Humanities in Crisis

About a week ago, Martin Cothran  linked to this article by David Brooks on the subject of why the liberal arts are such a joke in education.  Brooks writes “the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.” What is the reason for this? According to Brooks “Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn't want to offend anybody.”

I had the opportunity to see this first hand in my time at A&M, especially in my class on Literary Theory. Truth, in the class, was debunked and talked about as an unreal or irrelevant thing, and the focus was on how writers were influenced and how their works could be twisted to mean anything we wanted, thus proving an author had no control over his work. This was the subject of an essay I wrote for the class which I may post here at some point in the near future. Several people at The Imaginative Conservative have written replies to Brooks article which are very interesting, especially that of Louis A. Markos where he brings in a very enlightening quote from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.

However, while everyone points at the problem quite clearly, I think that most of them are missing the root of the problem. As Charles Clough says often, it all comes back to origins.

If evolution is true, if humans evolved from monkeys, then the humanities are a complete waste of time.

If mankind is evolving through history, which is the primary point of today’s scientism and atheistic revolution in the meaning of morality, then what Aristotle said thousands of years ago is monumentally irrelevant. What is driving much of the debate around abortions, gay marriage, euthanasia, social security, gun control, political philosophy, is the belief that mankind is advancing along a rising slope that begins with slime, rises through apes, rises through us today and beyond.

The problem with the humanities is that they deal with people, events, and philosophies all resting on that line between us and the apes, not between us and what we must become. They are, in effect, below us.

The humanities only make sense if we are created by a rational God who has revealed himself and his truth to mankind through the ages. Only if mankind is created in the image of God do the ancient philosophers have anything meaningful to offer besides a look at un-evolved man which should be taken quickly and mockingly.

Why We Need Health Care (Part II)

In the last post I attempted to define at a very fundamental level why liberals believe that the wealthy are to blame for the plight of poor people in America. I realize now that I made a basic mistake and did not define the terms I was using. When I speak of poor, I mean people who have difficulty paying for or maintaining many of the luxuries that are common place in America and when I speak of the wealthy, I mean those who make or have accumulated more than the average American family.

In this post I will look at why liberals look to the government as the solution of the problem. We identified their assumption that the reason for an excess of wealth in one area is a lack of it in another. They believe that there is a finite amount of wealth, which means those who have more than average have stolen it from those who have less.

Having determined that there is theft going on, (from one income bracket to another) the liberal then looks to see who or what has the power to remedy the situation. The most obvious candidate is government, it has the power to compel people to do its bidding, and the wealthy will not surrender the amount of income required of him willingly.

 Thus, the liberal sees government as the best force with the right to equalize the wealth of a nation, because the nation is not capable of doing it itself. When big business steals from the poor or otherwise takes advantage of them, the poor have no one to turn to except government. Thus the government become the ultimate charity, collecting from the wealthy to care for the poor. The collections take the form of taxes, and the government uses those taxes to pay for doctors, food stamps, medication, etc. In this way, the wealthy CEO of Walmart pays a portion of his earnings back into the system, allowing it to be used to help and provide for people in the lower income brackets he makes his money off of.

This is why people like Marx or Hitler look to some form of populist government and force to achieve what they see as social justice. Because people with wealth have been shaped by the capitalistic culture that surrounds them, they are motivated by greed and self interest and thus are more concerned about themselves than the community and must be forced to share and take care of the community.

Government becomes the ultimate parent, making sure the children share and get along while also providing just what every child needs.

Why We Need Health Care (Part I)

In the hopes of contributing something to the debate over the direction our country should take in regards to Health Care and welfare programs in general I will be taking a few posts to attempt to discuss the assumptions and reasoning that underlie the belief in welfare in general. 
We begin with a basic problem, there is a vast disparity in wealth among Americans. While some have golden toilets, others have difficulty paying for their plumbing from month to month. While some charter private jets to fly from city to city, others cannot afford a car to drive to work. A portion of our society cannot afford the basics of life in modern America. This raises two questions.

1. Why are people deprived or lacking in basic necessities and comforts?
2. How do we go about fixing the problem.

The first question is perhaps most important but is often overlooked so we can talk about fixing the problem. Before we can determine a solution to the problem we first need to identify the cause. This points us toward one of the bottom level beliefs of liberalism that is so fundamental that it is rarely brought to the surface.

Man is basically good and is shaped by his environment. Thus when educated he can be enlightened and improved, but if left in poverty or surrounded by corruption then he will be almost unable to avoid damaging influence they will exert. 

Thus, an individual in poverty must be rescued from that state. He is nearly  powerless to remove himself from his environment because the environment itself is what shapes and motivates him. Thus, his existence in poverty cannot be his own fault. 

If it is not his own fault, then we must look around for what is creating the environment that is keeping people in poverty. The liberal usually falls back on the great socialist thinkers, the foremost of whom was Karl Marx,   and identifies Capitalism as the culprit. Capitalism is, fundamentally built on gaining wealth for oneself. The vast amounts of money that corporations and companies make must come from somewhere, and often that money comes from the private sector. For  example, take Wal-Mart. The company has built itself around selling base level goods at base level prices, and the majority of their income comes from low income people (like me!) who are unable or unwilling to pay more at other stores. Thus, when Walmart makes a billion dollars, that is a billion dollars that came from lower income families who cannot pay for medical or dental bills, for a car, or for insurance. And, to make it worse, when the CEO receives a 100,000 dollar bonus, that is a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account that came from people who make less than that in four years.

Thus, the culprit seems obvious, there is a lack of money in one area (the low income bracket), an abundance of wealth in another area (the CEO's bank account) and a clear path as to how the money got from one place to the other. The CEO is caught red handed.

Now that we know who caused the problem, we'll look at how to fix it next. 

Iranian Mess

This week Wiley Lecture Series, a student organization in the Texas A&M Memorial Student Center, hosted its symposium entitled 'Iranian Hazard' with Dr. Paul Barretto, a consultant on international nuclear projects (his corner on NSSPI can be found here), and Richard Stoll, Professor of Political Science at Rice University. The problem with Iran, as they pointed out, is that America and Iran have had bad relations for many years, since we helped over throw a democratically elected government and instituted a more friendly dictator in his place. Now, their nuclear program is continuing to ramp up as they continue to acquire nuclear technology that is military specific and has no use outside of nuclear weapons and they increase the number of nuclear facilities they admit to be building.

A lot of people suggest a simple preemptive strike composed of numerous precision air strikes to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, but Iran has so far not crossed the red line of actually beginning to assemble a nuke, though they continue to work close to the line. A plethora of air strikes is not the simple easy solution that it might appear. First, it would require numerous, simultaneous strikes throughout Iran which could stretch our operational capabilities in the region. Second, We do not have the Intel we need to make the kind of precision strikes necessary. Iran's facilities are spread all over the nation and we do not even know exactly where many of them are. Third, our bunker buster bombs are beginning to be obsoleted by the bunker building capabilities of established nations and there is a considerable chance that even a direct hit on an Iranian nuclear bunker could fail to completely destroy it. Fourth, and most importantly, it is a temporary solution.We and the Israelis have knocked out nuclear facilities before, and though they delay development of the nuclear program, they do not take it off the table.

If we want to keep Iran from developing nukes, we need to remove their motivation to do so, which would make an interesting discussion in defining.

Something that surprised me Wednesday evening was the lack of power that the president of Iran holds. Iran is ruled by a smorgasbord of high elder councils, religious boards, clerics, etc., with the president being somewhere south of tenth on the political power rankings of Iran. Iran's military is also made up of two different pieces, the regular army, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the fanatics of the military. The military threat is not necessarily that Ahmadinejad will send Iranian forces in, but rather that one of the radical elements in one of the councils or a cleric will provide the little push the Revolutionary Guard needs to start some kind of conflict. Then, whatever the Iranian people think of their government, they will be very anti U.S., worse even than Iraq was.
As is usually the case, the situation is a lot more complicated than it would appear at first glance and will take time and energy to solve, and more than a little sacrifice on everyone's part.

A Republic, A Tyranny

As I have mentioned before, the root problem with the debates going on in Congress focus around how much the federal government will control the nation. The question that is being ignored is who will run the federal government.

In the Republic, Plato sets out what he thinks would be a perfect state and in so doing sets forth two propositions which are wonderful on the surface, but flawed underneath. The first is the foundation of the Republic's boundaries upon the people's need for beef, which pays no heed to the people's need for bacon; and the second is the running of the nation by a council of all powerful wise men, which pays no heed to the propensity of wise men to have particular area of foolishness.

The need for bacon being beyond argument, I will here deal with propensity of wise men to have particular areas of foolishness and further more the inability for a council of such men to run a country. Wise men, or rather those called wise men by the world, have the same difficulty in managing the details of a nation that general has in managing the details of a battle, both are esconsed so high above the fray over seeing the big picture that they have lost touch with what is really happening in each of the individual conflicts that put together make up the battle. The general has his plans and the wise man his theories, but neither has anything to do with particulars.

It is also important to note that a government such as Plato imagined it, an all powerful one filled with wise men, has another devastating draw back. Such governments tend to slowly be less filled with wise men without becoming less powerful, so that in the end they are all powerful governments filled with fools or madmen. Power does not corrupt so much as it produces stress, though the difference between the two for men with the moral framework of our current politicians is slight indeed. Plato makes an attempt at creating a system to perpetuate the rule of the wise, but he has nothing to perpetuate their wisdom. His solution, education, has just as much power to blind as it does to illuminate. Look at the rulers of Nazi Germany, most of the men who formed Hitler's government were geniuses with college degrees. And I don't think there are many who can claim to have the power to manipulate or shape not just a crowd but an entire nation as Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

Our current government no longer exists to 'promote the General Welfare'. Instead it exists to support itself, the first step in the direction of tyranny. I do not suspect the current members of our government to be working toward a dictatorship, I do not think that even most of them want a dictatorship. They are however moving in that direction by diverting portions of the government away from the public and toward itself. Vast amounts of money are spent each year from the national budget on keeping the present people in power. Whether this is creating programs that people want (but shouldn't have), jobs that could be done better in the private sector (or shouldn't be done at all), or government funds going to criminal organizations (like Planned Parenthood) it is in line with Plato's theoretical Republic, which is in itself a tyranny. The current politicians, having written exceptions for themselves into almost every law they pass and massive benefits for themselves into special laws for themselves, are content to play Plato's wise men on our nation, directing everything as they see fit, and making a rather colossal mess of the whole thing.

Our government was not set up to opporate like Plato's Republic, but instead was supposed to be a limited government run by good people. Now most of the good people are gone, replaced by greedy theorists, and the 'limited' part of our government is being reduced in every way possible.

Novelty Cannot Replace Quality

In my continuing quest to create a story that a few people might enjoy, I have spent not a little time reading books on how to write a book. Many of them have provided me with helpful insights, a few in particular have harped incessantly on the necessity of ‘surprising the reader’ and ‘being new’. So far this is all well and good, I enjoy being surprised by a clever plot twist, or a new type of character, but when the aforementioned books assert that without such, the book will not be read, I fear I must respectfully disagree.

A good work of art attracts attention either by its novelty or its quality. Novelty is easier to create than quality and has thus become, for many, the Holy Grail of art. So artists, writers, directors, etc. spend their time trying to outdo each other in novelty, usually by being ore and more grotesque, until grotesqueness ceases itself to be either novel or grotesque. Art today is a business, if you book, movie, or paintings don’t bring in money, then few people are interested in it, and when something becomes a business product, people try to find the way to produce something for as little as possible to sell it for as much as possible. An artist’s currency is time; novelty is quick and fast when compared to quality. Thus, quality has suffered. Novelty is just that, something new, and so when something ceases to be novel (when you’ve seen or read it), the essence of what made you enjoy the work of art is gone, then it has no pull on you. Novelty may create best sellers, but it cannot create classics by itself.

Well told stories, well made characters, however, do not grow old at nearly the same rate (Reading your favorite story, and nothing else for weeks on end will make you sick of it no matter how charming or fulfilling). Quality stories, quality characters are able to entertain for years on end, they have staying power. Part of what brought this to my mind was the number of movies that are remakes of stories and characters we already know: Iron Man (film adaptation of a comic series), Thor (film adaptation of a comic series) , Green Lantern (film adaptation of a comic series), The Green Hornet (film adaptation of a comic series), The A Team (Film adaptation of a TV Series), True Grit (Remake of a film adaptation of a book), The Eagle (Film adaptation of a book), I Am Number Four (Film adaption of a book). These films have done very well, and you cannot really argue that they succeeded because they pushed the envelope or were in some way vastly different from anything we had ever seen. In fact we already knew what most of them were going to be about.

A pursuit of novelty has contributed largely to the waste paper lining the Fantasy, Horror, and Sci-Fi sections at Barnes and Noble; it creates works that are fun to read once or twice but have no lasting value. Quality can overcome a lack of novelty and create a work that is fun to read and does not rely strictly on your desire to find out what happens next. A great work of course, includes both novelty and quality, but novelty must be servant, it makes a poor master.

King Arthur

This is an essay I wrote to (very) briefly cover the history of the Arthurian Legend with emphasis on the earlier portions of the story. I would like to eventually do something a little more in depth on certain characters or portions of the story, such as Merlin. Check it out, and I hope you enjoy it.
King Arthur, Man, Myth, And Legend

Clearly!

Evolution is purely scientific, of course, nothing religious about it.

Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

This video really drives home the fact that evolution is a root of a larger philosophy that has something to say about everything. You can no more plug evolution into Christianity than you can plug theistic creation into atheism.

We Have Met the Enemy....And He is US!

In Pogo veritas est. What is art for if not to illuminate the plank residing within our optic organ. Today Tom Delay was sentenced to three years for money laundering. While it is true that there is much wrong with what the Democrats have been doing in the federal government for the last two years, it is to be expected that they will act the way they have. If we will follow our own moral code, the world will be far better off than if we spend our time screaming bloody murder when democrats in Washington spend like democrats (Drunken sailors, it has been pointed out, stop spending when they run out of money), when people in Hollywood make pornographic films, and when atheists write books that use atheistic logic.

If Republicans cut off pork barrel spending and ended Christmas tree bills just from their own party, that would have more effect on the deficit than any amount of yelling at Democrats. I am not equating Christianity with Republicanism, far from it. I am merely trying to point out that both Christians and Republicans have a tendency to spend too much time pointing fingers when there is plenty of work to be done in their own garden.

Beyond the obvious effect of making a number of almost clean gardens clean, fixing our own lives is part of being above reproach. Our calls for morality fall somewhat flat when people see how Christians behave toward each other. Machiavelli and the Medici could take a few tips from church politics today; I mean whatever happened to 'they shall know you by your love for one another'? Republicans have screamed and yelled about excess spending and immoral democrat practices and yet this past year multiple Republicans and Christians faced charges relating to improper use of money and improper sexual relations, charges that were not unfounded.

If we take care of ourselves, and exercise dominion over the resources that God has given to us, we will do more good for the world than any amount of finger wagging will do. People, strangely enough, are more effected by deeds than by words, yet it is words that most of us employ instead of actions.

Towers

If you decide to become a soldier in the war of ideals that has raged for all time, it is unfortunantly true that you will meet on the vast and varied landscape known as the human mind many people who are brilliant, but have erected towers of ignorance, powerful, imposing, and impervious to facts. In my own limited and short journeys have met several such towers, and no matter how much I hurled facts, figures, and witty quotations at them, they have continued to stand, tall and power, immune to all my arguments.

In a recent confrontation of this nature, I found myself wondering at thickness of the walls and the height of the tower that two gentlemen had erected, from which they poured abuse on an organization they next to nothing about and its failure to have any resemblance to a second organization which they knew nothing about either. Such towers are immensely infuriating to those they withstand, and I found myself devoting far too much time to constructing refutations of their utterances of nonsense. The problem with nonsensical utterances is that there are so many ways to refute them that you can often spend a great deal of time preparing attacks from every possible angle, when you will at most use one.

However, two separate thoughts came to me as I thought how best to bring down a tower impervious to anything I could do. First, assaulting such towers is often a waste of time. Granted, there are times when nonsense is broadcast so far and so loud that it must be contradicted, but it is often better to save our energy and time to discuss truth with those who are genuinely interested in discovering it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, as we survey such towers, we should take a moment to see if our vantage point is a result of our standing on a mountain of fact and reasoning, or if we are able to see so far because we have erected our own citadel of folly.

Priorities?

This Wednesday Mexico, and 10 other Latin American Countries presented amicus briefs against Arizona's new immigration law to the 9th circuit Court of Appeals. The 9th Circuit Court allowed them to submit the briefs, and Arizona Govenor Jan Brewer is understandably irritated. Before I comment on the precident of foreign nations sumitting legal documents to American Courts in American Cases, I would like to look at another issue that is developing at the same time.

On September 30th, David Hartley and his wife Tiffany were jet skiing on Falcon Lake, which sits on the American-Mexican Border, when they were attacked by members of the mexican Zeta drug cartel. David was shot in the back of the head, and fell into the lake. His wife tried to turn around and get him, but was driven off by gunfire from the cartel members. In the last few weeks, Mexican authorities have done little, and have denied the little help our government has offered. The few who have tried to help have suffered the consequences, such as Rolando Flores Villegas who took up the search for Hartley's body and was found beheaded on Tuesday. The State Department has remained for the most part silent on the issue.

If the Mexican government really cares about the welfare of the people of Mexico, they should spend more time and energy on stopping drug cartels and less time worrying about Arizonan's limiting illegal immigration. The drug cartels are doing more damage on the border than anything else. The Mexican government has no interest in slowing down illegal immigration, a decent amount of money comes into the country from jobs made possible by America.

If you take a second and think about it, what kind of precedent is set by a foreign nation submitting legal documents to a civil court dealing with a constitutional case? American Law lives on precedent (It's always easier to say 'they said it first' when you are critisised) and what is used today will be abused tomorrow. If mexico can submit amicus briefs in this case, then why should Canada not submit amicus briefs against gun rights, Pakistan against women's rights, any African nation against business ethics? Foreign nations have no jurisdiction in domestic maters of our nation. If anything, Mexico should be apologizing for the number of it's citizens who violate our law on a daily basis, and not just by crossing the border.

Priorities people, priorities. Get them in line, and your problems will begin to diminish.

On Critisism

The last few days I have spent some time looking at critiques of various writers, and several on G.K. Chesterton have set me wondering as to how we can make an objective critique of a writer, mainly because there are some writers I dislike almost as intensly as some seem to hate Tolkien and Chesterton. After some thought, here is what I have come up with.



You cannot dismiss someone's arguments simply by saying they are not a trained philosopher or scientist. In the past, and a little today, people educate themselves. If someone has made stupid mistakes, it will take little or no effort to point out said mistakes. If you want to dethrone someone from a wrongly held seat of cultural authority, show what is wrong with their work, and how that corrupts what they have to say.



It is not enough however, to prove them wrong by showing how it conflicts with your beliefs. The two places that philosophies and worldviews can destroy themselves by having conflicts. If an idea conflicts with itself, or how the world works, then it can be viewed as false. Too often ideas are dismissed because they do not fit a belief system they are attempting to challenge simply because that belief system is the one held by the reviewer.

The problem is that it is difficult to show where an idea conflicts with how the world works, but if there were no problem, philosophy would not be fun.

Christianity v. Life

I have been looking at a lot of different books and blogs about and by atheists and christians, and I have to say that the amount of weight given to the study of plants and animals is far out of proportion to it's actual importance. Despite the fact that most of our construction of 'pre-history' is based on falicious assumptions and straight up guess work, it is still treated as the irrefutable refutation of theism in general and Christianity in particular. The fact is that such pre historical guestimating is far less important than what the world is doing now, or within the last two hundred years.

The fact is that Christianity fits reality better than any other belief system. You can say that we can have morality without God because we have no need of logic, that life is illogical and thus has no meaning (using logic to prove such), but the fact is that people living their lives know that logic and reason are basic pieces of how life works. No one has ever lived their life without logic and no one ever will.

You can say that Christianity is cruel and causes people guilt, but it also gives them redemtion, while aethism gives people dispaire and leave them in it. Christianity has a problem of evil only when you demand that God be accountable for everything and man for nothing, but when man becomes responsible for his actions, the problem vanishes. Evil is still there, it is still painful, but it is not a permanent part of the cosmos as it is in aethism or eastern philosophies. You can say, as Budhism does, that good and evil, peace and war, life and death, are all the same, but people do not live that way.

You can say that we are chance products of matter and that thoughts and emotions are simply chemical reactions in the brain, but again, people simply don't live that way. Some people may find it convenient to blame behavior on such chemical reactions, but the theory undercuts itself by denying man's ability to theorize.

You can say that what we do doesn't matter, that it will all vanish, but man cannot live that way, and those who have tried usually end up blowing out their brains. Life and man only make sense in Christianity. Why are we continually amazed by how fast or slow time moves? Why can we not simply accept murder and rape as good? Why are we sad when people die? Why are we consumed with love, burn with hate, sink in despair, or rise in joy? Why do our hearts leap at the sound of the horns of Rohan as the Witchking stands at the gate of Gondor? Why do tears start to our eyes as random people pay their respects as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl escorts the body of PFC Chance Phelps home from the Iraq War?

Before people bash Christianity for being "full of contradictions" (Which are usually idiotic readings of the scripture that a six year old can understand), they might want to look at the bleakness of their own beliefs, and look at the hundreds of ways that such beliefs simply do not fit reality.

Hurrah for Good Old Southern Manners (and guns)

In my Arthurian Literature class this week, we have been discussing Chivalry (how you act as a warrior) and Courtly Love (How you act as a lover) in the romances of Chretian de Troyes. Most of the young men in the class still open doors for ladies and give up their seats on the bus (To be fair, there were a good number of Corps people there). What was interesting was the small number of girls who would want their boyfriend to be a 'courtly lover', a grand total of zero. I think the reason was the impression that such a friend would be a push over. Maybe, maybe not, I have no experiance in that area so I can't talk much lest I set my foot firmly in my mouth.

What I can talk about a little, and was slightly disappointed we did not discuss, was Chivalry, a code of conduct for combat. If they have no code of conduct, are you still bound by one? Obviously there are boundaries, i.e. if they use human shields or launch missles from hospitals you can't do it either. However, the practice of taking prisoners is dependent to a large degree on the assumption that the prisoner will not suddenly blow up in your face or pull a knife when you turn your back.

Also, in combatives this morning we learned something very interesting. Who always wins an unarmed fight?

The guy who's buddy with a gun shows up first.

Fiction

I would highly encourage all of you to read Martin Cothran's article 'The Rhetoric of Amazement', I think he is spot on in what he is saying. I would like to add just a few thoughts of my own.

Fiction, and Fantasy in particular, has been attacked as escapist, full of lies, and not worth our time, etc. Much of this stems from the pragmatism that has become the trademark of modern times. Like everything else, fantasy can be good and bad, but it is not bad because it is fantasy.

Fantasy is an instrument that allows the author or creator to do two things. The primary joy that Tolkien and many other Fantasy writers had from their work was the joy of creating. It is the same joy that God felt when he made heaven and earth, and it is a reflection of his image in us. Also, fantasy is and always has been, a tool to explore and make moral points. Until recently, if you wanted to know how to or not to act you looked at heroes and villians in legends. You followed the example of Hector, Beowulf, Diomedes, Sir Gawain, and avoided the actions of Paris, Unferth, or Loki (The modern 'dark hero' has changed all that, but another time). Humans learn best by experiancing, worst by lecture. Literature and stories is one of the best ways to learn without actually making every mistake yourself.

Just as we would neither subsist on a diet of sweet potatoes nor on a diet of cookies, neither should we subsist on only one type of literature, much less disregard it completely.

Wishful Logic

Last night the Bastrop GOP put on a forum dealing with the issue of the proposed ACC campus being built in Bastrop. In return for getting a campus on the wrong side of town that over three years will grow to serve 1,100 annually, Bastrop will become co-signers for ACC's $444,000,000 debt, a debt that will grow after ACC buys land and builds a $38,000,000 campus. The reasoning behind this bad investment goes something like this.

1. Bastrop has a low household income level,

This is caused by Bastropian's low education,

Therefore, more education will raise income level.

2.If we bring in an ACC campus, then more people will get a better education.

3. Therefore if we bring in an ACC campus, then Bastrop will get a higher income level.

All three arguments are seriously flawed, however, as the propositions and conclusions are either false, do not follow, or both.

The most solid argument of the three is (1). Education and income level are fairly complementary. If you have one you are likely to have the other. The problem is that young people in Bastrop are not staying in Bastrop if they can help it, at least as far as I can tell. This is me speaking without any studies or polls, but from what I have seen, if young people can leave Bastrop, for the most part they do. Hence, giving Bastropians a better education would not necessarily raise the income level since the recipients of that education would simply leave the Bastrop area.

Argument (2) is where the real problems are. First, it assumes that Bastropians would get a better education if they could, which is not true for the majority of Bastrop youth. It is an unarguable fact that Bastrop High School is rife with problems ranging from drugs to pregnancies to violence. Less than 40% of BHS graduates go on to take any form of higher learning. That means that over 60% of Bastrop Youth do not take advantage of distance learning or any of the easily accessible college campuses around Bastrop. Former Mayor Scott suggests that if we put an ACC campus right next door then the young people will attend. Some of them will, it would be foolish for them to turn down free education. The second reason that this argument falls flat is because it assumes that the people a new campus would attract will make good use of the education. Those that want a good education in Bastrop can get it today with distance learning or at one of the many ACC campuses nearby. The people who enroll in a new campus will be the ones who are, for the most part, free loaders who will not put their education to good use (I am speaking generally here and from my own experience, which is, I admit, limited).

Thus, when we arrive at Argument (3), every proposition that it is built on is false, and thus it is left without a leg to stand on. This was former Mayor Scott's only reason for pushing the project, and I was suprised to not see any kind of statistics from him on average income in any of the cities ACC has annexed in the past. Instead, all I got were figures from Mr. Parmalee showing that the cities themselves annually lost around $2,100,000 dollars to the program.

Also, we are being told that the campus will add nine cents to property taxes for ever hundred dollars of property value. We are promised that the rate will not rise, but Austin was told the same thing when ACC first began, and the rate has since almost doubled.

Yes, Bastrop needs to do something to fix it's education, but this is like saying the best way to fix a house is to make it taller, never minding the fact that the foundation is shifting. Throwing money at something and building newer, bigger, emptier buildings (think BHS Performing Arts Center) will not fix the problem. There are numerous other options that Bastrop can look at, the ACC proposal is far from the best.

There are many people who find it difficult to wrap their heads around the hatred that displayed toward theists by atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, P.Z. Meyers, and Richard Dawkins. Many write it off as simply hatred against those in disagreement, others claim the hatred is simply doubt about atheism being manifested as anger toward Theism. While there is a bit of truth in these explanations, they do not explain the anger for one basic reason. They dramatically under estimates the effects of believing something is really true, especially when that something concerns the existence of God and moral standards.

Most, if not all, atheists have bought into the theory of evolution, which makes very clear statements about good and evil, the nature of man, and what the world should be like, or what utopia should look light. In general, good is strong, pleasant, and natural, evil is weakness, pain, and self denial. Man is only one step on the evolutionary ladder and is not intrinsically more valluable than any other organism, and the world only progresses as fast as evolution. These statemnts are in direct contradiction to the tenents held by many theistic belief systems: God determines right and wrong (our enjoyment has little or nothing to do with it in the short run), man is unique and above all animals, and history will end with mankind going to heaven and hell.

Now, if everyone were to stay at home and hold these beliefs to themselves, there would not be as many arguments. The problems arise when we try to make laws, run nations, and set policies. If you oppose abbortion, stem cell research, or euthanasia, then you are obstructing the atheistic march to utopia by slowing evolutionary development in the human race. If yuo oppose gay marriage, incest, bestiality, or polygamy, then you are opposing good (pleasure, that which is 'natural') and advancing evil (denial of one's urges). When you support prayer in school, the mention of God in the pledge of allegiance, or the mention of Intelligent Design in schools, you are filling children's heads with nonsense from humanities dark and barbaric past, ideas scientific atheism hates as much as most people hate Fascism (which is, by the way, good atheism).

Thus, Atheists have no problem with theists who leave their beliefs at home, but their wrath is hurled up at those theists who point out the harm in atheistic ideals and attempt to prevent them from implementation. Another way of looking at it is a comparison of war. In wars such as the American Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, there was a measure of respect between soldiers. Religious war is different, combatants in a religious war are fighting because the other side is evil. Thus, there is no respect between sides. Theism vs. Atheism is by definition a religious war. Atheists see Theists as full of ideas harmful to the human race, and thus see them as unworthy of common rules of decency and argumentative etiquette.

A brief disclaimer: Much of the above is generalization and I realize that. If I wanted to speak specifically to every case I would have to write a book. Someday I might, but please realize that there are exceptions to just about everything I said, but the general rules still holds.

We Put Ourselves Here, Not Congress

The Healthcare plan put forward by the House of Representatives has set off a powder keg that has turned our whole political system inside out and divided the nation in three groups, one furious about what is being done with their tax dollars, one group, led by the President, furious that they are being opposed so vehementently and called liars, and a third group standing between the other two wondering why everyone is so bent out of shape. I'm not here to flame the fires either way, but there are a few things I would like to say.

1. Shouting and threatening violence does not change minds very often. Be courteous and don't interupt when someone is trying to speak. Even if they are completely in the wrong, our Representatives are in our government and thus deserve our respect because they hold a position of power and responsibility.
2. Proclaiming that we need to kick everyone out of congress is not going to help. Even if that were to happen, the beaurocratic fat that has been built around our government would keep things from changing a great deal. There are a lot of good senators and Representatives who are trying to do their job, but cannot get anything done because of the red tape and the opposition. If you want to make a difference research the candidates and campaign for them, even if it is only to tell a few people about them. The Founders based a great deal upon the assumption that the people would hold their representatives accountable. Our current predicament is just as much the fault of Americans who can vote as it is the Representatives who have been voted in.

From the Ivory Tower

King Arthur and Lancelot

I have always enjoyed the legends of King Arthur but a source of constant annoyance and frustration has been the depravity of Lancelot and the ruin it brings upon Arthur's kingdom. I can understand the fact that a knight may fall into sin and thus bring ruin upon a kingdom, but what has always annoyed me is the way in which Lancelot has been regarded as a tragic hero and his failing as a terrible, if unavoidable, mistake. This is due in a large part to the misunderstanding of 'true love'. Wonderful words, but they have come to represent a sick concept. It is because of how the Arthurian legends have been used to peddle this idea of love that I have come to dislike most recountings of it.

When Lancelot falls in love with Guenevere, it is often portrayed as some kind of inevitable bond that is beyond their control. Their adultery is often explained away or excused on account of them "being in love". Because they were in love, the argument goes, they couldn't help themselves.

True love does what is best for the object of that love, it does not follow the basis of the lover's selfish actions. Yes, I am looking at you Anakin Skywalker. The theme of True Love excusing any number of harmful actions has only been magnified over the years, and it is seen with special poignancy in Episode II of Starwars. This goes back to what I mentioned in an earlier article on interesting things in the Fantasy Genre. Most of the things I listed were funny, but this one just makes me sick. In the name of true love, a male character can get away with almost anything.

There is actually a word for what Lancelot's version of True Love has become. It is lust. I know, it doesn't sound as good, that's why they say True Love.

J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien has to be one of the most amazing authors in the history of literature. Besides his collosal mountain of work in Middle Earth he wrote a great deal in the field of Northern Mythology. Most recently, Christopher Tolkien has published The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. I've only just started it, but already Tolkien's mastery of the epic is clear.

Also, I came across this documentary on the web a few days ago and really enjoyed the first 3 parts, but I could have done without all the stuff about the similarities between Frodo's journey and an acid trip. But I really enjoyed all the footage of Tolkien and his thoughts on his work.