God Made Me a Loser!

"What better way to feed subjectivist belief," asks Rizzi, "than to propound that their belief is given by science?"

Thus, for example -- because he is such a reliable example of subjectivist assoulery backed by science -- "Once you throw out the brain as the creator of experience, it's plausible that the mind creates experience." Therefore, "Getting outside the brain is easy once you accept that the mind is running the show."

This would explain Deepak's militant leftism: it works perfectly so long as you disregard objective reality and accept that your thoughts and feelings "run the show." Again: if one begins in the mind, one ends up out of it.

Why not begin in the senses, as does every developing human, since there is no other alternative anyway? Ever see a baby begin with a feminist theory about the degrading role of mothers?

A human being is not a brain-on-a-stick, but an incarnation, or body-and-soul. That primordial idea is how the West was won -- or rather, how the West won. The adoption of its antithesis is why we are losing, or at least frittering away our victory. For to embrace subjectivism is to reject the world. But the world will not go away quietly; nor, as Obama is finding out, does it fit under his bus.

Is Obama really a subjectivist? Yes, and what's worse, like all subjectivists, he implicitly believes that his subjectivism is the last word in objectivity. Or, as he said,

"Implicit... in the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course..."

Got it? The slippery truth is forever etched in Jello. Or, our gelatinous principles are spelled out with wet noodles.

Subjectivism necessarily equates to nihilism, and furthermore, renders real community impossible, since each mind is an isolated monad. No longer is it THE truth, only my truth, which is of course no truth at all.

But the very existence of science itself "is a continual refutation of nihilism, because it continually trusts that the world is understandable; even more, that it is understandable by us" (Rizzi).

Thus, the exercise of science rests upon a very naïve, trusting, and childlike metaphysic -- in a good way! For just as we trust that our parents won't screw us, we innocently trust that mother nature will not steer us wrong and let us down. Deep down we know that nature will reveal her secrets. To believe otherwise is to be incapable of science.

Even so, "it appears that science has hatched, or helped hatch, a culture with elements that are potentially destructive of science" (ibid.), almost to the point of suicide. And this suicidal attitude is not coming from the right. You might say that leftists are not necessarily "anti-science" per se. But they are nearly to a man anti-the science-before-science.

Now, this science-before-science implies both a ground and a destination, or origin and end. Or in other words, the ontological assumptions that make science possible carry with them certain entailments that make God necessary.

To pretend to have the one without the other is to cut off one's train of thought before it arrives at its logical destination. But it works both ways, because there are indeed some fundamentalists who obviously believe in God but who reject the scientific -- or terrestrial -- implications.

I don't want to dwell on it, but I actually flipped through a popular evangelical book that shall remain unnamed, and read this arrant nonsense (which is as utterly nonsensical and anti-Christian as anything Deepak could come up with): God

"decided when you would be born and how long you would live. He planned the days of your life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death.... God left no detail to chance. He planned it all for his purpose." There are no accidents or contingencies, just pure necessity, from the Holocaust to his child's suicide -- both are just part of the Big Plan.

This weird philosophy goes by another name: Islam. It is not Christian but Mohammedan. Quoting Allah himself, "No soul will ever die unless it is God's will. The length of each life is predetermined according to the Scriptures" (in Bynum). You're all just little cogs in Allah's big wheel, so don't bother trying to figure out how the cogs work. God only knows, and God is irrational, so science is an exercise in massive presumptuousness, a recapitulation of the Fall.

The Koran suggests that it doesn't matter, say, if you become a suicide bomber or a stay-at-home mullah, because "those of you who were destined to be killed would have died regardless." Absolute predestination breeds unrelenting nihilism and futility. Unless you're a little dense, or a global loser, in which case I suppose it will be some sort of consolation. Indeed, losers will be very much attracted to this philosophy, since it frees them of any responsibility for being one. God made me a loser!

Here we see how Islam and predestination merge with the neo-Marxism of the modern left, in that their first principle is that it's all someone else's fault! The left may not have a God, but they have a whole gallery of convenient demons to choose from in order to explain away their failure: race, class, sex, whatever. With leftism you are only free to choose your demon, while the demon is responsible for all the heavy shirking.

With predestination, whether Marxist, Mohammedan or modern Christian, human agency is eliminated; guilt and responsibility are God's business, not ours. So you can wreck the world and blame a mechanical demon of your own imagination. What deviant child wouldn't love that?

And if that offends you, don't blame me. God made me this way.