Enter the Dark Ages

I've said it before. There isn't really two sides to the pro life issue. There are people that want to protect rights, and there are irrational crazies who don't know what they want. But as we move into the 21st Century we learn that the crazy 10-40 percent of the population effects politics in new and more effective ways.

There is a gap between what people believe politically and, in particular, legislatively, and between what seems to happen in the real world. I don't know the numbers, because I don't trust them. I know that most sane people balk at the idea of gender reconstructive surgery for children and yet there is a social-moral premise (if not a legal one) that protects this surgery in some states. This means if you want to get one for a child, you are protected through social-moral-language and possibly through laws in your state. This is a gap. A big one.

Nietzsche was afraid that the rabble, the vulgar, the uneducated would rule social language. He was in no small way upset and fearful of them, and of religion, and of what he termed "rancor;" the moral outrage that fueled social-language change. In particular, the notion of strength was hijacked by religious idiots, for Nietzsche, even in Germany, and changed from what it meant (strength) to what they wanted it to mean: a thing morally aligned with unexamined Christian ideas about right (ie: the opposite of "evil," anything they didn't like, anything that undermined their power, blind equality, blind socialization, and altruism).

What has happened today as the anti-intellectual minority has finally and tangibly imprinted its randomness and mediocrity on one of the last true philosophical political systems is that Nietzsche's fear is truly realized. America is perhaps the only context it could be realized. The complete transformation of strength (American political and intellectual might) into nihilism and religious totalitarianism.

Apropos of this transformation I will come out of the half-opened closet and say that, on the surface, those to blame are the vigilant, active and the passive believers in historical Christianity and Islam and Judaism. The three pillars of idiocy. To believe any tenet of either of these three deeply-rooted lies is to believe that magic trumps evidence, that subjectivity trumps objectivity, and that wishful thinking trumps reality. God, as a concept, has no substance, no place in reality, no place in language, and nothing to defend. Thinkers knew this three-hundred years ago. IT IS NOT a matter of finding out if God is real. He or she cannot be. Not in reality. To define God is to shatter the hopes of a successful proof. You cannot prove magic. Once it is shown, it is no longer magic, and no longer has magical qualities.

You cannot set up a concept (God) with conflicting attributes any more than you can set up an object with conflicting realities and expect any sane person to believe it. He or she cannot create a world and then not be responsible for the evil, even if you, as an uneducated dolt, believe he did it for a purpose. If he had a reason HE is still responsible and that conflicts whole-heartedly with your other "opinions" about him or her or it or

its magical offspring or ghosts.

God cannot be bailed out of the historically successful "Problem of Evil" by claiming "free will." That argument doesn't work any better than the first man who tried to fly off a 500 foot tall cliff without wings. To claim God provides free will is to claim he has the ability to provide or not provide it, which makes it not "free." If the contradictory God-concept includes some messy explanation why he makes evil (see Marcus Borg: God creates evil and kills babies to teach us real-life examples of evil so we don't do them ... uh?) then we see a world where he creates evil, creates man, and then lets it run amok without any oversight. Oh wait, this is exactly what Deists believed in the 18th Century and it fits much better. It does not, however, did the God concept out of its irrational hole.

So, unfortunately, and against my better judgment, I'll tell you who is at fault. Every religious idiots who posts billboards and runs fast-food Baptist consortiums and writes books about faith and defends contradictions to their friends and children … It is those people, the zealots and the nihilists, who have brought Rand's worst nightmare (lower run of hell) to fruition.

We have been discussing God, unfortunately, but let's discuss the issue tersely.

If you cannot see that the pro-life discussion is not truly a debate, you are not fit to speak, let alone hold office or raise children. Pro-choice people do not want to kill babies; as a group, they merely want to defend "inalienable" rights. Societies that do not protect fundamental rights sink into totalitarianism and a greater health pandemic then we have recently seen or even historically seen in this country for decades. It is not two-sided as the vulgar imagine it to be, one side for life and the other against life. That would be a strange argument indeed.

The beginning of the debate demands at least the awareness that it is not two-sided. There is no choice but to protect rights. This federal decisions half a century ago (perhaps our most famous) did not happen by accident. It happened because thinking people in a time when Americans still fought for legitimate rights (not the rights of silly groups who, though they may deserve the right to be left alone, do not deserve to control politics and law) believed that the country needed federal protection. That is the job of the federal government, to protect the greatest rights: voting, speech, fair trials, and medical issues such as abortion or right-to-life.

To protect and to debate them.

I am no longer interested in random, uneducated, dark-age, guess-work "thinkers" telling me moral premises and the consequent moral applications of these premises. I am no longer interested in their fallacious and unexamined opinions. It is about time to blame the ones responsible for this "lower rung of hell" that appears as divisiveness, politicization of language, and the stripping of rights in America. Maybe totalitarianism is the answer. It is the very thing we are fond of criticizing about Russia, the curtailment of rights under a totalitarian regime. Today we have learned that a free country opens the door to the blind power of religion. Religious nonsense and over-confidence is the consequence of Dark Age thinking.

I said it.

If you cannot read Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or Ayn Rand on the issue of religion and agree 1. with the overwhelming anti-Christian sentiment and 2. disagree with their allowance of the God concept, you are not allowed to speak from a position of power. Chatter to yourself in your over-priced house with your silly cellphone app. You must raise your hand. I'll call on you after you learn something and become more self-aware.

This is why (I'll say it) I'm an Ignostic. Not an Agnostic (someone who knows nothing). Ignostic. Someone who does not accept a discussion about God as if there is a God concept to discuss (because there is not) and because this unexamined nihilism has destroyed modernity or post-modernity or whatever this mess is called.