House of Eratosthenes

I was given cause to think about that funny essay about the discovery of beer leading to the splitting-up between liberals and conservatives. What made me think of it was the story from out in Madison about a laundromat that serves beer. Yeeeeaahhh…

Now, here is where beer becomes a fascinating staple, carrying sociopolitical overtones far more important than those involved in simple tasty mildly-alcoholic carbonated beverages. Beer is a lodestar. We got some people running around, shooting their mouths off, voting and whatnot — who HATE MEN. They don’t admit this on a word-for-word basis. That is what makes the man-haters so dangerous. What you have to do, is listen to them recite the list of things that earn their disapproval, and then sift through all these things trying to find a common theme. And the common theme will be masculinity.

He isn’t in touch with his feelings. That soldier shot those insurgents when I don’t think he had to. He needs to have a gun in his house to make himself feel all big. He’s a redneck. He watches NASCAR. He drinks beer. He goes to Hooters and stares at waitresses in skimpy clothes. His car has a big engine. He eats red meat. He’s a cowboy. He, he, he.

The beer thing usually comes first. Where the vegan man-bashing hardcore feminists take over, the first thing they expunge is the beer. Therefore…where you find beer, overall you tend to find friendly people. I mean, generally speaking. In fact, where there is beer, it’s not too unusual for you to find other people who just want to escape the negativity.

So yeah, this looks like my kind of laundromat. Pretty cool.

On the subject of people telling you what to do and what not to do. Fascinating article in The View From 1776 about Misguided Christians and Liberals.

Some individual Christians, within Evangelicalism and within Catholicism, believe that society should be channeled into “correct” behavioral patterns by political edict.

Pope Benedict confronted this materialistic doctrine in his recent journey to Brazil. Variously known as liberation theology or the social gospel, the belief that the political state has the capacity, as well as the duty, to compel its citizens to follow certain ways of thinking and behavior, is not Christianity, but socialism.

I’ve been noticing this for awhile. With all the yelling going on, the notion of a divide between “conservatives” and “liberals” has been sprouting problems like zits on a teenager’s face. Conservatives…don’t want to “conserve.” You have cheapasses like me who drive little cars because we don’t like to pay for things we aren’t using. My ass is only so big, it doesn’t need a Lincoln Navigator. I’m not doing it for the public good, I’m doing it because I like to pay $30 to fill up my car instead of $50 or $60. That isn’t really conserving, that’s being cheap. When you talk about “conservatives,” most of them are like me. We skimp. That’s as close as we get to conserving anything.

Nor are our liberals liberating. Quite the opposite. They’re more about telling other people who they should respect, how they should live, what they should do, who should be fought, how intensely. Now if you come up with someone you know is up to no good, like Saddam Hussein, or some low-life thug who broke into your house to steal your…well, your beer…this is when liberals take on their live-and-let-live stuff. Ooh, maybe he was hungry. Saddam was not a threat to us. Sovereign nation, blah blah blah. The rest of us, who are at least making an attempt to play by the rules…there’s a mile-long laundry list of rules for us, courtesy of our liberals. In sum, liberals like to tell people what to do, provided those people have demonstrated the capacity and will to obey. All others can do as they please. Liberals like to decree things without conflict. What they want is a kingdom to rule without fighting to conquer it or to hold it.

This essay is very interesting, I find, because it shows how errant Christians end up in bed with secular liberals, fighting for a common cause without realizing they’re doing it. I would boil it down further by taking everyone who is making noise right now, about whatever…and splitting them up into four groups. Four groups of people who would, in turn, sign on to…

– We were put here by a Higher Power. If you do not follow certain rules, you negate the purpose that Higher Power had in mind for you when He put you here, and therefore contradict your very existence, so listen to me.
– We were put here by a Higher Power. If you tell me what to do, you negate the purpose that Higher Power had in mind for you when He put you — and me — here. I am fulfilling His will every bit as much as you are…so leave…me…alone.
– We were not put here by a Higher Power, we grew here just like a lump of mold on a loaf of bread. This whole business of a Higher Power is an ancient fairy tale devised by holy men in an age-gone-by so they could tell the peasants what to do, and I’ll not put up with your shenanigans. Leave me alone.
– We grew here like mold on bread, and now that the evolutionary process is complete, everyone needs to live their lives according to what I’ve decided. If they don’t, they’ll have to answer for it someday…to whom, I’m not sure. Still working on that.

The last of those four groups is the most delusional.

It seems to be the most prevalent. I’m entirely lost as to why this is. It seems logical to me that if we have a bunch of taboos that come from the notion a Supreme Intelligence placed us here, and in your mind you reject the notion of said Intelligence, therefore accepting the mold-on-bread axiom — the taboos fall away. They must. And there can be no taboos filling the void.

But in my forty years on the planet, I have yet to see an atheist sign on to the following: “Now that evolution has put us here, what do we do. Don’t ask me. You decide that for yourself, let nothing stand in your way, and respect no limits.”

Haven’t seen that once. Our secular people, the loudest among them especially — they all seem to have suspiciously long lists of things that are decent, and demand approval from all, and things that are not and do not.

In the animal kingdom, it’s perfectly alright for a lioness to chase down a zebra. But the human race is different. Nothing, no act of social interaction, no living object in humanity, can simply…be. There’s always something to be deplored. Or applauded. Usually deplored.

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon Perhaps it started with the first man to codify the rules of socialism, mentioned in the article itself, Henri de Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon envisaged the reorganization of society with an elite of philosophers, engineers and scientists leading a peaceful process of industrialization tamed by their “rational” Christian-Humanism. His advocacy of a “New Christianity” — a secular humanist religion to replace the defunct traditional religions — was to have scientists as priests. This priestly task was actually taken up by two of his followers — Barthelemy-Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) and Saint-Amand Bazard (1791-1832) — who infected the whole movement with their bizarre mysticism and ritual.
:
Although Saint-Simon was one of the first to identify the process of “industrialization” as it was happening in Europe, his concern with the laboring classes was more reserved, although noting the “unnaturalness” of unemployment. In general, Saint-Simon’s bourgeois elitism distinguished him from the later more “labor-orientated” socialist thinkers — notably those radicalized by the 1848 Revolution, such as Blanc and Proudhon. Indeed, Saint-Simon’s enthusiasm for the “spontaneous harmony” of the “organism” of industrial society has led some to claim that he was really a Classical Liberal in disguise. The famed Saint-Simonian critique on private property was due more to his followers (notably Enfantin) than himself. But Saint-Simon was clearly a dirigiste in economic policy matters.

That means, the government says what happens and what doesn’t happen. You got too much money, that other guy has none, you need to fork some over. Opposite of laissez-faire.

Secular-humanism…hostility to God. Man in charge of man. It leads to the men in charge, naturally, telling everyone else what to do. How could it not?

But if the promises were good, God’s Throne, once He was unseated from it, would remain empty. There would be no priestly scientists rushing in to fill the void. You ask a roomful of passionate atheists what it is they hate about religion, and nowadays the word that keeps bubbling up is “oppression.” And nobody ever seems to learn — socialism, in the eighteenth century as well as in the twenty-first, is all about oppression. That priest we just burned at the stake, he told you what to do because he said it was the word of God. I’m telling you what to do because it’s the word of ME.

I wish people demanded more out of their secular-humanists. We get rid of God so we don’t have anyone telling anybody else what to do…seems to me, if that’s the purpose, we ought to be coming up short in the “envisag[ing] the reorganization of society” department.

It never seems to work out that way. Always, it seems, there’s an entire layer of secularists pulling long cheat-sheets out of their pockets, covered with new rules for everyone top-to-bottom…pronouncing, “now that we got rid of that God guy, here are my ideas about how a society should function.” And of course if you don’t want to follow those rules, you should be forced to.

By whose authority?

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Memo For File XLIIMonday, May 21st, 2007

Memo For File XLII
Monday, May 21st, 2007