Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Conservative Politics and Liberty

The life of Man must be defined as unalienably self-sovereign.

In a recent article in American Thinker, Bruce Walker wrote this piece of politically conservative observation:

"Seventy-five years ago this month, one of the most insidious laws in human history came into effect in Nazi Germany. The innocent sounding name was The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring. It was the ghastly pinnacle of an unholy theory of human eugenics. Darwinism -- not the Theory of Evolution, per se, but the sinister notion that natural selection made God superfluous -- liberated man from his obligation to treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe."

While Walker is correct in calling the law "insidious," and "the ghastly pinnacle" of eugenics, he demonstrates what is wrong with conservative epistemology, namely, the inability to see that political and social values and the virtues required to attain them must be values and virtues proper to Man--not to a God who is unattainable in life.

Men are never "liberated" from their "obligation to treat fellow men" as endowed with self-sovereignty. Whether or not God is "superfluous" can never be allowed to be part of the equation. The most avid atheists are often the most avid defenders of human rights, and they see no "divine" order in the universe.

What they see is the equality of creatures born with the unalienable right to life and liberty. The necessity of saying "liberty" ought to be superfluous itself, since the right to life necessitates the liberty necessary to live life as the rational animal. It is entirely superfluous to say "and the pursuit of happiness," for the same rationale.
However, it has come in handy in certain arguments with people who forget that the right to pursue one's happiness necessitates the liberty to achieve it.

It ought to be enough to simply say, "Until a man violates the rights--equal to his own, of other men--he has the right to libertarian life." Libertarian in this sense does not include the right to violate the rights of other men, which are equal in value by virtue of their unalienablity by right of birth.

Libertarian means specifically the ability to act with all the unalienable rights of birth with which Man is endowed by the nature of his metaphysical existence. That existence is defined as "the rational animal."

It can only be when a man has violated the equal rights of others that justice may require forfeiture of his libertarianism for a time, e.g., jail or prison or probation. In some cases of gross violation justice has required he forfeit his very life.

America's Founders were mostly Deists, no matter which denomination they attended. It was politically incorrect for public leaders not to attend a regular denomination such as Baptist or Episcopal, but there were some like Thomas Paine who managed to evade without even that constraint on his freedom. He had to flee America for France, literally for his safety and probably his life, in order to remove that constraint, until President Jefferson invited him back with a guarantee of his safety.

It is important to note America's Deist beginings because those Deists were more dedicated to worshiping God than were most of the commoners who followed established denominations. There is one and only reason for being able to say this: the Deists themselves said their devotion to the virtue of Reason and to the Rule of Law was precisely because they believed it was God himself who had endowed Man with that virtue.

Then He stepped back and allowed the nature he had created to run its course. A form of Darwinism one to two centuries before Darwin was born was part of the metaphysics of Deism. They believed God was superfluous only because He was willing to let the Reason He had provided them rule the affairs of the Men He had created as rational creatures.

Libertarian action translates into the value of being both free of coercion from others, and is non-coercion of others, for the purpose of furthering the pursuit of human life as well as one's own, through the virtue of Reason.

Yet, "when one speaks of a man's right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others." Ayn Rand; The Virtue of Selfishness: The Objectivist Ethics

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring was ghastly because it used the power of government to choose the criteria set by a leader with a criminal mind, criteria for the sacrifice of others. Clearly Hitler's was not "rational" self-interest. Rational self-interest cannot be coercive or it is self-defeating and therefor non-rational.

But conservatives do not see that such men--Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Mugabe, Stalin, Pol Pot--care nothing about whether or not God is superfluous. The only thing such men have ever cared about is power, and that is the power to control.

If it is insidious to find God superfluous, then America's Deists were insidious. Since that is not a word that can be used to describe them, Mr. Walker uses a "package deal" consisting of tying together the concepts of Hitler's policies with a disregard for God, as if God was anywhere in Hitler's thoughts. Corrupting or ignoring a "divinely ordered universe" was never a consideration for Hitler.

If Hitler had a devout belief in God, he would have continued his policies, believing as do Islamicists that what they do is in the name of God.

Neither Hitler nor the world's current Islamicists believe they are liberated from any obligation to "treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe." As a matter of fact, Islamicists believe that to continue the "divinely ordered universe" of Allah it is moral to martyr one's self in the destruction of those who actually see Allah--but not necessarily the Judeo-Christian God--as superfluous.

A supernatural God is superfluous for anyone who calls him or herself a naturalist, because in the cosmic scheme of the laws of nature, "nature's god" did not create existence.

The only "sinister notion" in natural selection is in the motives of men who refuse to accept individual sovereignty as the right of every human being, the selection by nature's god of the species of Man to be the one to obtain the virtue of rationality.

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Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Quotes of Interest

When Men Use Reason, Not Religion

While we are indeed witnessing a battle of civilizations, this battle is between Western civilization and Islam. Western civilization is in fact a mixture of two traditions: the Greco-Roman and the Judaeo-Christian. Ever since the spread of the latter into the West, there have been periods when that element has been stronger or weaker. ... [T]he lowest point for the Western world was reached precisely when its cultural milieu was closest to being unadulterated Christianity. The Renaissance arose after classical learning was rediscovered in the West and men began using their minds again, rather than subordinating them in blind obedience to the dictates of religious authority. Gus Van Horn

Austrian vs. Neoclassical Economics

Neoclassical economists usually explain their disdain for the Austrian School by saying that, although their theories may seem to be logically and correctly constructed, they lack predictive power...[However...]

[T]he traditional Austrian theory is able to explain the main facts of the current crisis, and, being available to all professional economists, it should have enabled [the neoclassical economists] to anticipate and explain this crisis with far greater success than they have had. The sequence described by ABCT is as follows.

--Banks grant new loans on a massive scale and the interest rate drops.
--Credit expansion drives malinvestments in projects far from consumption which were not profitable before the credit expansion.
--Capital goods rise in price.
--Prices climb on the stock market.
--The capital structure is artificially lengthened.
--The capital-goods sector demands more workers.
--At some point the rate of growth in credit expansion ceases. The interest rate climbs. The stock market crashes.
--Consumer goods prices grow faster than wages, in relative terms.
--Accounting profits appear in the consumer sector (demand increases).
--The capital-goods sector sustains heavy accounting losses.
--Workers are laid off in capital-goods industries.

[Note: After each sequence, the author gives credible examples to demonstrate the predictive power of the Austrian School. Click on the attribution at the bottom of this section for the full Daily Article.]

The current situation is precisely this: we face a credit crunch stemming from the creation of bad debt by the banking system (based on hyperabundant money) and the central banks. The recession seems to be inevitable: malinvested assets will undergo a severe adjustment due to the sale or the repossession of assets on a massive scale, which is necessary to repay the debt.

Neoclassical economists, and specifically monetarists, have brought us here. Keynesian theory fell apart in the 1970s, and now monetarism has followed. The Austrian School is the only remaining source of credible analysis and sound economic policy.

If financial and business communities do not want to sacrifice themselves in an ever-intensifying cycle of monetary chaos, they should start to listen to the Austrians; as should the media as well. For some people, unfortunately, intellectual conceit and convenient ignorance are more powerful forces than honesty and prosperity. Daily Article by Juan Ramón Rallo Julián Ludwig von Mises Institute

Health Care "Architects" Should Empty Bedpans

When President-Elect Obama nominated Tom Daschle to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services, he proclaimed the former Senate Majority Leader: "one of America's foremost health care experts."

I read his book "Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis."
Senator Daschle wrote his book with 2 other experts, Scott S. Greenberger and Jeanne M. Lambrew. According to the flyleaf, Greenberger is a reporter and consultant. Lambrew is a senior fellow.

To paraphrase a famous quote by Sam Rayburn, "They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever emptied a bedpan."

In the introduction, the Senator recounts for us the many attempts by the federal government, beginning with Harry Truman, to guarantee health care to all Americans. Since none of these attempts have succeeded, Daschle diagnoses American health care as "broken." He pins blame on 3 areas:
[The first is] The complexity of the health-care issue.

Health care shouldn't be complex. Basically, it's a service. A cardiac surgeon once remarked to me, "Take a look at any hospital parking lot early on a Sunday morning and note how few cars there are. That's all you need to run a hospital. Everything else is just fluff." It's the fluff that's making American health care complex. One never hears about the "complexity in automotive repair", or the "complexity of the hair salon issue." Yet health care is deemed to be so complex that the entire system needs to be scrapped. Who's making it complex? Who's piling on the fluff? Certainly not doctors and nurses. If you answered "The Federal government," you are obviously not a Senator or a senior fellow. American Thinker; Article By Carol Peracchio

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Rights and Personal Sovereignty

What is missing from the Constitution

is a provision that explicitly states

the derived nature of "individual sovereignty".

We Have Indentured Posterity

With Our Debt

"We think experience has proved it safer for the mass of individuals composing the society to reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent..." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.

The "mass" of individuals is what the framers of the Constitution called "We, the People," and wrote that the Constitution was "to provide for the common Defense" and to "promote the general Welfare."

Never did the Founders dream that what was "common" among them--their defense, their promotion of security, their lives, their liberties, and their pursuit of happiness--would congeal under the nationalism of Federal laws into something called "the common good."

They could not have conceived it, because they could not conceive that the individualism promoted by securing a nation would be turned on its head, turned into the denial of individualism in order to promote the security of everyone but the individual.

The "common good" is nothing but the result of either democracy by majority in which that majority overwhelms the minority rather than protecting it; or it is the republicanism of our representative government becoming the majority. Once case in point is how Washington ignored the people's wishes in this bail-out mess. Poll after poll demonstrated how Americans were against the bail-out, repeatedly telling Washington to let the free market fix the problems caused by Washington.

The people knew there would be hard times. The people know that harder times are now to come because Washingon ignored their pleas to let the banks fail and to let Detroit fail. Why are the harder times to come?

A senator on live TV was heard to say just yesterday that all this debt that the Federal government has taken on in the name of the economic security of the people, will be paid for by the generation now being born and by the children born of that generation.

But what of the debt we must incur before the first-born generation of indebted children can begin to pay off our debts? That will be at least twenty years, if not forty. In that amount of time there will be literally quadrillions, not just trillions, more dollars spent in the red. Then it will be up to the third, forth, even the fifth generations to come to pay off that debt. How will they do it?

They will not be able to pay it off until it is recognized that the free market, when allowed to fail, will heal itself. That is the purpose of capitalism. No capitalist ever thought he should not "try, try again," except in the case of bureaucratic roadblocks and "progressive" taxes that took from him when he made money the very profits needed to make more money.

"Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted." “The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness; Ayn Rand

Since individuals may do anything whatsoever that does not violate the rights of others, keeping his profits is within his own rights. Proper taxes are those which go to pay for government infrastructure. Improper taxes are the debts incurred by "the people" when government prints even one dollar that is not backed by the security of goods already manufactured. Since Nixon took us off the gold standard, and since the dollar is backed only by the Gross National Product (GNP), and since all the manufactured money for the bailout is credit in the name of the hope of future production that can back up the debt, such credit is immoral of any government to print, and should be illegal if it is not already.

What is missing from the Constitution is a provision such as the one below, a provision that explicitly states the derived nature of "individual sovereignty" in order to prevent our government from acting in the name of the "people" when the "people" is merely the "mass of individuals," not some organic whole made of everyone now living and yet to be born for generations.

Such a provision would read something like this: [from Nation's Press Institute]

"Reserved to each Citizen of the several States, and to each citizen of the United States, the unalienable and rightful powers of said Citizens as defined by Natural Law shall not be abridged except to conform where necessary to the functioning of the common sovereignty of said Citizens. 'Natural Law' shall be defined as the right of action by any and all individuals when those actions do not violate the same right of action of any other individual. 'Common sovereignty' shall be defined as those minimal powers deemed necessary for the maintenance of a democratically operated republican government to establish justice, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. 'General Welfare' shall be defined as the mitigating powers of the common sovereignty over individual sovereignty. 'Liberty' shall be defined as the unalienable and rightful powers of each individual Citizen as is given at birth by the fruits of nature and of nature's god, except where mitigated by the common sovereignty, which mitigation shall constitute the general Welfare."

This provision would do much to restore American law and jurisprudence to the Originalist position. From there, changes could be made to the Constitution where "the mass of individuals" saw a need for it. The "exercise of all rightful powers" is the right of every individual under any doctrine of natural law. "The exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent..." is a matter of prudence and justice under the law of men. We are engaged as a nation in the politics of pragmatism, which is neither prudent, nor just, denying the exercise of any rightful power because to deny one is to deny the principle that makes all of them "rightful."

Note: I am withdrawing my membership in the Center for Inquiry. It's liberalism, it's humanism, and its subjectivity are beyond the pale, when considering such items as this, from CFI Chigago:

The Center For Inquiry/Chicago is pleased to present:
Re-Framing the Educational Debate: Teaching and Freedom
with Guest Presenter Dr. William Ayers

Not only is this the very same Ayers at the center of controversy in the Obama for President debate, the CFI Chigago, after listing his many academic milestones and failing to mention his domestic terrorism background, has only this comment to make: "He is an inspiration to a generation of young teachers."

The Center for Inquiry seems to have no standards for their behavior or their moral choices for investigation of any subject except that of secularity. Secularity is not a moral choice. It is the division of one's life--or the life of an organization--into the religious and the non-religious, or the outright rejection of religiosity; and it is the separation of church of state.

I reject outright any faith and religiosity in my life; but I also reject the presentation in the name of "secularity" of terrorists as legitimate objects of veneration, respect, and inspiritation.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Pragmatic Politics vs. Originalism

Originalism Protects Individual Sovereignty

Last Saturday I wrote that the politics of Original Intent that were practiced by Senator Barry Goldwater in his race for the Republican nomination of 1964, are not the politics of Washington as we know it today. Originalism is not respected by those who see necessity in specific government programs which defy strict Constitutionalism.

The politics of pragmatism has become the standard, practiced by both Republicans and Democrats. Pragmatic politics sees necessity as the trump card, whether or not American supreme law supports it. I do not deny that many things are "necessary," and can be implemented by governments without reverting to any form of collectivism.

But in order to implement necessary policies and programs that are pragmatic rather than Constitutional, the Constitution must be changed. That is what the Founders said. That is the mechanism the Founders gave us in the Law. What is so hard for pragmatists to understand about that mechanism?

Bush the Pragmatic decided an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would be better than a Middle East that remained inclusive of him. He started an unnecessary war, a divisive war, a war based on perfectly incompetent intelligence reports.

Bush the Pragmatic decided that limiting the individual sovereignty of Americans through the coercive, and therefor mis-named "Patriot Act", was a better means of advancing the "common" good rather than the Constitutionally provided-for "individual" good.

("We, the People," meant specifically "We, the Individuals collectively called 'the People.'" Among others of the Founders who wrote or spoke of such individual sovereignty, we have these words of Jefferson:

("We think experience has proved it safer for the mass of individuals composing the society [i.e., all the individuals collectively] to reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent and to delegate those to which they are not competent to deputies named and removable for unfaithful conduct by themselves immediately." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.)

Bush the Pragmatic decided it was better to save the "Barney Frank Democrats" who led us down this thorn-and-shard-laden housing financing debacle. That debacle led to the "me too" attitude of banks that had been allowed to become "too big to allow to fail"; the hands-out attitude of the Motor City who couldn't keep up with the smarter looking and better selling cars made by the Asians and Europeans. There is a one year waiting list in the U.S. for the Nano Car manufactured by the Indian company the Tata Group.

And of course, there are the "me too hands" held out for Federal funding by the states and cities across America.

Bush the Pragmatic, who never opted for the "redistribution of wealth", opened the door for the wealth redistributing Obama the Pragmatic.

It appears that many local governments are going to get their palms greased.

It is, of course, pragmatic to destroy the capital value upon which this nation was built, and to destroy that very wealth by taking from those who have it and giving it to those who do not--so that those who do not get some of it whether or not they know how to create more wealth with it so it can be redistributed again; or whether they merely know how to spend it before coming looking for more to be redistributed in their direction.

Either way, pragmatic redistribution "stimulates" the economy, like a cattle prod "stimulates" a cow, with a sting worse than Muhammad Ali's fist to your face. The purpose of the sub-prime lending was to make the Democrats look good through the stimulation of the economy by lending. The "sting" was that those to whom sub-prime loans were given could not afford them or they would not have needed sub-prime rates.

Though Obama stated that his team members share his "'pragmatism about the use of power' in foreign policy," Dr. Tara Smith, speaking for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, said Democratics and Republican presidents disagree vehemently about foreign policy and "all manner of moral and political issues, [and] that the way forward is always through moderation and compromise. [But] pragmatism, from either the Left or the Right, is inherently self-destructive and a threat to Americans." [emphasis added] CapMag.Com

What makes for pragmatic politics? In these times when non-Originalism is the order of the day, "anything that goes" and which seems to fill a need is pragmatic. Non-Originalism is the idea that no written Constitution can anticipate all the methods by which government could use--after the law was written--to oppress people, so it is sometimes necessary for judges to make decisions based on other laws with similar intents, and the precedents set by interpretation of those laws.

Judge Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. Bork is a an Originalist. His nomination was scuttled by Democrats who didn't like his former involvement in Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre," nor by some of his controversial opinons.

(Neither do I. But, putting that aside,) his case, in part, for Originalism is solid as rock: "If the Constitution is law, then presumably, like all other law, the meaning the lawmakers intended is as binding upon judges as it is upon legislatures and executives. There is no other sense in which the Constitution can be what article VI proclaims it to be: Law....

"This means, of course, that a judge, no matter on what court he sits, may never create new constitutional rights or destroy old ones." [citation]

"Pragmatism is about how well things work in practice, not how they should work in theory. [But] we present evidence that non-originalist judicial decision making has, in fact, done a good job of enhancing social welfare, as measured by popular ap-proval of the Court’s decisions. " [emphais added] THERE IS NOTHING PRAGMATIC ABOUT ORIGINALISM David S. Law & David McGowan

This "good job" measurement is pragmatism defined. But Goldwater, the Conservative's hero of Heros said this in the long, honorable tradition of Originalism:

"I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible." [emphasis added] Barry Goldwater Quotes

This policy is the measurement of someone who believes in a nation of laws, as Bork spoke about, not of a nation of men who proceed to find things that are necessary--as the bailouts may have been, but which are un-Constitutional.

Respecting the Constitutional individual sovereignty of each member of "We, the People" would preclude taking from he who has in order to give to he who has not. Such redistribution is neither in the letter of the law, nor in the spirit of the law. Pragmatism is not about law; it about results irrespective of law.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Conservative Society for Action

Conservatives Uphold the Constitution

No Better Than Liberals

I just joined--with a donation--a new organization called the Conservative Society for Action. There is only one reason I did this. The site's sidebar contains quotes from none other than, and no one but, Senator Barry Goldwater.

The conservative lineage CSA claims to follow--as demonstrated by the pictures at the top of the page--are Thomas Paine; Thomas Jefferson; Robert Taft, "the first to fight 'New Deal' Socialism"; Goldwater; and Ronald Reagan, the friend and so-called heir of Goldwater's modern ideology of conservativism.

As the CSA's website makes clear, Goldwater was out to protect the Constitition, quoting him with statements such as:
"I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible"; and:
"It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden."

This is clearly not the conservatism of Washington in the Twenty-First Century. In fact, in was only by the barest standards that Reagan, the "hero" of modern conservativism, can be said to have furthered Goldwater's Originalist politics. He was the best President of the Twentieth Century, but Goldwater had the potential to be a game changer, taking the Constitution back to its originalist roots.

Stephen Flanagan of the National Defense University, founder of the CSA, has it right when he states, "Obama's win means nothing! Capital Hill is the enemy! [ ] As I said before the election, Obama won't really come through on his campaign promises because that would end up hurting HIM. [ ] But here's the REAL danger... The Liberals in this country now control 4 out of the 5 centers of political power. [ ] There's one more item on their checklist and that is the Supreme Court. By the time Obama's presidency is over, they likely will have that too. Five out of Five for the first time in American history."

But as modern conservativism goes, Nixon, not Goldwater, was the next Republican President. Leaving all Nixon's scandals aside, his disastrous (and traitorous) act of taking America off the gold standard eliminates him from rationally conservative status. He unilaterally cancelled the Breton Woods Agreements signed by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations, which adopted the gold standard as the only objective measurement of a nation's wealth. A nation's wealth is now tied only to its "good name," its economic strength, in world market comparisons.

Gerald Ford was a popular centrist in the House of Representatives, but after becoming President when Nixon resigned, he showed none of the strength of that Goldwater lineage. Had he shown any such strengths, he probably still would have lost to Jimmy Carter. Goldwater's radical defense of liberty frightened many Americans who saw him as a hawk who would take us to war against the Communist enemy.

More than likely Goldwater's international policies of strength, and his domestic policies making each American more economically wealthy and thus independent of government charity, thereby enriching the Treasury, would have broken the economic back of the Soviets two decades before Reagan was able to accomplish the same thing when he challenged the Soviets to keep up with our military spending.

Goldwater had objective standards. Reagan had objective goals, but his policies were strictly pragmatic, lowering taxes for the purpose of reaping higher levels of revenue from smaller percentages; America grows wealthy and even lower taxes will have the effect of providing a larger budget. But Reagan also blew the budget, and he left America deeply in debt. Pragmatism is not conservatism, but when used for the purposes of strengthening both our economy and our national defenses, pragmatic Presidents become heroic.

What Ayn Rand wrote about Barry Goldwater could have been written about Reagan, (although she was angered by Reagan's religious conservatism, especially his opposition to abortion based on the idea that the separation of church and state did not apply when in reference to a fertilized egg, a zygote, or a fetus undeveloped enough to live on its own.) She wrote:

"Barry Goldwater is singularly devoid of power lust. Even his antagonists admit it with grudging respect. He is seeking, not to rule, but to liberate a country."

The CSA says its first priorities are these:
ACT to Repeal the Community Reinvestment Act!
ACT to Impeach Barney Frank!
ACT to Defeat Card Check Legislation
ACT to Stop the Flow of U.S. Oil Dollars Going to Hostile Countries
ACT to Stop Congressional Censorship of the Broadcast Media.

To read the reasons behind each of the ACT links is to understand something of the nature of Goldwater's goals. Unfortunately I see no overall philosophical basis for each ACTion that CSA seeks to perform. They are worthy actions, necessary actions, and yes, conservative actions.

But the problem with conservativism is that it does not lay out a black-and-white philosophical strategy, as Goldwater did. Goldwater frightened many Americans because unlike any other candidate since Abraham Lincoln he had an unwavering plan.

The conservatives cannot allow themselves to appear to have the luxury of a black-and-white, unwavering plan. That it is not a luxury but absolutely necessary to break the back of the growing menace of the overpowering, power-hungry federal machine and its leaders is a fact.

"If a [politician] evades, equivocates and hides his stand under a junk-heap of random concretes, we must add up those concretes and judge him accordingly," Rand wrote. "If his stand is mixed, we must evaluate it by asking: Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?"

Whether or not Flanagan and his staff and the general membership of CSA can ACT with Goldwater-like reserve, and with Jefferson and Paine's committment to individual sovereignty, remains to be seen. Flanagan has the background. Now let's see if he has the vision and the rationality to take on Capital Hill with the balls that are necessary to make him an enemy of the state.

"I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom," Flanagan quotes Goldwater. But Goldwater also said, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Extremism of any sort is frowned upon now, because the Religious Right is extreme but so are the Islamicists. Goldwater's extremism was his downfall even in 1964.

Flanagan has the credentials to be an extremist. Let's see if he has the credentials to sell the extreme position that the Constitution must be adhered to, and sees to it, with membership help, to destroy Goldwater's idea of "necessary but un-Constitutional" legislation.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Friday, January 2, 2009

Naturalism's Link to Humanism

Not All Metaphysics of Naturalism

Are Created Equal

One of the problems I have with other authors' definitions of "naturalism" is that I often see what appears to be mistakes, albeit sometimes they are small. But they become untenable with the larger context of that author's message, because until the mistake is fixed, the reader (me in this case) doesn't know what to make of it. So I write to the author and I ask for clarification.

On the Home Page of the Secular Web, a naturalistic and humanistic website, Paul Draper is quoted as saying that naturalism is "the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system, which means that nothing that is not part of the natural world affects it." The conclusion is then made that, "Thus, 'naturalism implies that there are no supernatural entities."

Well, no it does not imply that, not as written.

To say "nothing that is not part of the natural world" leaves open the possibility, for anyone who thinks there is more than the natural world, of a thing that exists that is more than the natural world--like God. Mr. Draper leaves an open hole. I would have thought that leaving open such holes are mistakes of epistemology--or simply a gaffe of grammar or syntax, or even one of thinking faster than the pen can write.

It seems untenable with the larger message to leave such a hole.

So I wrote to Mr. Draper and asked him about the it. It seems it not a hole in his opinion, and is intentional and correct by his metrics of naturalism. It is a question, not of epistemology, in his mind, but of metaphysics.

"The statement," replied Draper, "that the universe is a closed system does imply that there are no supernatural entities because a supernatural entity is defined as a non-natural entity that AFFECTS THE NATURAL WORLD. Thus, naturalism as defined in the quoted passage rules out supernatural entities but does not rule in or out non-natural entities." [emphasis his]

The supernatural is defined as non-natural, yet this published naturalist author concedes that the non-natural may exist? And, isn't Draper's idea that no supernatural entities exist exactly what I said was implied?

Mr. Draper is an educated man and qualified as far as his peers are concerned, I'm certain, to be held in esteem, to be a published author, and to be the editor of Philo, "published biannually at the Center for Inquiry with assistance from Purdue University," reads the home page of the online magazine, concluding with: "Philo is the publication of the Society of Humanist Philosophers."

Interestingly, I found nothing in the Google search engine for the Society, except an ancient reference to Philo before Draper was Editor; and the remark in Wikipedia that it is a program of the Council for Secular Humanism.

The Council is responsible for many things. Originally called the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, it was begun by Paul Kurtz a naturalist humanist. "The council acts as an umbrella organization for a number of other groups, such as the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, African Americans for Humanism, and provides support for Center for Inquiry - On Campus. It also publishes several magazines and newsletters, including Free Inquiry," states Wikipedia.

Kurtz calls his form of humanistic naturalism "philosophical." Michael Friedman of the American Philosophical Association says this "philosophical" form "has reached the end of its useful life."

I am not a humanist of any sort. www.jcn.com/humanism.html lists 8 sorts. About secular humanism it says it is "an outgrowth of 18th century enlightenment rationalism and 19th century freethought." That ought to say something to those who understand rationalism. And freethought explains the slippery language used by humanists and by scientific and philosophical naturalists. While elevating science and reason, freethought does so at the cost of a rational metaphysics.

The website for the Council supports most of what Wiki states about it, and also makes this declaration:

"Secular humanists reject supernatural and authoritarian beliefs. They affirm that we must take responsibility for our own lives and the communities and world in which we live. Secular humanism emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry, individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance and cooperation." [emphasis added]

Gee. I just wrote about this on Tuesday. It's kind of strange, sometimes, how the world goes around. The subjects that secular humanism "emphasizes"--reason, science, individualism, responsibility, human values, and compassion--are defined by that movement very differently from Metaphysical Naturalism. But what does it have to do with Paul Draper's differentiation between "supernatural" and "non-natural" entities?

To begin with, this: I never seem to be able to get answers from naturalists like Mr. Draper that make much sense to me. It all seems gray, undifferentiated by any substantiality, or it seems like metaphysical double-speak that goes round and round, stopping only long enough to get in the phrases "tolerance," "compassion," and a few others with similiar altruistic connotations--and they do mean it altruistically as I will show; there is nothing about justice connected to their phrases for "cooperation".

When I answered Tom Clark's critique of my comments to him about naturalism, he did not come back with analyses about what I had written. Apparently he couldn't match me logic for logic. Instead, he wrote, among other things:

"Ok, many thanks for these clarifications, most interesting. It would be nice if all [Ayn] Rand’s acolytes examined her philosophy as assiduously as do you, ending up with more nuanced conclusions about the legitimacy of compassion and limits of egoism." [emphasis added]

My "nuanced conclusions" on those subjects were that compassion was worthless in the wrong circumstances, and that there are no limits to egoism when defined as "rational egoism."

Clark is a dedicated humanist, and some of the contributors to his site also contribute to Philo. It seems, from the other things Clark wrote me, that humanists cannot accept egoism because they exalt altrusim.

"There are two errors," he writes about my ideas, "in addition to thinking we’re ultimately self-made. One is to suppose that in empirical fact we are merely self-interested creatures. But we aren’t; there are many altruistic bones in our body. Second, it’s to commit the naturalistic fallacy of arguing that if we are selfish by nature, that means we should be selfish. But there is no direct implication from a natural is to an ethical ought."

Humanists take issue with Rand's clear disdain of altruism. I accept her disdain completely, because she did not allow the definition to become watered down by humanistic definitions that make it seem as if "altruism" is merely being human to one another. Rand fiercely upheld Compte's definition; after all, it was Compte who coined the word.

"For Comte Altruism meant the [ ] eradication of self-centered desire, and a life devoted to the good of others; more particularly, selfless love..." [emphasis added] http://www.ditext.com/runes/a.html Devotion to the good of others when coupled with selfless love--a contradiction in terms--is duty, and duty has nothing to do with rational compassion, yet such irrational duty is the field of secular and other forms of humanism.

I replied to Clark that "'to commit the naturalistic fallacy of arguing that if we are selfish by nature, that means we should be selfish,' is the definition of 'logical' egoism," not rational egoism which Rand knew was the necessary form of egoism for man to lead a rational life. http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/egoism.htm

Which leads us to the rationality of humanists and scientific and philosophical naturalists. Every concept has only one antonym, though many words are connected to more than one concept, so you must choose your concept carefully. Sometimes, depending on the way a dictionary has separated concepts, the differences are unclear. Definition 2) may seem to one's logic to be the same as 3). Such differences are subtle and sometimes not even legitimate.

But if the ontological concept of "natural" has the antonym of "not-natural", then "supernatural" must be a sub-set of "not-natural." Mr. Draper does not see it that way.

"I define a 'natural entity'," he wrote, "as an entity that is either physical or that is causally or ontologically reducible to physical entities. Skyscrapers, for example, are natural entities by this technical definition. There are, of course, other senses of the word 'natural' in ordinary language."

So far I agree, but then he went on: "Non-natural entities by my definition are entities that are not physical and are not reducible to physical entities. Perhaps abstract objects are non-natural, but that's debatable."

Since abstract objects are concepts of human thought rather than Platonic Forms, and since thought is natural, I would refuse to debate it. He does not make clear what any other objects are that he might define as "not physical and not reducible to physical entities."

"The supernatural is a subcategory of the non-natural", he continued, a complete reversal of my Metaphysical Naturalist position. "If there were any supernatural entities, then they would be entities that, in spite of not being natural, nevertheless affect natural entities."

The way I see it, God, if He exists, is natural, not supernatural. Why should we see Him as anything other than natural? We see Him as supernatural because then we do not find ourselves able to have empirical evidence of God, and we do not want empirical evidence, except perhaps for the indirect kind. Ronald Reagan's comparison of the physical world to a dinner table laden with food--that had no chef--comes to mind. The physical world "revealed" to our senses are all the evidence that supernaturalists say we can ever have, unless they are also of the opinion that revealed revelations e.g. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus, are possible.

However, Mr Draper tells me, "For while we have empirical evidence that the natural world is closed (our success in discovering natural causes of natural entities), it would be idle metaphysical speculation to claim that no non-natural entities exist."

From this we can infer than Mr. Draper knows of no non-natural entities, yet insists that the category must remain an open one in order not to "idly speculate" that the category is empty of entities!

This is the road that humanism plows, one of metaphysical mud and muck from which no logic can be ascertained except that of definitions with no clear denotations; and capitulation to the idea that clarity is egoistical and egoism must be "logical" rather than "rational" and therefor must be rejected (despite a very big difference between them); that egoism is the opposite of altrusim (which it is) and, that altruism is the metaphysical mud and muck that humanists prefer in their metaphysics over any form of egoism.

They do, after all, accuse Rand of being "black and white," "too concrete," and even "irrational."

Objectivists "strike me as being pretty irrational when it comes to ideas about the self and free will," Clark wrote to me, "and it seems to me this irrationality supports a morally objectionable radical individualism, see my critique here."

I will let his critique stand on its own, and see whether or not I can pull my feet out of humanism's muck without losing my shoes. If the category "non-natural entities" is an empty category, yet it contains a sub-category (supernatural,) then I can walk on water.

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Thursday, January 1, 2009

God, Prejudice, and Alcoholics Anonymous

I'm A Success as Atheist in the AA "God Program"

Bill Wilson is responsible for writing the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," referred to as the Big Book. AA is a spiritual program, and a "God program," meaning it depends upon what AA terms a "higher power" to relieve the alcoholic of his/her need to get drunk.

In many places in the Big Book we read specifically that other things than God can be considered a higher power. The use of the AA group itself with people you come to rely on, friends, and other people with whom you can discuss your problems, are often suggested as a higher power. A man can think of his wife and children, and use them as his "higher power" because of the very real possibility that if he goes on another binge, or gets arrested one more time while drunk, he could lose them.

Anytime one of us who is alcoholic goes to a meeting and says anything like, "When I fought with my son over something stupid, I knew I had to get to a meeting"; or "I realized I was letting myself become hungry, angry, lonely, tired--I knew I had to get to a meeting," we are then using the group and our time there, away from the "outside world", as our higher power, to recoup a bit of our spirituality.

But in the end, AA members are expected, not by any membership requirement, but through the incessant urging of Wilson to "accept" that the higher power he expects us to discover is God. (Accepting God is not a requirement because there is only one membership requirement: the desire to stop drinking. But the constant urging to accept God has made many people see AA as a multi-denominational religious cult.)

"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." [emphasis added] The Big Book page 46

Naturalism, to Wilson, was unnatural. Naturalism was prejudicial. "To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face." For Wilson, his own prejudice made him believe that "to continue as he is [as an atheist or agnostic] means disaster, especially if he an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. page 44

An alcoholic of the hopeless variety can only be hopeless because he does not accept God; to accept God means he isn't hopeless. "There Is A Solution" touts the previous chapter's title, and that way is through God. "This is the great news this book carries to those who suffer." p 17

The expectancy is that eventually all AA members will have "made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understood him"; and it expected to come sooner than later; turning over one's will is the third of twelve "steps". AA dogma, gathered up from the first few years of attempting to find the steps and the means to make them work, was that you could not get to Step Four without "doing" steps one, two and three first. (Step Two is admitting that only "a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"; Step One is "admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.")

But Bill Wilson was an extremely prejudicial and biased man. Do you notice in that quote from page 46 how he deftly turned "a power greater than ourselves" into God Himself, without even the pretext of qualifying "God" with "as we understood him"?

The phrase "as we understood (or understand) him" is always italicized in the Steps, in an effort to be inclusive of all religions. But Wilson had to be talked into accepting that phrase, and then only grudgingly. Yet whenever he wrote of his own experience and how it ought to be used by others, God stood alone and every member was expected by Wilson to "graduate" from using the group or other people or a hope as his/her higher power, to using God Himself--who in Wilson's mind stood alone without need of "understanding." After all, he wrote, "it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." How could He be a God of anyone's understanding when Wilson admits that it was impossible for "any of us" (the original members) to understand Him?

Naturalism, which is necessarily an atheistic doctrine, and agnosticism, were, to Wilson, biases which the new members had to let go of.

"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results..." [emphasis added] page 46

Page 46 is in the chapter of the Big Book entitled "We Agnostics." Wilson was never an agnostic, and he wrote no chapter for atheists, though he mentions them there. He speaks to the agnostics as though he had once been there himself, putting his brotherly arm around them in words, comforting them in the knowledge that things will be alright if they just let go and let God.

He writes in the first paragraph that "you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience can conquer." Many naturalists and others don't believe in the "spirit" because they have always been told it is linked to God, and God is what they are trying to discard by using an epistemology that admits of nothing supernatural. But this is not a problem for all naturalists.

The Deists were theistic naturalists. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

In Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) the spirit, the soul, is a naturally occurring non-supernatural physiological phenomenon of the fact of being human. When someone says he could not do something or was compelled to do something because his "conscience was being affected," it is the naturally occurring physiologically emotive phenomenon we perceive as our soul, that he is referring to.

MN understands existence to be natural and only natural, with nothing supernatural existing within existence. And of course, there is no existence outside of existence. Not even a God can be outside existence, though many believe a God could.

God could not--not without causing an irreparable contradiction within human language. If you believe in God and believe, as did America's Deist Founders, that it was God who gave us Reason in order to be able to solve our own problems without His intereference or help, then such a God would not also have allowed us to conceive acceptable contradictions; they break all the rules of the logic of linquistics. Allow one, you must allow them all. Then "nothing" will be "something," "yes" will be "no", and Reason will be worthless. We will return to the growling animalistic expressions of Man before he gained language, because without Reason language has no expression.

Boethius told us to join faith to reason, "insofar as is possible." Thomas Aquinas and others did that, and the juxtaposition led us to the scientific and then to the industrial revolutions. But at the same time, it did not banish faith by elevating Reason, and the Founders were forced to conceive a nation with a Constitution which assumed the separation of church and state. The assumption was common, was therefore not included in the Constitution in those words, and that common assumption allowed the Supreme Court to declare it a de facto part of the Constitution. The Deists would say it was Reason that dictated the Constitution.

Yet, Wilson tells us we must abandon Reason, for the blindness that comes with "accepting a power greater than ourselves" in the realm of the spirit while upholding Reason in the realm of all other things.

"Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists [There he goes again!] chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word... Rather vain of us, wasn't it?" page 49

But Thomas Paine, in "The Age of Reason", wrote: "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. [ ] I know, by positive conclusion resulting from [my] search, that there is a power superior to all [ ] things, and that power is God."

Paine was one of the most outspoken Deists, even fleeing to France for his life because his devotion to God would not allow him to have faith in anything but a Reasonable God, and no organized religion is Reasonable to a Deist.

"The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists," wrote Paine, "accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud." [emphasis added]

"If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago," Wilson wrote. [p. 44/45] Yet, isn't that what blind acceptance of a higher power is--a supposed better "code of morals" or "a better philosophy of life"?

Actually, Wilson must have realized they were not the same, or he would have said so. Instead he said, "We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, but the needed power wasn't there.

"Lack of power, that was our dilemma," he wrote, instead.

Their lack of power was from the desire to turn a wish into reality, without the "mere code of morals" or the "better philosophy." Philosophy is nothing without epistemology. Faith in God is the epistemology of disavowing Reason; faith is the only thing that Wilson serves up.

"Besides a seeming inablility to accept much on faith," Wilson wrote, about the problem of human intelligence as the last word, "we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinancy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. [ ] This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. [ ! ]

"Some of us had already walked far over the Bridge of Reason toward the desired shore of faith. [ ] We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow we couldn't step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning on Reason that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.[ ]

"Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time! [ ! ]

"[A religious doubter] recounts that he fell out of bed to his knees. In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by the conviction of the Presence of God. He had stepped from bridge to shore. [ ]

"His alcoholic problem was taken away."

I sit here and copy and paste and write these things, in order to tell the reader that I had my own spiritual experience, and my "alcoholic problem was taken away."

But my spiritual experience was not what faith would have me believe it to be; it is what Reason tells me it was.

The mind is the most powerful force in human life. My experience was one of a comgination of mind and that natural phenomenon, the human soul, because they are irrevocably connected even in death; the soul follows the mind into the grave. If I could bottle my experience and release it in a room with someone who was looking for God, he would claim his experience that came from my bottle was God, and then try to convince me of it.

Humility seems to be the greatest virtue in AA. It is mentioned specifically on nine pages of the Big Book and those mentions carry various descriptions of how it works and why it works and why we need it. There are many more references to humility in the other AA "approved literature," such as the "Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions". Honesty is mentioned on twelve pages, but we all know a man cannot be humble if he is not first honest.

Men whose humility does not extend to allowing the possibility that an atheist such as myself can have a spiritual experience and become sober by it, despite "the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON;" wrote Paine, "and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself."

Bill Wilson believed in the elevation of faith over Reason. Rather vain of him, wasn't it, to despise the "choisest gift of God to man," Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions;" wrote Paine, "he prays dictatorially; [ ] he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I."

Wilson's prayers were like that: "Relieve me of the bondage of self," goes his Third Step Prayer, "that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power..."

The strictest adherence to Reason is the act of binding one's self to one's self; altruism was conceived as the act of giving one's self completely over to God, without asking for such things as the removal of one's difficulties: one took what God met out. And what kind of humility is it to ask God to remove one's difficulties, then turn and call that "victory over them"?

"It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that those people pretend to reject reason?" Paine

The rejection of Reason was not all Wilson's. It was, and is, endemic of the kind of organization that AA is. The co-founder of AA, "Dr. Bob," wrote in his own chapter of the Big Book, that atheists, agnostics, and skeptics have a form of "intellectual pride which keeps [them] from accepting what is in this book, [and] I feel sorry for you." [emphasis added]

He also ended his chapter saying, "Your Heavenly Father will never let you down!"

Rather prejudiced of him, wouldn't you say?

Note: I get my 3 year token in January. That spiritual experience that I had in my soul didn't put the fear of God in me; it put in me the fear of being drunk--and of dying that way or of killing someone else. That is a stronger deterrent, apparently, than God who I do not accept as an existant. But I am grateful to have found an AA community in which my outspoken atheism is not rejected. I am fully accepted by my home group and other groups, and I currently hold two "service positions" with my home group.

AA works if you find the higher power of your understanding. Mine,
"the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind," is Reason. I trust I will never use any other weapon, a weapon which leads me to the positive conclusion that it is a power superior to all things available to man including the irrational prejudice of belief in God.

Happy New Year to all my readers, to all sober members of AA, and to all those who have not found the means to conquer their alcoholism. Don't let your prejudices against Alcoholics Anonymous keep you from using it to find serenity in sobriety. Accept the things you cannot change and change the things you can, and may you all have the wisdom, as I am grateful myself to have had, to know the difference between them.