The Mosque Debacle

Well I can hold off no longer. The amount of commentary in the mass media, focused upon the proposed building of an Islamic mosque within a few blocks of the former WTC location, has caused a number of reactions by me, from interest, to confusion, to boredom, to outrage, to perplexity, and I’m sure others as well. But despite the mountains of words spewed on both sides, I feel I still need to express my, slightly limited, view. But hopefully that will work to my advantage, because, as usual, I feel that people are discussing things at the already-confused, diffused surface of the topic. In true philosophical form, I want to discuss something that I take to be at the root of this (or at least only what I can infer must be there, based on the rhetoric people have been using).

Things I want to point out: 1) the logic implemented by the people who do not want the mosque to be built. 2) how Obama's religiousity is related.

This is just one video, but does give you an idea of the sorts of logic being used. Where’s the argument in that video? “The mosque is wrong, so wrong.” There it is; that’s the argument being put forth in that video. Well that’s fine as a conclusion, but it doesn’t work so well as an argument, which is something you won't find in that video. So let’s keep going.

Please, please watch this 10-minute Daily Show clip. It is, in my opinion, one of the best Daily Show pieces they've done, although they typically are pretty good at reporting on things like this. Hopefully, that'll give you a taste of some of the points being made, and what sort of logic they are attempting to use.

Most (but not all) people realize it is not a legal issue, as they have the right to build there. Its not illegal because the constitutions only mentions of religion are stated in the first amendment and are as follows: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. And that mentions nothing about prohibiting a religious center, based on its location.

So it is not illegal, but "wrong". So what is wrong about it? They want to build a Muslim religious site close to a place where terrorists, who are Muslim, killed thousands of people. What's the connection? Apparently, they are not being sensitive, or respectful, to those who were affected by the attack. This isn't exactly a horrible plea. Out of all the jargon, I can respect this point more than any other. But nonetheless, to believe that an entire religion can be represented by the actions of less than 20 of its members is ludicrous. What about recent Christian leaders such as Ted Haggard, George Alan Rekers, Tony Alamo, Joe Barron, as well as the slew of Catholic leaders who have been accused or convicted of having sexual relations with children. Does this prohibit the building of Christian churches near schools? Does it make it "wrong" to have Sunday School? It hasn't seemed to be a problem yet. We isolate those "bad characters" from the rest of Christianity in attempts to retain the pristine character of Christianity. But when it comes to Islam, one represents all.

So here is my contention, which is nothing original, pertaining to the logic behind prohibiting the building of the mosque: muslim = terrorist = non-american = non-christian = immoral = wrong

The same logic is being used simply by the fact that Obama's religion is being questioned and that that makes it somehow relevant to the U.S. political realm. This is an extremely well-researched op-ed piece in the NYT on Obama’s religion. My point, which is one of the ones mentioned in article, is that it should not matter. But, according to that logic, if Obama is a Muslim, then he becomes all those things in that equation above. And if you don't trust that equation, notice how his nationality (which in America, perplexingly remains tied to ethnicity) and religion are always brought up together, always. And why, even when Obama says he is a Christian, do people not believe he is a Christian? That's usually good enough for most other politicians, even when their actions say otherwise.

Levinas on Discourse (or how to not have a monologue when talking to people)

Can objectivity and the universality of thought be founded on discourse? Is not universal thought of itself prior to discourse? Does not a mind in speaking evoke what the other mind already thinks, both of them participating in common ideas? But the community of thought ought to have made language as a relation between beings impossible. Coherent discourse is one. A universal thought dispenses with communication. A reason cannot be other for a reason. How can a reason be an I or an other, since its very being consists in renouncing singularity? …

But to make of the thinker a moment of thought is to limit the revealing function of language to its coherence, conveying the coherence of concepts. In this coherence the unique I of the thinker volatilizes. The function of language would amount to suppressing “the other,” who breaks this coherence and is hence essentially irrational. A curious result: language would consist in suppressing the other, in making the other agree with the same! But in its expressive function language institutes a relation irreducible to the subject-object relation: the revelation of the other. In this revelation only can language as a system of signs be constituted. The other called upon is not something open to generalization. Language, far from presupposing universality and generality, first makes them possible. Language presupposes interlocutors, a plurality. Their commerce is not a representation of the one by the other, nor a participation in universality, on the common plane of language. Their commerce ... is ethical.

Schopenhaur on the Will, Intellect, and Moral Judgments

Arthur Schopenaur: The World as Will and Idea, Chapter 19 On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciouness

If now it is said of one man, “he has a good heart, though a bad head,” but of another, “he has a very good head, yet a bad heart,” every one feels that in the first case the praise far outweighs the blame – in the other case the reverse. Answering to this, we see that if some one has done a bad deed his friends and he himself try to remove the guilt from the will to the intellect, and to give out that faults of the heart were faults of the head; roguish tricks they will call errors, will say they were merely want of understanding, want of reflection, light-mindedness, folly; nay, if need be, they will plead a paroxysm, momentary mental aberration, and if a heavy crime is in question, even madness, only in order to free the will from the guilt. And in the same way, we ourselves, if we have caused a misfortune or injury, will before others and ourselves willingly impeach our stultitia, simply in order to escape the reproach of malitia. In the same way, in the case of the equally unjust decision of the judge, the difference, whether he has erred or been bribed, is so infinitely great. All this sufficiently proves that the will alone is the real and essential, the kernel of the man, and the intellect is merely its tool, which may be constantly faulty without the will being concerned. The accusation of want of understanding is, at the moral judgment-seat, no accusation at all; on the contrary, it gives great privileges. And so also, before the courts of the world, it is everywhere sufficient to deliver a criminal from all punishment that his guild should be transferred from his will to his intellect, by proving either unavoidable error or mental derangement, for then it is of no more consequence than if hand or food had slipped against the will.

Certainty Without Religion

Certainty doesn’t require knowing. In fact, certainty doesn’t even require facts; except the fact which it itself creates. And in that case, such a requirement fulfills itself.

A little while ago at work, a lady I was working for began talking about god and Jesus and stuff and how (almost verbatim, but forgive my memory) “you may think you’re certain, but the only true certainty is with God.” I just smiled and nodded politely, as I didn’t have the desire to have any form of in-depth conversation given the circumstances. Well I didn’t agree with that statement when I heard it, and I disagree with it more and more as time goes on.

What she is telling me is that human certainty is no certainty at all. Ok then, what certainty is actually certain? Well her reply would be a certainty found through a relationship with god (whatever shape her god and her relationship to it might take). In sum, humans, on their own, are incapable of having certainty (how Cartesian of her). And as you can tell, I disagree.

I assume this religious relationship she is referring to involves a belief, and a faith. In which case, certainty seems to be precluded. Or would she say that? Does she gain a certainty from her faith? I bet she does; she just doesn’t want to grant me the same (godless) result.

But analogously, I think we create our own certainty by taking all sorts of leaps of faith, and without a religious figure in the picture. When two people, both possibly standing on quite uncertain ground, take a leap of faith and create something new through a pact or some sort of agreement, they create their own certainty. In other words (and somewhat perplexingly), through uncertainty, they gain their own certainty. This is because we can create it. And this is what a relationship (of any type) is; for if both parties agree to it, or in other words put their faith/trust in the other, then of course the relationship will be fulfilled. And in fact, that is the only way for it to work. I am not saying that her religious certainty is fake; rather, I am saying it is no different than a secular certainty.

We gain our certainty when we first cease to doubt; and we don’t need religion to do that. [and for the students of philosophy, this is one of the most critical and logically fallacious mistakes of Descartes’]

Some Thoughts of Time, Part II

This post has no real main point that I’m trying to argue but, similar to my last one, is a flow of ideas on time and identity.

In my previous post I said: “As a single event, I do not have existence; as an event, comprised of a past, I take up my identity (or even seen differently, I find myself). For there to be an “I” which looks back, there must first be that past which can be looked upon by the “I,” as the self in the present.”

The self is always present and only immediate. To be now it must have destroyed itself and yet still recognize itself as having been then, as some thing removed and distinct from what it is now. It is only through this recognition that time is possible, and it is only through time that identity is possible. Seemingly paradoxically, an “I” can only be present and yet is possible only through a succession of those presents, in other words, through time.

But isn’t this how we view time anyways, as a succession of present moments? The past is no special aspect of time, rather it is just the collection of experienced presents, which can be recollected in some fashion. Similarly, the future is just the totality of the unexperienced, and thus only perhaps possible, presents, which can be imagined in some fashion. The tenses of time are always in relation to the present.

The Relatedness of Time

In a blog post awhile back, I repeated a theory I had heard once:
“After one year of life, that past year was 1/1, or 100%, of your experience. After your twentieth year of life…, the previous year was 1/20th of your experience. So each year, since we are unable to expand our brains, causes the percentages of our brain to get reconfigured.” So the span of a day (which we calculate by the rotation of the earth), actually goes faster the older that we get, because it represents that much smaller of an experiencing than it once did. If time is only relative, then it is the case that as we get older, time gets shorter.

So I’m not only purposing the relative theory of time that says time only occurs with movement or in the relation of physical objects to one another, but also one that says that time is also related to itself; in fact, that is how it is possible. Because as mentioned two paragraphs back, the past and future are only modes of the present, modes of the “I” experiencing. And notice how I must use the in-process verb of “-ing” to express what an “I” does. When we say that “I worked yesterday”, we are saying that I was working at that given time and thus that I recall an experience of a present that is no longer be”ing” experienced.

So if time is related to itself, then every past event is defined as an experience”ing” which can now be objectified and thereby experienced anew (and yet in a new, removed way) by a new present “I”. Thus, memory is a collection of presents, which have become objects accessible to the now-present “I”.

What is odd is that an “-ing” implies a duration, a succession of experience. So as soon as we try to talk of an actual present (not just the present, as today or this year, but rather as the moment where experiencing occurs), we reduce it to such a slice of existence that it disappears altogether. So it seems that while having this notion of present is useful, when thought through, it is really an impossibility. And if I just spent this whole blog saying that all of time is in relation to our notions of the present, and the present doesn’t exist, then what is time?

Some Thoughts on Time

Time, by its very nature, takes all up within it; thus, there is no outside of time. For anything posited outside of time, so long as it is put in relation to time, will be captured by time. And so as soon as we say a thing is outside of time, it then is taken up by time.

Humanity, at once both crossing time and, as a result, yet nevertheless caught up by it, can only know things through it. For one can only cross in time, and never across or out of it. All things in relation to us, accessible to us, are then tethered by time and, as such, have only finite existence; in fact, they can only ‘be’ through such tethering. We cannot say there is a timeless idea such as Communism or Christianity; rather, in time, things which receive such a name share some commonalities, but each takes up its own identity, specific to that era, to that people. Reciprocally, time makes us and we make time.

As a single event, I do not have existence; as an event, comprised of a past, I take up my identity (or even seen differently, I find myself). For there to be an “I” which looks back, there must first be that past which can be looked upon by the “I,” as the self in the present. For example, when encountering a stranger, that is what they are. They have no history for us, and so we cannot call them anything but a stranger, endowed with superficial attributes that even then, require a history of their own. If we notice a big scar across the cheek, we imagine the sort of past that person would have had.

But at the same time, what is time without a recognition of itself? Can there be a succession of events without some event (some thing in time) first recognizing that succession, and thus those events. That we say there is a time before man is only the necessity of succession being thrown upon the preexistence which lays dormant for us, hiding in shadows. We only infer a before-humanity because, as mentioned before, we need a past to have a present. We cannot be without at least some thing once having been. But notice again, there can be no outside of time; even when some thing lies outside humanity’s jurisdiction (i.e. the time before we were), we still find a way to account for it (our current theory is evolution). Thus, we create our past, even when it is inaccessible to us, and never ours to begin with.

The Devil

"Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar." - C.S. Lewis

That line is conveniently situated in the preface to Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters”. The next line goes on to say that even the lines written by the fictitious spirit, Screwtape, should not be taken as necessarily true. (Of course, should we doubt Lewis too?)

I immediately was drawn to that initial quote. I’ve often thought about what it must be like to be the devil of Christianity. For instance, why and how is the devil an individual being? Why must the devil be a man? Well, I suppose all angels must be men, and have a phallus.

Now that is the fascinating part; the devil is (was?) an angel. It must be. It must be a (the) fallen one, an antagonist, an opponent. But is this a pure negation? If the Christian God is pure spirit, shouldn’t the devil be purely physical?

I suppose any negation of the Christian god is a complete negation, or at least of a completely different sort of nature. I take humans as also being some sort of negation, but this must surly be a different type of denial than that of ‘the eternally fallen one’. (Strangely, humans are physical, yet the devil is still a spirit.)

Questions:
Must the devil always lie? Are all lies ones of the devil? What truths would the devil espouse? In what way are those truths ‘true’? What truths could aid the devil’s cause? What type of cause can the devil have? What type of cause does the Christian God allow the devil to have? What does it mean for the Christian God to allow an antagonist an agenda? What does it mean for the Christian God to have an antagonist? Questions are easy. Answers are not.

My Two Cents:
What a worrisome world to live in for that person for whom the devil is behind every corner and every claim. How great the doubt! How great the fear! My issue with a statement like Lewis’ is that it makes the Christian’s life extremely individualistic: “I must doubt all things (all people), except my thoughts attached to my God, which I must take on faith.” That individual is scared for his or her life, trembling from a different sort of fear …