What if the people wake up?

There has been more than one attempt on Youtube to make this speech into a sensation. I like the style of this video:

If this speech doesn't get your blood boiling, you aren't paying attention.

"What if Christianity actually teaches peace?"

It's hard for me to hear those words without realizing my own need for repentance. I'm sorry to say I was once pretty much sold on the neo-con rhetoric. I once voted for Bush. I once thought the war in Iraq was necessary. I once had no idea how much was being spent on the military each year. I once had no idea how many military bases we had around the world. I once had no idea that we paid billions of dollars to train Osama bin Laden and support the Taliban. I once had very little awareness of how many times in the past several decades we have ousted democratically elected leaders around the world and put puppet dictatorships in their place. I once had no idea how easily fear leads people to support evil. I once believed that war could lead to peace. I once believed that good people would do the right thing.

When exactly did I wake up? I don't know the answer to that. Sometimes I feel like I'm still in a fog, like those mornings I wake up and wonder if I'm still dreaming.

I don't know if all of our military interventionism has been based solely on lies. But I'm quite certain that whatever the reasons really are, we're still wrong.

Big government and immigration

So here's the latest from the Republican debates on immigration:

Given that nearly everything Rick Santorum says is absurd, this one really takes the cake. Rick Perry is a "big government moderate" because he opposes building a fence across the Mexican border?

Seriously?

Honestly, how much more "big government" can you possibly get than building a fence across the border between two countries? Maybe the Reaganites owe an apology to all those small government conservatives who were in charge of East Berlin during the 1980's.

You won't catch me supporting Rick Perry very often, but on the immigration issue, at least he, in his own words, "has a heart."

Which is nice and all, but I confess I prefer Ron Paul, who also has a head. Don't build a fence; it's a waste of money, it's an infringement on liberty, and there are much more practical ways of dealing with the immigration issue.

If you look at conservatives like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, it's not clear to me they have either hearts or brains on this issue. (And I thought Mitt Romney was "liberal.")

Even including Ron Paul, I'm not quite sure any of the Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) quite represent my views on immigration. (Ron Paul would perhaps be the closest.) I simply don't see why immigration shouldn't be free and open. End the quotas. Stop talking about a fence. Let people come here if they want, but don't subsidize their doing so. Obviously drug cartels are a problem, but that's a problem for law enforcement generally and is not specifically immigration-related.

(And while we're on the subject of drugs, we could probably save a lot of money and lot of lives by just letting them be legalized.)

But no matter what your opinion on immigration is, at least have the common sense to realize that in fact, the "conservative" view on immigration is in fact a big government view. If you favor the government building a fence along the border of Mexico, then you favor bigger government. If you favor a national identification system, then you favor bigger government. If you favor politicians deciding who is allowed to immigrate to this country, then you favor bigger government. If you favor tracking down small businesses to see whether or not they hire illegal immigrants, then you obviously favor bigger government. It's really not that hard.

Anyone who professes to be a "small government" conservative and yet wants more restrictions on immigration, well...hypocrite doesn't even begin to describe such a person.

Free will, dualism, and reductionism

Following up on a post I wrote recently, I thought it would be interesting to think once more about the concept of free will, with respect to the idea of causality. What is the cause of my own behavior? Is it really I who act a certain way, or are all of my actions reducible down to physical causes? Do I have genuine volition, or am I simply a composite of simple particles which combine to produce something complex?

The second question is an attempt to refine the first, which is blatantly naive. This question leaves us with only two options: dualism between body and person, or else hard reductionism, eliminating the notion of "person" altogether. I think both of these options are absurd. The first option forces you to search hopelessly for a way to link the choices of the will with the behaviors of a body, which exist in totally disparate spheres. The second option forces you to eliminate the question, "Who did this?" from your language. Neither of these will do. Indeed, you can't hold people accountable for their decisions unless their decisions genuinely happen in this world; this should be enough to immediately dismiss both dualism and reductionism.

One option is "emergentism." Maybe the laws governing the fundamental particles which constitute a human being can be shown to logically imply certain complex characteristics, including the ability to make decisions. In other words, maybe free will somehow "emerges" from the "bottom up." The implied directionality is too big of an assumption. We can see humans as wholes, or we can start to divide them into parts, or we can aggregate them together. It just depends on the questions we're asking--psychological, biological, or sociological, for example.

But that really is wild, isn't it? I can look at my body and realize I have many parts. I can acknowledge that I have very little conscious awareness of all that my brain is doing. But in my conscious experience, it is hard to divide myself into parts. If my mind really is the sum of many parts (specifically neurons working together) the whole really cannot talk to the parts, and therefore the whole has a hard time even believing it is divisible. In normal human experience, it is hard to avoid thinking of the self as a single entity. In traditional terms, nothing could be more obvious than that I have a soul.

Muslim libertarians

The Minaret of Freedom Institute is a group of Muslim scholars dedicated to libertarian values, including both civil and economic freedom. As they put it,

The Minaret of Freedom Institute was founded in 1993 with a dual mission for educating both Muslims and non-Muslims. For non-Muslims our mission is:

1. to counter distortions and misconceptions about Islamic beliefs and practice
2. to demonstrate the Islamic origins of modern values like the rule of law and sciences like market economics
3. to advance the status of Muslim peoples maligned by a hostile environment in the West and oppressed by repressive political regimes in the East

(Keep reading on their web site.)

To be honest, I know embarrassingly little about Muslim thought in the modern world, considering how important it is in our time. But since ideas are often processed best through synthesis, it's nice that there are organizations like this, who combine a discussion of Islamic thought with ideas I'm already quite familiar with.

It's amazing what you can discover on Youtube.

A little unnerving

Warning: violent images.

"Top down" vs "Bottom up"

One repeatedly encounters these two metaphors in discussions of science and faith--or in discussions of economics! Most recently I've encountered the distinction in Polkinghorne's Exploring Reality, where in Chapter 2 he writes,

The 'laws' of physics discovered at low levels of complexity would then simply be 'downward-emergent' approximations to the character of a more subtle and supple causal story in which the whole truly did influence the behaviour of the parts. ... Making us of science's account of future behaviour in this open metaphysical way by no means demands us to abandon the principle of sufficient reason, requiring a full explanation of the origin of what actually occurs. It is simply to conceive that the portfolio of causes that bring about the future is not limited solely to the description offered by a methodologically reductionist physics and framed only in terms of the exchange of energy between constituents. Instead, the concept of causal influence can be broadened at least to include holistic effects of an informational, pattern-forming kind. One might called this top-down form of causality 'active information.'

In my opinion, Polkinghorne gets overly technical in a book apparently designed as an apologetic work for the public. In any case, here's what he's basically saying: reductionist scientists have a solely "bottom-up" approach, whereas Polkinghorne believes that a lot of our discoveries demand a more "top-down" explanation.

Let's think about this dichotomy for a bit. First, I want to stress that it is a metaphor. That is, we are not talking about a literal "top" and "bottom" to the universe. Many times metaphor is simply the only way to talk about abstract concepts like the nature of causality, but nevertheless it is often important to acknowledge the limits of our metaphors, and to be aware of the influence they have on our thinking. In this, I'm not sure the influence of the metaphor on our thinking is entirely good.

Mesmerizing

Mikayla Mackaness on peace, love, and...

...wait for it...

...Ron Paul, believe it or not.

This is one of a series of endorsements for Ron Paul, all meditating on the concept of peace. All of them are quite beautiful, I might add.

When you hear that Ron Paul's support runs deep, it might be easy to conjure up images of rabid individualists and free market fanatics. But the diversity among Ron Paul supporters as quite astonishing. Most encouraging to me is seeing supporters of peace join his camp.

How about it? Peace, love, and Ron Paul 2012.