The Tower of Babel…

In preparation for my religion class, I found myself reading through Genesis in an attempt to compare the motives of Adam and Eve’s ingestion of the fruit from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil to the motivations of the post-flood builders of the Tower of Babel.

Now, I’m going to be honest about the fact that I have never actually read the biblical text regarding the tower until now, so it came as a great surprise to me when I found but a couple of verses saying something about God’s perception that if all people had a common language nothing would be impossible for them (if anyone actually got through that god-awfully long sentence in one try, congratulations). Missing were the stories about how the people wanted to reach Heaven to bitchslap God, and present was the notion that the people wanted to give themselves a name. Let me go ahead and type out the verse from my new revised standard edition Bible, just to make sure I’m not horribly misrepresenting the text:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its tip in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole Earth”. –Genesis 11.4

God proceeds to foil their plot at a unified nation by mixing up their languages.

I guess having never read this before or heard it really spoken about in the context of the scripture, I have difficulty understanding God’s motive in this instance. If someone out there has a greater grasp of this, please feel free to comment.

My disappearance…

My recent abandonment of the blogging world can really be summed up easily by acknowledging the fact that I have indeed become entirely too mellow. I’ve never cared about the important things(grades etc.) but before I had always found time to question the completely meaningless aspects of life. Unfortunately I have begun to even not care about the unimportant things(ie: celebrity facial hair patterns), but no more, for as I am typing this garbage out I pledge to reinvigorate my distaste for hippies, liberals, and people so short that they almost certainly don’t have souls.

To kick this rededication off I am going to compile a comprehensive list of the ten worst people ever.

10. Larry from Three’s Company. The man had all of the properties of a used car salesman without any of the marginal benifits(having a job and such). All he ever accomplished was finding a way at least every 30 minutes to keep Jack from getting action from a hot(by 70s standards) lady. Larry resides in the 9th level of hell.

9. Jim Carey. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that he is on the current SNL cast(which I’ve heard is horrible, though I haven’t watched it in a couple years).

8. Osama bin Laden. When labeling Osama(Osa for short as his friends call him) as a bad person, most would point to his acts of terrorism. Unfortunately, because of this “terrorism” most people overlook the true evil of Osama. His immense wealth isn’t due at all to his being an heir to an oil fortune. Quite the contrary, it is a little known fact that Osama was the middle brother in Hanson. The evil of this speaks for itself.

7. John Stewart. Most of my peers won’t get this one…because they’re stupid. John Stewart isn’t funny. He’s a C-list comedian with better than average writers on the Daily Show. For those of you who would consider yourself fans of Stewart beyond the Daily Show, I have a question. How long did you have to camp out to get the first tickets to Brokeback Mountain in your city?

6.  Geraldo Rivera. Grade-A Asshat, enough said.

5. The younger daughter from Family Ties. Let’s just say that she didn’t really fit in with the Keaton family.

Older daughter:    Youner daughter:

4. Keyshawn Johnson. If being named Keyshawn wasn’t enough to get him on the list, this “possession” reciever for my beloved Dallas Cowboys is a slow loudmouth who we somehow found it advantageous to trade Joey Galloway(who had a career season this year) for.

3. The new Pope, just because following up “John Paul: The Deuce” is a tough act.

2. Mack Brown. The fact that he lucked out getting Vince Young makes him a great coach? Hardly. This man is notorious for two things: being a somewhat effeminate head coach and losing to Oklahoma, both of which I expect to be displayed in full force in 2006.

1. Large truck people in general. Unless you make several hundred thousand dollars distributing illegal substances, there is absolutely no reason for a college student to drive a truck bigger than my house. You suck at life, every one of you.

A response to C.S. Lewis…

To christen the new blog I have decided to post a paper I wrote for my English class taken last fall in which I confront C.S. Lewis’s arguments made in his essay “The Poison of Subjectivism”. In case your curious, this was my only non-A in the class(a B+), for the cited reason of my overuse of rhetoric. Enjoy.

The Poison of Subjectivism: A Response

In “The Poison of Subjectivism”, C.S. Lewis tackles the idea that morality is not something dictated by mankind and his feelings, but rather dictated by a constant moral compass, objective across all humans. This is why, he claims, that there are any universal applications of morality at all. After all, were there not legitimate standards for how we measure morality then why would such things as murder and rape be considered immoral, considering that in most case they are merely an attempt by the perpetrator to pursue the life, liberty and happiness portrayed as so important in the Declaration of Independence. Lewis affirms his idea that true morality cannot be subjective by establishing the argument that societies which utilize widespread subjective morality have actually been empirically proven to be immoral by practical reason. Lewis’s flagship example for this argument is Nazi Germany. He argues that subjective morality was responsible for the genocide that resulted from the Nazi’s rule in the 1930s and 1940s. According to Lewis, it is the dictation of popular morality by the sentiment and feelings of people that was responsible for these atrocities, that they were allowed to happen because of the flawed moral ground taken by the Nazis of Germany during that time period. Throughout this essay, the most significant and reoccurring theme of Lewis is that morality is something which cannot change, that it is absolute. He extends this with his argument which separates true morality and false morality with the distinction of whether the morality is found by practical reason, or whether the morality is justified by personal feeling and sentiment. In responding to Lewis’s essay, I would present the argument that practical reason, as Lewis defines it, is based entirely on sentiment and feeling, and thus that there is no difference between subjective morality and true morality, and furthermore all morality is subjective in nature.

Throughout the essay, Lewis bases his entire list of claims against moral subjectivism with his claim that true morality is based on practical reason, not sentiment or personal feeling. Reading through the essay a first time(skimming it to be honest) I was left with one burning question regarding Lewis’s claims, what the hell is practical reason? In an attempt to answer my question I went back through the essay reading more closely and found one line that directly confronted it, “By practical reason I mean our judgment of good and evil”, on page 100. Our judgment of good and evil? Lewis’s alternative to moral subjectivism, his escape from having us guide morality with our feelings and sentiments, is that we should use our judgment of good and evil? According to dictionary.com, judgment is defined as “the formation of an opinion after consideration or deliberation”, a definition which establishes Lewis’s all important “judgment” (our savior from subjectivism) as nothing more than opinion. Can we (or even a great thinker such as Lewis) realistically perpetuate the idea that the opinions of individuals are completely void of personal feelings? No, of course not. Whether or not we as humans want to acknowledge it, most of the decisions we make on a day to day basis are not objective. I did not choose to write over this essay because I felt an uncanny moral obligation to do so, but because I felt I could more adequately(and hopefully interestingly) respond to this essay than the other options. The concept of mankind making judgments completely objectively is a joke. Whether conscious or not, none of our decisions(or more importantly our opinions) allow us to forego our own personal experiences in finding them. Lawyers know this. When selecting jurors for a trial, a lawyer tries to pick those which would have comparably favorable experiences regarding the crime for which his client is accused. For example, let us hypothetically assume that a man is on trial for raping a woman. When selecting jurors, if given the option between a woman who is a rape victim herself or a man who doesn’t know anybody who’s ever been sexually abused, the defendant’s attorney is going to pick the man with no experience of rape. Why? Both of these people are likely to believe that rape is bad, and Lewis would have you believe that would be enough to make them equals as jurors, but despite this agreement on the heinous nature of rape, it is a near given that the two individuals will view its severity in different lights. The first individual would likely view rape as the most heinous of crimes, that to be raped is a fate worse than death. The second would certainly agree that rape is bad, but would someone who has had no experience at all relating to it really be likely to consider it a worse crime than murder? No. Lewis might argue in this situation that a moral constant has been struck, that rape is bad because in their judgment, both jurors thought so, but in reality these two jurors would have struck no moral agreement because they disagree on the severity of a moral breech.

In Lewis’s essay, he demands that objective judgment be obtained to deliver a verdict of morality, and that all humanity should be capable of using this objective judgment in exactly the same way. The flaw in this argument is that objective judgment is not something possible in humans. At best, from a Christian perspective, we can act as God would, a God that describes himself as selfish, and who is clearly subject to the same emotions as humans. At best, we are governed by our emotions.