(America) Part 3

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Joel

I’m too busy to add much of my own commentary. This is my last installment.

What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imagry, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doind, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness. This is the special effect of our times. The ecstasy of the polaroid is of the same order: to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has become reality. It is a dream. It is the optical materilization of a magical process. The polariod photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.

America (live or die)

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Joel

No: this is not some ‘vote or die’ political post but is, in fact, the third installment of my series on Baudrillard’s “AMERICA”. One thing in particular I like about Baudrillard is his ability to interject deep meaning into the mundane. For example, merely glancing at a piece of graffiti can prompt this response…

‘LIVE OR DIE’: the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death. If you live, you live, if you die, you die. It is like saying ‘be yourself, or don’t be!’ It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic. You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal. Following the model of ‘pay or die!’, ‘your money or your life!’, it would become ‘your life or your life!”. Stupid again, since you cannot exchange life for itself. And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood. In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: ‘ if you get more stupid than me, you die!’

I like how he doesn’t see a need for some ultimate conclusion on the meaning of the statement… nothing irks me more then philosophers who get caught up in the meaningless questions. Even so, it seems he contemplates the statement long enough to expose it for what it is–and in doing so causes his reader to view the common and banal with a fresh perspective. And you wondered why I like this guy so much…

How to argue with an Athiest

Posted on January 27, 2008 by Joel

I found this article on Americanthinker.com and wanted to share a few potions of it.

So, assuming you are a theist, what do you say to the atheist who asks, “You don’t (chuckle) actually believe in God, do you (snicker)?”…

No matter what evidence you give, the supercilious atheist finds a way to dismiss it. To him, it is not the case that your evidence for God is valid but nevertheless is cancelled out by his superior evidence against God. No, in the atheist’s mind your evidence does not even count as evidence…

the atheist refuses to expand his mental universe by also believing in the transcendent things that the theist believes in: God, souls, angels and demons, for example. The atheist restricts himself to a sort of tunnel vision.

And this is where atheism becomes vulnerable. The atheist does not disbelieve in God because he has neutrally examined all the evidence, and drawn the proper conclusion that there is no God. On the contrary, the atheist radically misconstrues the plentiful evidence for God, and he does this because of his false worldview, which tells him that only the physical really exists. Before he has examined the evidence, the atheist thinks he knows that nothing non-physical actually exists, and this assumption governs how he responds to the evidence.

There is only one effective way to respond to the supercilious atheist’s question: Speak his language, the language of evidence and reasoning, of logic and proof… Say something like the following:

“I believe in God because that’s what the evidence shows. But before you try to debunk my evidence, we have to ask, what are your criteria for deciding whether a God exists, and how do you know that these criteria are correct?

So when the atheist asserts that there is no evidence that any miracle has occurred, ask him: “What sort of evidence for a miracle would you regard as being valid? And how do you know ahead of time that any miracle not validated by this type of evidence must not have occurred?”

This is only a short portion of the entire article; the author goes on to take you through almost an entire debate … focusing on the weaknesses of the typical atheist position. It is really a useful article for BOTH sides… atheist and theist alike.