John Edwards, Surprise me

I have stated to a friend a few times that under no circumstances would I vote for either Mitt Romney or John Edwards. Today he asked me what I so disliked about Edwards.

I like much of what Edwards says. But I don't trust him. He seems to have invented himself for the campaign. When asked about his for-the-poor-man message, he said, "The more I talked about it, the more it became internal. I understood pretty quickly after that, this is who I am. This is what I believe" (http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20071213/us_time/johnedwardsdefiningmoment) About a year ago on C-Span, I heard a political analyst, who seemed relatively objective and who is a denizen of Washington and knows Edwards, state that prior to the campaign "the poor" wasn't a word to be found on Edwards' lips. At the beginning of the campaign Edwards was talking about "the poor", but he migrated to talking about "the middle class".

This suggests that Edwards is constructing a candidate to win an election into which he entered as a person who originally didn't care about either the poor or the middle class. If he himself states that he came to care about his issues only after he began to mouth them for the purposes of winning an election, and if his associates say that the pre-campaign Edwards never had the poor or middle class on his radar, then I strongly suspect that the candidate John Edwards is not the real John Edwards.

This is why I think Edwards and Romney are two peas in a pod. They look pretty and craft their rhetoric to win, but at their core they are empty. Yes, Edwards is smart. Too smart. Smart enough to take his trial lawyer skills of persuasion and convince millions of Americans that he is sincere. But who he really is, I suspect, is a brilliant, rich cat whose only anchor is attached to his ego. The fine speech of a candidate who comes to realize "who I am" and "what I believe" only during an election campaign is not trustworthy. A candidate who discovers what his political career stands for only after he starts running for the presidency is likely to be an empty suit. I would much prefer to see people like Kucinich, Clinton, Obama, Paul, McCain, or Richardson, whose private and political careers have demonstrated that they believe in what they are saying and that who they are is who they say they are.

I like much of what Edwards says about lobbyists, the poor, and the middle class. I like his health care plan, which accommodates choice and market forces. If he were to win and turn out to have the substance of his campaign rhetoric, it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised by a president, for a change. I do not rule out the possibility that Edwards had a genuine Damascus Road experience during the campaign trail, but given human nature and history I regard that possibility to be remote. I doubt that Edwards really knows himself or what he believes, other than that he wants to win. A soul-less person like that under the tremendous pressures of the presidency is not likely to surprise me.

The fool says in his heart,"The fool says in his heart, 'The fool says in his heart, "There is no epistemology."'"

Call me a probablist, because I think it probable that I am not an empiricist. Who is, really? The problem with empiricism is that it is not verifiable empirically.

"The only reliable knowledge is empirically verified knowledge."

Really? Reliably? Do you know that empirically?

"No, but it is probably reasonable."

Yes, that is why I am a probablist, but, no, empiricism is not reasonable. I do not think it probable that the only reliable knowledge is empirically verified knowledge, because both such a notion is empirically unverifiable and, it seems to me, probably very close to being true. I do not think it is true, exactly, so much as I think that empirically verified knowledge is more reliable than knowledge verified by other means--except, of course, by means of reason, which is verifiable only by means of logical proof, which, strictly speaking, is not operable in so vast a scope of human knowing that it is practically irrelevant to it.

...unless I am missing something. And I probably am.

My point, exactly.

I am probably also correct to think that empirical evidence and reason are more reliable than, say, other means of knowing--at least to the extent that I mean this probabalistically. Knowledge amenable to logical proof and empirical evidence probably has a better track record than, say, intuition or religious revelation. Even Moses surely thought, had he the cultural warrant even to think of such things, that claims to revelation, in the aggregate, on average, were abysmally unreliable. This is at least true to the extent that only the tiniest fraction of the going revelation in those days bore a testimony to YHWH, or Elohim--or whatever the name of whom he heard on Mount Horeb in the earthquake, thunder, lightning, and smoke that probably did not happen, anyway, it seems to me. Yes, even Moses, by means of the exception, thought the rule certain that revelations, in general, were unreliable--or, rather, reliably false; or at least significantly skewed enough to deserve stoning.

Amen, but for the stoning. Except his exception probably followed the rule, and was no exception at all. I have empirical evidence and reasons for thinking this, but evidence and reason are poor excuses for empiricism and rationalism, whether respectively or not. Reason and evidence only make me think it highly probable--so probable as to be practically certain--that no revelation of any existent god came to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

You have your reasons to think differently, I know, but I do not think you a rationalist for it.

I wish this confession would finally lay the insinuation or implication that I am an empiricist to rest, but it probably will not. Evidentiary and rational appeals that claim priority over revelational ones will forever smack of empiricism and rationalism--except, of course, to revelationists who make them against what they consider to be false revelations. For example, many an instance have I heard Baptists, Pentecostals, Catholics, and Presbyterians state their reasons, including good evidence, for thinking the Golden Tablets of Moroni fraudulent. Appeals to one revelation against another were never so conclusive as fistfuls of evidence, were they ready at hand.

Since we then apparently use evidence and reason similarly, depending on the target, perhaps neither of us is an empiricist or rationalist, no matter how much we smack of it to the persons whose probably or practically certainly false revelations we oppose on evidentiary and reasonable grounds. I think the evidence and reason you use against your religious antagonists is probably more reliable than the revelations they claim. But I do not therefore think you an empiricist or rationalist. Neither am I, even though I think my reasons, which are similar to yours against what you consider to be false revelations, probably debunk your revelations, too.

But probabilities lie in the eye of the beholder--rather, are captive to the emotional commitments of those who know humanly, so humanly. That is a point that neither radical religionists nor fundamentalistic atheists consistently grasp. I am not a fundamentalistic atheist, thank God, and I am not a religionist, by George. I understand that human knowing is so probably a function of neither empiricism, nor rationalism, or supernaturalism as to be practically certain. The fool says in his heart, There is no God, just as, I think, he says there is one. And God forbid that I forget the fool who says she does not know.

So, do not, in fact, call me a probabalist. Due to my experiences, perceptions, observations, reasons, and evidences, I do not think some things to be probable so much as I am emotionally committed to things that seem highly probable to me. Call me, then, a probablistic emotionalist. Call me human. Call me mammal. Call me Tim.

Hi. Nice to meet you, too.

The "Promised Land" and the Two-State Solution

In 2006 sometime, someone asked me how Bible-believing Christians could "possibly negotiate the 'rights' of Palestinians or anyone else to share the land we believe God gave the Jews a deed to in perpetuity." I wrote a reply even though I was by then four years a post-Christian, as I now prefer to identify myself. As I see it, God is practically non-existent, if not actually, except in the imaginations of those who, for example, filter concepts of justice through notions of divine favoritism, as illustated by the question at hand. Practically an atheist (at least as practically as God is absent), I offer the following reply from a Bible-believing perspective, a perspective that I no longer hold but here only assume for the sake of answering the question.

The question is, I suppose, a million dollar one for Zionists who have a conscience. There are other Christian positions than Zionist ones, of course. Some believe that the promise is fulfilled in the church, which is to inherit the land in the new earth, and that Jews to whom the promises apply receive that inheritance in Christ, in the resurrection, as believing members onto whom the Gentile branches have been grafted, and that the perpetual promise does not apply to unbelieving Jews or to the secular Israeli state. Some believe that the promise applies to the Jews as Jews, but only again in the final Eschaton, and that, in the mean time, the secular Israeli state is obligated to deal justly, in the common order, according to the Old Testament prophetic tradition, which stressed justice and compassion for the oppressed, failure regarding which resulted in ancient Israel's original loss of the land as an act of divine discipline.

Some aren't sure what to think about Israel exactly but believe, regardless, that if Jesus has any relevance at all surely he must care about suffering people and treating them justly and compassionately, even if they are Palestinians. Someone said something once about things changing between the Hebrew conquest of Canaan and the time of Jesus. Regardless of how Christians integrate into their belief system what was essentially the genocide and slaughter of women and children when the Hebrews conquered Canaan, one wonders whether they would sanction that as a valid model for modern Israel's handling of the Palestinian problem today. If so, then Israel's failure to kill every last Palestinian should be a matter of divine displeasure, at least to kill those who are in the way of a full conquest of the land, which, of course, according to the ancient promise, includes Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Iraq.

If slaughter and genocide no longer constitute a valid model, then there must be some theological reason to think so, and it seems reasonable that it might have a bearing on how Israel ought to deal with the Palestinian people short of gratuitously sparing them from massacre. If humanitarian principles are now in effect in a way that they were not when God first gave the land, might those principles figure into a concern for Palestinian rights, too? Just what is it, anyway, that makes genocide seem like such an inappropriate option? Is it a worldly spirit to which the church has fallen prey, or is there something legitimately inherent to Christianity that makes caring about the earthly lives of Palestinians something other than a sentiment at which to shrug one's shoulders?

Israel's dominion never reached the scope indicated in the original promise. What does that say, for those who believe, about the dispensation of the promise's fulfilment? It suggests, at the very least, that God is patient about how quickly he intends to fulfill the promise. Who is to say, in that case, that God's plan is for Israel to occupy the West Bank in the current age? Maybe the real plan is for Israel to demonstrate justice and compassion toward the Palestinians and thereby to show forth the glory of God in the current age. Who is to say? Apparently the partial fulfilment of the promise in ancient times extends to the present day, unless Christians are willing to think that it is time for Israel to take over Lebanon and Jordan, and large portions of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. If it was apparently a part of the divine mystery for ancient Israel to make due with the existence of Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, Edom, Moab, Egypt, and Syria for centuries after the promise was given, on what basis can Christians conclude that God's will is for Israel not to negotiate a two-state settlement with the Palestinians now? Just think of how it would redound to the glory of God for him to have used the last three thousand years, two thousand of which had the benefit of Christian influence, to make a difference in how he asked his people to behave. Just think of how awesome it would be for him to make good, through a concern by Israel for Palestinian rights, on Jesus' claim that the meek inherit the earth. Who is to say that that is not how God wants it to be and that he will make good on his promise in due time?

As for me, I might have half a chance to want to be associated with a God like that, even if I had problems believing in him on other grounds.