Bonus fishbait!

Friday Fishbait will feature an ever-growing collection of snapshots of and commentary upon the ongoing fish wars and new origins of species competing therein.

The excerpted photo of tennis star Ashley Harkleroad will not be featured as fishbait, but I just had to point this out to those of you who are not Playboy subscribers. Yes, it is a Jesus fish, and yes, it has a certain resemblance (and proximity, in this case) to a fertility icon used by heathens and cartoonists alike. Perhaps most notably, this symbol was once appropriated by the Church of the Ultimate Naked Truth, a formerly funky but now-defunct organization which generally avoided acronyms.

Hard-Core Latter-Day Anti-Federalists

道 (Đạo)

In The Abolition of Man C.S. Lewis has staked all on the assertion that what he terms the Tao (i.e. "Natural Laws" of ethics, doctrines of objective value) cannot be deduced or shown to be correct via any process of ratiocination.  Lewis claims that "I am not trying to prove [natural law's] validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it."

This sort of talk is absurd on its face.  Either morality is teleological, or it is not.  If not, an apologist such as Lewis cannot hope to have a theistic account of the Tao.  If it is, we may talk about moral ends and ethical means and thereby reason out (logically and empirically) which rules are the most efficient means to those moral ends which we desire, either for their own sake or for the sake of obeisance.

Every ethical exhibit, each Earthly exemplar, one and all empirically explicable!  The question one must ask is "What would happen if metaphysical materialism was really true, and the Tao naught but natural phenomenon?"  Put another way, which particular moral rules would emerge organically as families, tribes and societies adopt rules motivated by their natural desires and common goals, e.g. prosperity for their kin and kith, woe unto their enemies.  Lewis fails to even pose such fundamental questions because he assumes the Tao to be transcendently intelligently designed from the word go, rather than an emergent property of rational agents having increasingly complex social arrangements.  Thus, Lewis begs the most interesting question which he could well have posed, that is, "What is the best explanation for the cross-cultural prevalence of certain moral principles?"

Thus, we see another great thinker stymied by making the design inference too easily and too early.  In the end, Lewis has served as "only one more obscurantist," come to entreat us back to traditional morality without properly investigating either its sources or limitations.

Abraham of Ur, Deanna of TX

Illustration by Barry Moser

If you came upon Abraham of Ur just about to slay his son, would you talk him out of it?

If you intruded upon Deanna Laney just before she murdered her sons by stoning, what would you do?

From a Judeo-Xn-Muslim perspective, how can one claim that only one of these people acted rightly? For that matter, how can an unbeliever morally differentiate between them, if at all?

If we can all agree that the free excercise clause does not extend to murderous acts of filicide, what should we do with people like Abraham and Deanna?

Progress in Religious Liberty

James Madison, in a letter to Edward Livingston dated July 10th, 1822:

Notwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Govt. & Religion neither can be duly supported. Such indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting influence on both the parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded agst. And in a Govt. of opinion, like ours, the only effectual guard must be found in the soundness and stability of the general opinion on the subject. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

Here is the part to bear in mind when imparting the profundity of the founders to future freethinkers:

Perfect separation! Not partial separation, not merely neutrality in funding various religious programs, but perfect, utter, absolute separation between affairs of state and church.

How sublime!

Big-screen savers of souls

We've all heard the family-values crowd grousing about Hollywood filth, that "American business that drops metric tons of toxic waste on your country and in your homes." Glorification of non-marital sex, non-martial violence, non-Martian aliens, etc. Mostly, I trust my children to know that what goes on screen does not pass muster in real life. Except, of course, when well-nigh everyone else in society buys into the very myths and memes made manifest in movies.

Case in point, the semi-final scenes of Shrek the Third, in which Puss and Donkey have their souls magically swapped by a magician. What is a metaphysical materialist to do?