Blinks: Economist consensus on Christmas, NT Wright on Salvation and Eschatology, Econtalk on Climate Change

• Economists don’t think Christmas is inefficient. They usually make the point that presents have intangible benefits for people, even though recipients of presents could satisfy their preferences better with cash. Bryan Caplan is more suspicious.
  
• A debate between NT Wright and James White on whether the apostle Paul believed in salvation by grace alone (solo gracia). Interpretations in popular Christianity take Paul as saying that works don’t matter. NT Wright thinks he was referring only to older Jewish traditions, not good works in general.
  
  NT Wright represents some version of The New Perspective on Paul.
  
• More NT Wright, this time on heaven and hell.
  
• Cognitive Strain Repost: Tyler Cowen thinks everyone is religious and I don’t think they have to be.
  
• Econtalk podcast with Judith Curry on Climate Change. My take on the interview is that she’s reasonable, but struggled a bit in explaining things in lay terms.

We can give something up to get more of it

When a lie sounds good people often believe the lie, especially when it doesn’t really effect them personally.

A couple clear examples comes from libertarians and anti-war advocates. Libertarians will often say that sacrificing liberty for the sake of liberty is absurd. Anti-war advocates will say war for the sake of preventing war is absurd. They certainly sound absurd if you don’t, and never will, think more than 5 seconds about it. It is exactly the contrasting terms in these slogans that make them sound somewhat profound.

The truth is that it is quite possible to sacrifice a little of something to prevent losing a lot more.

Libertarians often like ex-post corrective policies – if I steal from you I have to give it back with an extra fine. That’s trading liberty for the sake of liberty. But ex-anti preventive policies trade a little liberty to prevent a lot more being taken away. A camera in every house might help liberty, but just because the liberty-liberty tradeoff exists does not mean that every possible case is one. Even having a government at all is a liberty-liberty tradeoff.

It is perfectly possible that starting a small war that costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars could prevent a big war that costs hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Of course, the pro-war advocates seem to think that by simply saying that the tradeoff theoretically exists, that’s the tradeoff we’re making. It is hard to see that as the case, but if you’re going to be against the war, I don’t think it is a thoughtful response to simply assert that the war-war tradeoff is absurd. It isn’t.

Blinks: Jeff Miron Video on Drug Prohibition, Doug Wilson interviews Natural Revelation Advocate, Peter Thiel on Luck, Bryan Caplan and Charles Murray

•  Jeff Miron Video on Drug Prohibition. He’s factual and logical.
  
• Doug Wilson talks to J. Budziszewski about natural law and natural revelation. He seems to be a moral intuitionist.
  
• Peter Thiel: You are not a lottery ticket.
  
• Bryan Caplan and Charles Murray on Selfish Reasons to have more Kids. Murray mostly agrees with Caplan, but where he disagrees on children without a male role model contradicts Bryan’s evidence.

How to not Seek

The failure to seek and understand is a basic, universal, moral failure. It is very serious, so it is important to note the ways that people don’t seek.

I think about two different ways -- avoiding and pretending.

Avoiding means ignoring your basic urge for meaning. It is filling your life with stories, games, and consumption so that you don’t have to think about basic things. It is lets eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It is making fun into the good. It is seeking the maximization of sensational pleasure. It is living for the next thrill. It is not living the examined life. It is believing whatever your culture believes without critical thought. It is ignoring reason.

Pretending means not seeking but acting like you are. It is generally not pretending for others, but pretending to convince yourself that you’re a seeker. It is examining your life, but lying about the results. It is open-mindedness about some possibilities, and closed-mindedness about others. It is bias. It is a conclusion first way of thinking. It is examining whatever your culture believes, only to find better reasons for why what you’ve always believed in the first place is true. It is abusing reason.

The Backwards way Paternalistic Drug Prohibitionists Think

Your child scrapes his knee doing something he shouldn’t be doing on his bike. How do you respond?  Nobody I know believes that the appropriate response is to punish the child. But this is exactly what paternalists do with drug prohibition. Drugs are dangerous and bad, therefore, lets make them more dangerous and bad by having men with guns come after you. Parents reserve punishment for activities that don’t punish themselves. So even from a “government know what’s best” standpoint, drug prohibition is completely backward.

The reason drug prohibitionists punish drug offenses, oftentimes severely, is because they believe it will discourage drug use. That’s fine, but minimally they have to recognize the tradeoff between that making drugs more dangerous. The death sentence will discourage drug use too, just ask Singapore, but it is hard to ignore the fact that you’re also killing people. In light of this clear-cut tradeoff, why do drug prohibitionists believe that drugs aren’t dangerous enough? It is easy to imagine that without drug prohibition everyone would become druggies, but that picture doesn’t get past the edges of their skulls. The actual evidence is that drug prohibition at most discourages a modest amount of drug use. They have to make the case for why drug users irrationally ignore the costs of the drugs themselves, but the evidence is that they irrationally ignore the prohibitory costs of drugs.

Consider a few options: A) drugs are too dangerous B) drugs aren’t dangerous enough C) drugs are just dangerous enough. The reasonable answer is A. After all, that’s the starting argument of most drug prohibitionists – talk about how bad or dangerous drugs are as if that implies we ought to make them more dangerous. It doesn’t imply that. If drugs are too dangerous, how does making it a crime help? In what world are drugs more dangerous? The world where drugs ruin your life or the world where drugs ruin your life and you’re a criminal for doing them?

Here’s the weirdest thing – drug prohibitionists want a greater added danger to more dangerous drugs. It seems if marijuana is not dangerous enough, then they would want to make it significantly more dangerous to put it in the same league as cocaine, meanwhile cocaine users should be left alone. If there is some sort of danger / discouragement sweet spot, where the costs of added danger outweigh the benefits of discouraged use, harsher penalties for harsher drugs is the wrong way of getting it. Rather, we should want harsher penalties for milder drugs.

Contrary to the make bad things worse way of thinking, we should want to reduce the harm that drugs do, even though it will likely encourage their use. If we could make sure heroine users are using clean needles we should. If we can reduce the nausea, vomiting, and itching, heroine causes, we should. If we can reduce the possibility of fatal overdose, we should. And we should want to make drug treatment more available, even though it effectively lowers the price of drug use, and we should expect more people to do drugs as a result.

What I’m ignoring: economists have a different, more rational argument for some kind of drug policy. They give externality arguments. To the extent that the cost of drugs are internalized, no public policy is required. Most of the harm of drugs is internalized, so these externality arguments (however good they are), imply a much less harsh drug policy than the popular rational which tries to price the internal costs of drugs with public policy.

Bryan Caplan on Concerned Tolerance

Here is Bryan Caplan at his best. Provocative but right on the money.

Guns cause suicides, and suicides are bad.  But despite this risk, guns also have major upsides.

Bryan is pushing a Taboo Tradeoff. Never ask a parent if they would buy a less safe car seat, and never ask society if they should buy fewer school shootings, or suicides in this case.

$89 Billion per year in Revenue for Legalizing Drugs

Libertarian Miron from the libertarian Cato institute estimates $42 billion in savings from enforcement of drug laws, and $47 billion in additional revenue from taxing drugs at roughly the rate of alcohol. That means $89 billion a year in savings from enforcement plus revenue from taxing.

How much trust do I put into the study? The way I think about it is this: Jeffrey Miron is a libertarian who works for the libertarian Cato institute, so I’d normally mentally adjust the estimate downward because libertarians like reasons why drug prohibition is bad. But in this case, I happen to find Jeffrey Miron in particular intellectually honest. He’s not a fundamentalist libertarian, and he typically acknowledges evidence that isn’t libertarian at all. Drug laws are also his specialty. Moreover, the report also, “assumes that the demand for drugs would not shift” (reasons on pg. 8). To the extent that laws actually are discouraging drug use, which is a very real possibility, his estimate is too low. I also don’t think that rigid nature of the evidence leaves him much play to skew the evidence according to libertarian biases. Drug use is what it is, enforcement costs are what they are, and the only thing he has to play with is how much drugs are discouraging drug use, which he leaves at 0!

In light of that, I take Jeffrey Miron’s estimates as a good ball-park figure. In the scope of things, $89 billion isn’t going to fundamentally change anything. It is a good chunk, but when people talk about taxing drugs they oftentimes make believe that this is going to pay down the debt, or pay for some major government program like universal health care. It isn’t. Not even close. Total government revenue is $5.5 trillion (including state and local, since Jeff included them in his estimate). That’s about 1.5% increase in tax revenue.

Another thing: we should see this kind of increase in tax revenue as a good thing. Hypothetically, this increase in tax revenue could be given back to tax payers, but that isn’t going to happen. Government is going to be the one spending the additional revenue. Isn’t that a bad thing from a libertarian point of view? I don’t think so. Most of the things that government creates aren’t bad (except perhaps offensive defense spending). It is that the resources being employed have higher valued alternative uses. Health care, education, and care for the elderly are all valuable. But the relevant question is what is the opportunity cost? When government taxes a market, the government grows and the market shrinks. But in the case of the additional revenue from drug legalization, it isn’t taxing an already existing market, it is taxing a market that formerly did not even exist. So without regard for the other costs and benefits of drug prohibition/legalization, this is free money, and an extra marginal benefit for legalizing drugs.

Islam on Knowledge of God Inclusivism

Consider this Islam website:

Is 'Allah' the same god of the Jews and Christians?
Yes. The word in Hebrew came from "El" and in Arabic from "Elh". The word for "god" (note the small 'g' in English) is "Elah". Compare this to "Eloi" and "Eli" in the New Testament.

It seems like Christians should take this mindset. Monotheiststic religions don’t disagree very much on who God is. He is the good, powerful, all-knowing, holy, immaterial, creator. Sounds like the same God to me.

Christians generally don’t take this view. They want to be both salvation exclusivist and knowledge of God exclusivist. One way they maintain that Islam knows a different God then them is because of the name they use. Of course, “allah” isn’t a name, and my understanding is the the Old Testament used “Allah”, as the linguistic expression of the English “God”. Christians will claim a name like Jehovah or Jesus in order to keep other religions out of their club. But what is in a name? If I describe your friend Brad to a tee – I describe his attributes and who he is in the most basic sense, but I don’t know his name, don’t I still know your friend?

Another way is Christians will describe a God of particular deeds; like parting the red sea or turning water into wine. Again, knowing the event doesn’t mean you know God, and not knowing the event doesn’t mean you don’t know God. Presumably, God has worked in many ways that aren’t recorded in scripture, does that mean bible readers don’t know the true God? Hasn’t many people been witness to the deeds of God but still not knowing him. Minimally, creation would be a significant deed that many don’t recognize.

Perhaps the most common way for Christians to maintain knowledge of God exclusivism is by claiming a personal relationship. I’m not questioning whether they in fact have a personal relationship, but in what sense do they that isn’t the same way other religions have a personal relationship with God. Personal relationship is one of these undefined terms that sounds like they have daily telephone conversations with him, but they don’t. It sounds like they bring God grocery shopping with them, but only in the same sense that any monotheist brings God grocery shopping with them.

It seems to me that a personal relationship means I know you and you know me. There is no question whether God knows Muslims and Christians. Do Muslims know God? It seems so since they describe him quite well; the good, powerful, all knowing, holy, immaterial, creator. One can’t say that how we know God is through a personal relationship, when a personal relationship normally means a mutual knowledge of each other.

If God is not generally revealed then non-believers have an excuse for not knowing him. If they’ve never heard of Jehovah, or heard of the parting of the red sea, or had access to a personal relationship, then they have a pretty great excuse. If there is no reason to believe in a God, and much less know him, then they have a pretty great excuse. Christians believe that all will stand before God in judgment, what do they think God will say? “ I know you couldn’t know me even if you wanted to, but you’ll suffer punishment for it anyway.”

It seems like the root of this is Christian disgust for Islam in general. Christians find the Islamic religion offensive. I don’t think their judgments are sober. One might try to soften the bite of the knowledge of God inclusivism by reaffirming salvation exclusivism. Simply knowing God is not what brings salvation. They’re still sinners according to the New Testament, and they’re dead in their sins without redemptive revelation found in the gospel. By reaffirming the unique redemptive claims of Christianity, Christians might be able to give up some ground to the other monotheistic religions who have access to the general revelation of God.

The Views of Trinity and Oneness

This is how I see the various views on Christology. The first two on top are within typical evangelical Christian orthodoxy because they both claim that Jesus is God. There is some dispute about how heretical the other view is, but my impression is that when they’re talking about something as fundamental as the nature of God, it’s pretty serious.

What happens a lot in this debate is a confusing of what the other side is saying. Trinity is not saying polytheism, and Oneness is not saying that Jesus is not God. They will also try to get the other side to go down the road to their more radical counter-parts. Perhaps they think that their debate opponents haven’t fully realized what they’re saying, but the philosophy itself is or leads to their more radical counter-parts. And one of the things that I’m trying to say with this Venn Diagram is that trinity and oneness are distinct from their radical counter-parts. There is no road from one to the other.

One way of looking at it is that Trinitarians and Oneness people don’t actually disagree on Jesus or the Holy Spirit. What they dispute is whether the God is the Father in a synonymous way, or of the Father in his entirety is part of God, but distinct from other parts.

Trinitarians also affirm that the trinity existed before creation. They will oftentimes use this to explain the pluralistic language in which God is referred to in the Genesis creation story. Of course, the Israelites knew the story and they did not affirm the trinity. Did the writer of Genesis not explain this? Was it just a big mystery to them why God is referred to in a pluralistic sense? A mystery which was only revealed to the author of Genesis? Wouldn’t their understanding of it just be polytheism? The rest of the Old Testament is referred to God in the singular. Why the change?

Oneness people tend to affirm that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created not creators. They appeared at a point in time. This is reconciled with still being God by being created not ex-nihilo, but created out of God. But if Jesus was not creator, in what sense was he God in the Oneness view? He didn’t have omniscience or eternality. According to popular theism, he was good in that he maintained moral perfection. But in their view of the afterlife, all maintain moral perfection, so that doesn’t make one into God. He wasn’t unchanging. He wasn’t immaterial.

In fact if we want to attribute God with the property of unchanging, then how did he change into a man? Is God only partly unchanging? Trinitarians can say that since Jesus pre-existed creation, that he never changed. But Jesus became flesh. To become flesh from non-flesh is to change. Jesus changed from alive to dead in the crucifixion, and then alive again in resurrection.

When we begin listing attributes of God, they all belong to the father. So in the Trinitarian view in what way is the father not entirely God?

Jesus said that he and the father are one, but what he must have meant is that they are one God, but he and the father are distinct parts. Jesus is not the father, and the father is not Jesus in the Trinitarian view, even if they are both God.

A lot of problems.

Bryan Caplan on Atheists should read the Bible and Economic Critics should read Mankiw

Bryan Caplan finished his blog post today with this fortune cookie,

Every atheist should read the Bible cover to cover - and every critic of economics should read Mankiw cover to cover.

Are these two examples really the same?

The bible is popular, but it isn’t the best case for theism. The bible doesn’t even try to prove God, it assumes him, “in the beginning God created…” Greg Mankiw’s textbook is one articulation of the best case for economic principles, but it isn’t popular.

So if atheists should read the bible cover to cover, then every critic of economics should watch Bill O Reilly from beginning to end.

And if every economics textbook should read Mankiw cover to cover, then every atheist might want to read Augustine, Aquinas, Plantinga, or Owen Anderson’s book The Clarity of God’s Existence.

New Testament Passages on Hades and Gehenna

Passages which the King James Version translate the Greek word Hades into hell, followed by the New International Version's translation:

Matthew 11:23
"And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell."
”And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.”

Matthew 16:18
"Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
”on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”

Luke 10:15
"And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shall be thrust down to hell."
”And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.”

Luke 16:23
"In hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments."
”In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.”

Acts 2:31
”He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.”
”Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay.”

Rev. 1:18
”I am he that liveth and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell [hades] and of death.”
”I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.”

Revelation 6:8
"And behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
”I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him.”

Revelation 20:13, 14
"And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell  delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged, every man, according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire; this is the second death."
“The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.”

 

The King James verson also translates this usage of the word Hades to grave.

1 Corinthians 15:55
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
”Where, O death (hades) , is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"

---

Here are the passages which the King James Version translates the Greek word Gehenna into Hell, followed by the New International Version:

Hebrews 10:26-27
“For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.”
”If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.”

Matthew 5:21, 22
"Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be amenable to the judges; but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be amenable to the judges; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the high council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire."
”You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

Matthew 5:29-30
“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
”If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”

Matthew 10:28
“Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
”Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.|

Matthew 18:9
It is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire."
“…It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.”

Matthew 23:15
”Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”
”Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”

Mat 23:33
“Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”
”You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

Mark 9:43-44
"If thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell. And if thine eye offend thee pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the Kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched."
”If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.”
(NIV Footnote: Mark 9:43 Some manuscripts … 44 where / " 'their worm does not die, / and the fire is not quenched.')

Luke 12:5
"Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell.”
”But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”

James 3:6
"So is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell."
”The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

It is important to distinguish between these two Greek words, Hades and Gehenna. Hades has always meant a temporary state of the dead before resurrection. In the eschatological plot of the New Testament, resurrection is followed by a final state either the Kingdom of God which comes out of heaven or Gehenna (the lake of fire).

Tyler Cowen on the Universality of Religion

Around the 40 minute mark, Tyler Cowen:

“I think all people hold onto some set of propositions which they do not subject to rational scrutiny in the same way that they submit other propositions to rational scrutiny. Furthermore, I think people use those propositions to socially bond with other people, and they tell themselves self-deceiving stories about how the whole picture fits together. In that sense of religious, I think all human beings, including myself, are religious.”

Tyler Cowen poses the question that is the beginning of philosophy: is the foundation on which we build our worldviews arbitrary? Tyler confesses that he begins with common-sense moral propositions which he is unable to justify (killing babies is wrong). Given one set of assumptions, the world is going to look completely different than given another set of assumptions. And if our most basic assumptions -- our philosophies – our lenses – are arbitrary, then how can we say anything? Nothing is clear. Nihilism won.

The alternative is that some things are clear. We can subject basic beliefs to rational scrutiny. We can test them for meaning. If one view is meaningless, that is, involves contradictions, then its contrary is the only meaningful view and the only possibly true view.

This assumes that rational scrutiny is how we determine what is true. This assumption prevails because reason is self-attesting. It cannot be questioned because it makes questioning possible. It cannot be doubted because one can’t doubt what they can’t question. Reason then is certain.

I think we ought to apply reason as a test for meaning to one foundational belief – something is eternal. If nothing is eternal then all came from nothing. Something from nothing is a meaningless proposition because these two are completely different. Being and non-being is the most basic distinction that can be made. And to make them the same at the point where one comes from the other, is to claim a contradiction. As previously said, if one view necessarily involves a contradiction, then its contrary is the only meaningful and true possibility. Something is eternal.

IGM Experts on Low-Skilled Immigrants

Here is the most recent IGM Economic Expert’s Panel answers. They were picked to be a representative sample of economists.

 

Non-economists tend to misunderstand the tradeoffs associated with low-income immigration. Immigrants are a net good for the economy. They raise the general standard of living of citizens. The tradeoff: those who closely compete with foreigners lose out. Creative destruction in economic growth has always been a 2-steps-forward 1-step-back kind of process. What we need to remember is that the people who lose out to foreigners are also receiving the gains from consuming other foreigner’s outputs. Protecting from foreign competition helps workers more than it helps consumers, who are by the way, also workers.

Of course we know that overall we’re moving forward by trading with foreigners (whether they’re immigrants or not), because total production has gone up.

Definition of Terrorism

If you Google Terrorism, you will find this definition

The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

Ask yourself, what enforced legislation and taxation? I mean ultimately – maybe proximately fines or other forms of punishment will be used to enforce government rules. But ultimately, violence has to be the motor that keeps government wheel turning. Without violence, lawbreakers could simply choose not to suffer punishment -- No thank you, I’d rather not pay that fine. You’re going to suspend my driver’s license? No, I don’t think so. Taxes? I’ve had a tough year, I don’t think I’ll pay them this time.

Now ask yourself, do lawmakers ever use legislation and taxation in pursuit of political aims? My economics textbook says that the reason we have farm subsidies because farmers lobby for them. Politicians give into the lobby because it is aligned with their political aims.

This is not unusual. Special interests play a role in every political system, and politicians give into them because it buys them votes, or monetary donations which are then used to campaign. There is dispute about how strong a role special interests play in elections, but pretty much everybody understands that they exist.

Even the more idealistic vision of politics use legislation and taxation in order to achieve political aims. The reason people expect politicians to pass the legislation they want is because it is aligned with their political aims. If they don’t pass the laws we want, we vote them out! At least that’s what people tell me. So the expectation is that lawmakers will use legislation as a means to their political ends.

I think you see what I’m saying – clearly, Google’s definition of terrorism is wrong.

Paul’s Response to Universalist Robin Parry: God Creates for the Purpose of Destruction

Here is a Rethinking Hell Podcast on evangelical universalism.

The guest, Robin Parry, regards it as peculiar for God to create human beings for the purpose of destroying them. It has always seemed to me that Paul answered this question very directly:

"One of you will say to me: 'Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will' But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?

What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory."

-Romans 9:19-23

This might seem morally repulsive from a traditionalist view – God creates people just to torture them and all the ones he saved are supposed to give him more glory for that than if he had just not made them in the first place? From an annihilationist view, this doesn’t seem morally repulsive at all. In destruction, the objects of God’s wrath are brought back to the same place God made them – nothing.

The True Meaning of Christmas is…

There is no true meaning of Christmas because Christmas doesn’t exist apart from our minds. The true meaning of Christmas isn’t Jesus, or paganism, or Santa Clause, or charity. Christmas is a day that people invented meanings to. Non of these inventions came from reality. The sign is not the reality. The ritual is not the reality. That doesn’t mean that rituals are bad. It is okay to enact a ritual in comemorance of a reality, it is not okay to make the ritual into the reality and then get into all kinds of heated debates with people about what the ritual really means.

Blinks: Evil in Plain Sight, Resurrection of Jesus Debate, and Demagogue Theory of Minimum Wage

• Bryan Caplan asks, what are the evils in plain sight?
  
• Also, Bryan Caplan’s phase in demagogue theory of minimum wage.
  
• Matt Yglesias on why you shouldn’t give money to a fancy college
  
• We as a Society do not Exist (The Freeman)
  
• The Resurrection Debate: Crossan and Borg vs. White and Renihan

Knowledge of God inclusivism and Salvation exclusivism

When we ask whether Christianity is a religiously exclusivist faith; that is, claims to be the one true religion, that answer has to be yes. But there is a sense in which Christians have become too exclusive. There is some exclusivity that popular Christianity has adopted that I don’t think is historic.

The sense in which Christianity is not exclusivist is that God is generally revealed in creation. Paul wrote to the Romans,

for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world, by the things made being understood, are plainly seen, both His eternal power and Godhead - to their being inexcusable

When Paul visited Athens he made one of the unknown Athenian Gods into his known God in order to persuade them – saying that we know him because in him we live, move and have our being. This is recorded in Acts.

For Paul, God is not an exclusivist God. Religions that claim an infinite, powerful, just, and good creator have discovered the one true God. Popular Christianity undermines this by claiming that one must know the God of a particular name and deeds. According to them, if you don’t know Jehovah, the God that delivered the Israelites, then you don’t know God. Moreover, they will say that the only way we know God is through Jesus or scripture, rather than being generally revealed in creation – to their being inexcusable for not knowing him.

So is Christianity truly inclusivist because anyone of any religion can know him without knowing scripture? Not quite. Though it is inclusivist where the knowledge of God is concerned, where salvation is concerned it is exclusivist. The gospels make it quite clear that only through Jesus are Christians saved. Man was dead in his sin, but Jesus is the redemptive revelation that brings them back to life. Eternal life will be had only by those who claim Jesus.

So if a Muslim sitting with a Christian says, “I believe in the one infinite, powerful, holy, good, just, creator God” – the Christian should say, “me too! But have you heard about the means through which he has given us eternal life?”

Jerry Wall’s on Purgatory for Protestants

Here is Dr. Jerry Walls on his protestant defense of Purgatory.

He outlines four possible answers to how sinful people can die and go to heaven where nothing unholy can be. I would frame the possible answers differently from how he does:

1. We don't die imperfect. Our yoke is easy and our burden is light, it is not difficult to live the moral life. New bodies aren't necessary to purify moral evil, but to rid the world of natural evil (no more tripping down the stairs). No man was perfect, but some men would become perfect before their death. The path is narrow and few will find it.

2. We die imperfect, and God whippidy-snip perfects us spiritually. Walls offers it as a possible answer, but explains how it conflicts with the free-will solution to moral evil. If moral evil is necessary for free-will, then God is undermining that by making us perfect against our will – without our cooperation. I think he can leverage his argument beyond just free will. Any  answer to the problem of why God would create moral evil requires some greater good to be achieved, even if it is not free will. If God can whippidy-snip perfect us, then the period of moral evil doesn’t make sense.

#2 and #3 are not mutually exclusive.

3. We die imperfect, and God whippidy-snip perfects us physically. One unexamined assumption Will makes is that everlasting life is had spiritually rather than physically. He seems to think we die and go to heaven rather than we die and are physically resurrected on the last day. If you hold the resurrection view, then it is possible that while our lack of holiness is solely a physical matter. It makes sense then that we are given new bodies, which when inhabited by reborn spirits, reach holiness.

4. We die imperfect, and we are not perfected. This view sees the continuation of sin and imperfection on into eternity.

5. Jerry Wall’s view: We die imperfect, we are sentenced to purgatory through which we are perfected. God perfects us but not in a whippidy-snip sort of way, but in a long grueling process sort of way. I award him extra thought points because if he were right, protestants would never see it. Protestants hate the idea of purgatory. This means that the fact that basically nobody agrees with him is not because he’s obviously wrong (in general, if nobody agrees with you you should be very skeptical of that belief, but adjust the other way for beliefs that people just don’t like).

That’s why it is imperative for Jerry to recite the major difference between his view of purgatory and the historic Catholic version. Purgatory is redemptive, not punitive. As such, you can not buy your way out of the process of being perfected.

Chris Date on whether Hell Persuades

I got into a talk with Christ Date from the Rethinking Hell Facebook group. He doesn’t believe that anyone professes the Christian Faith because of hell.

I do not think such a person exists. I don't think there's anybody who goes from (a) disbelief that God exists, Jesus saves, etc., then (b) is threatened with hell, which (c) causes them to believe.

I'm not convinced that there is any person who, upon being convinced that there is no threat of hell, would cease to profess belief. IOW, I don't think there's anyone for whom hell is the difference-maker.

For me it seems fear mongering is a form of propaganda which time has tested and shown to be very effective. I don’t know why fear mongering about hell wouldn’t work.

It is true; however, that churches do not have many people who’s salvation story goes something like, "I didn’t believe in any of that Jesus crap, but then someone told me about hell and I changed my mind.”

But that’s not how any fear propaganda works. It’s more subtle. It is more like communicating, “if you’re wrong the costs are so high that you should believe that I’m right.” With hell, fear mongering seems to subconsciously pressure sort of a Pascal’s Wager cost-benefit analysis.

Nobody says that fear was the reason why they changed their mind. But if you can impress the idea that if they’re wrong they will suffer eternal damnation, maybe they will ease their intellectual discipline and buy into a belief.

This is on the Wikipedia page for Fear Mongering.

Blinks: Strippers dislike Inflation, Effect of Guns on Suicide Rates, and Gospel Centered Hip-Hop

• Do strippers dislike price inflation? Tyler Cowen analyzes an smbc comic.
  
• Tyler Cowen has a post on a new study on the relation between gun ownership and suicide rates.
  
  Conclusion: “a 1% increase in the household gun ownership rate leads to a .5 to .9% increase in suicides”
  
  "Is the study robust?: “one might imagine that they are correlated due say to a third factor such as social anomie. We have an interesting test of this in the paper. If suicides and gun ownership were being driven by a third factor we would expect gun ownership to be correlated with all suicides not just gun-suicide.”
  
• Do television and electronic games predict children’s psychological adjustment?
  
  Results: Watching TV for 3 h or more at 5 years
  predicted a 0.13 point increase (95% CI 0.03 to 0.24)
  in conduct problems by 7 years, compared with watching
  for under an hour, but playing electronic games was not
  associated with conduct problems. No associations were
  found between either type of screen time and emotional
  symptoms, hyperactivity/inattention, peer relationship
  problems or prosocial behaviour. There was no evidence
  of gender differences in the effect of screen time.
  
  Conclusions: TV but not electronic games predicted a
  small increase in conduct problems. Screen time did not
  predict other aspects of psychosocial adjustment. Further
  work is required to establish causal mechanisms.
  
• Gospel Centered Hip-Hop

Rethinking Hell

One of my favorite resources is Rethinking Hell. Ultimately they are very persuasive in their claims that the original intended interpretation of the imagery of hell in scripture is total destruction – annihilation.

They present great arguments, but ultimately most bible fundamentalist Christians won’t be persuaded unless they show how scriptures on hell could be understood from an annihilationist view point.

The most obvious objection to Annihalationism is, “what about all those versus that talk about eternal torment?”. Interestingly, the term the bible almost always uses is not torment but punishment. or fire. Eternal destruction is punishment. It does not say eternal punishing, although tradition has trained readers to read that into the verse. The loss of life, total destruction, complete annihilation is punishment. Capital punishment is punishment.

There is one passage that does talk about eternal torment, and that is Revelation 20:10

the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

And of course, a few versus later the risen wicked join them.

I don’t have a particular way of understanding this verse, like many versus in revelation. It is important to understand that these are unclear versus because they are filled with apocalyptic imagery. A poor way of dealing with apocalyptic imagery is to interpret it and then use those unclear passages to interpret the clear ones. The highly symbolic imagery of revelation should not be the basis for building a sensible view of hell.

Of course if you’re going to, why not use Revelation 20:14 as your foundation? Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire, and we understand that this depicts total destruction. Death and Hades are no more. They’re not conscious entities capable of being tortured.

There are a lot of other versus where tradition skews our interpretation; confusing it for the most obvious interpretation. “Unquenchable fire” does not mean a fire that does not consume its victims, but a fire that cannot be stopped.

“Weeping and gnashing of teethe” is not set beside a duration. And those terms depict sorrow and anger, not pain. There is no reason to believe that weeping and gnashing of teethe will continue forever rather than will be had at the period of destruction.

To awake to “Everlasting contempt” is to be contempted everlastingly, not contempting everlastingly. The wicked in the scene are the subjects, not the objects, of contempt. The wicked are still contempted after they face the second death.

It is easy to think that the tradition is the obvious way to interpret these passages. But without the context of modern day Christianity impressing the idea that hell is eternal torment, the bible does not clearly describe that. The simple obvious way of understanding spiritual death is as the same thing as physical death only spiritual. That excludes spiritual consciousness as physical death excludes physical consciousness. The simple obvious way of understanding the destruction of the wicked is as annihilation.

“I killed your husband”
”Oh my!”
”Yeah, he’s in the other room being whipped”
”Wait, what?”

“The building was destroyed”
”Wow”
”Yeah, we’re still tearing it down”
”Wait, what?”

There are numerous passages that depicts the fate of the wicked as death and destruction. If there is an especially good reason to re-interpret these words from their plain annihilationist interpretations, then so be it. Maybe spiritual death means separation, but you can’t just assert it. In lack of an especially good reason to believe that (and the one verse in Revelation that says torment doesn’t qualify), we should understand them in the normal sense of the words. The traditional view of hell as conscious torment allegorizes the use of these terms, not the annihilationist view.

Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

I recently watched the original version of A Christmas Carol. Of course it is easy to find problems with Charles Dickens’ zero-sum view of trade and make-work bias. Economic insights takes a bit away from the movie, but overall it is still enjoyable, and it is not as if Charles Dickens is just completely off base about what kind of people we should be.

My observation about the movie is that despite scrooge’s apathy, his line of work helped many people. As a lender, he helped those in need get access to capital, which ended up saving the multitudes from the kind of poverty Dickens found so revolting. Sure scrooge was kind of a jerk to people who couldn’t pay it back, but without the jerky attitude, there’s nothing wrong with insisting that you receive what you traded for. The long tradition of hating the benefactors of interest comes from not thinking the matter all the way through (maybe we can talk about it some time).

The irony is the part of the story where machinery is decried for displacing a particular way of life. But that way of life is an impoverished one that Dickens hates and machinery helped eliminate from developed countries. Dickens seems to think that everyone can have a turkey dinner if the rich just buy them one, but in fact it requires a whole lot more turkeys which means a whole lot more capital that makes the process of making turkey’s more efficient.

After a lifetime of helping people with his line of work, he had accumulated a very significant stock of wealth. Good thing too, because that means that he actually had wealth to give away. Presumably, he kept his stock of wealth in the form of investments, which means that he had even more to give away at the end of his life than if he had just given away each and every paycheck at the time that he received them. This might be the very best way of charitable giving.

It doesn’t mean that Scrooge was a good man. It is not okay to be apathetic toward your fellow man or to give your life to the pursuit of money. But while Scrooge needed an attitude adjustment, not much of his behavior needed to change. One of the few behaviors he should have changed though is that he not spend so much of his spare time brooding alone in his house. Instead he should have experienced the joy of companionship, love, and community. Though that needed to change, he still should have continued with his job, been pragmatic about the gives and takes with his workers and consumers for the profit of his company, and given at least most of his wealth away near the end of his life.