atheist, I wouldn’t waste my time shadowing some haunted paranoia about religion, because the mere non-existence of God, if true, is sufficient to eliminate the entire enterprise. The very idea of there being the slightest need or “obligation” to engage in such implicit pandering, when atheism was supposed to be enough, is an insult to serious atheist thinkers who have no need for such tiresome hand-wringing.

Today’s atheists think some favorable comparison to Christianity or religion in general is going to somehow strengthen their case or show others that they are in some sense “better”, when this is merely an admission that they can’t quite handle the complete absence of any standard of good, obligation, ought, or should or any other standard for what is nothing more than a fundy-like lust to scold others. It's an admission that atheism is somehow not enough to keep them from moralistic whining, and only mirrors their religious counterparts.

Talk about playing into the same syndrome that was the original basis for rejecting an opposing view.

And now we’re going to have scientific commandments thumped at us by the “new” fundy atheists.

I’ve got some arbitrary news for such sunday schooler wannabees.

But the philosophically parasitic atheists' need to justify or falsify anything is the real  god getting a free ride here.

Kai Nielsen's Elephant Sighting

"For 'God commanded it' to be a morally relevant reason for doing something, let alone a definitive moral reason for doing it, it must, at least, be the case that God is good. A believer, of course, believes this to be the case, but what grounds does he have for this belief? If he says that he knows this to be true because the record of the Bible, the state of the world or the behavior of Jesus displays God's goodness, the believer himself clearly displays by his very response that he has some logically prior criterion for moral belief that is not based on the fact that there is a deity."

--Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God, Buffalo NY: Prometheus, 1973, page 22.