Skip to content
April 7, 2019 | 8 Comments

Summary Against Modern Thought: Divine Providence Does Not Exclude Free Will

Previous post.

God exists. And, as promised, so does your freedom of will!

THAT DIVINE PROVIDENCE DOES NOT EXCLUDE FREEDOM OF CHOICE

1 From this it is also evident that providence is not incompatible with freedom of will.

2 Indeed, the governance of every provident ruler is ordered either to the attainment, or the increase, or the preservation of the perfection of the things governed. Therefore, whatever pertains to perfection is to be preserved by providence rather than what pertains to imperfection and deficiency.

Now, among inanimate things the contingency of causes is due to imperfection and deficiency, for by their nature they are determined to one result which they always achieve, unless there be some impediment arising either from a weakness of their power, or on the part of an external agent, or because of the unsuitability of the matter. And for this reason, natural agent causes are not capable of varied results; rather, in most cases, they produce their effect in the same way, failing to do so but rarely.

Now, the fact that the will is a contingent cause arises from its perfection, for it does not have power limited to one outcome but rather has the ability to produce this effect or that; for which reason it is contingent in regard to either one or the other. Therefore, it is more pertinent to divine providence to preserve liberty of will than contingency in natural causes.

3 Moreover, it is proper to divine Providence to use things according to their own mode. Now, the mode of acting peculiar to each thing results from its form, which is the source of action. Now, the form whereby an agent acts voluntarily is not determined, for the will acts through a form apprehended by the intellect, since the apprehended good moves the will as its object.

Now, the intellect does not have one form determined to an effect; rather, it is characteristic of it to comprehend a multitude of forms. And because of this the will can produce effects according to many forms. Therefore, it does not pertain to the character of providence to exclude liberty of will.

Notes This implies the removal of imagination, perhaps through ignorance, limits the options of the will.

4 Besides, by the governance of every provident agent the things governed are led to a suitable end; hence, Gregory of Nyssa says of divine providence that it is the “will of God through which all things that exist receive a suitable end.” But the ultimate end of every creature is to attain the divine likeness, as we showed above. Therefore, it would be incompatible with providence for that whereby a thing attains the divine likeness to be taken away from it. Now, the voluntary agent attains the divine likeness because it acts freely, for we showed in Book One [88] that there is free choice in God. Therefore, freedom of will is not taken away by divine providence.

5 Again, providence tends to multiply goods among the things that are governed. So, that whereby many goods are removed from things does not pertain to providence. But, if freedom of will were taken away, many goods would be removed. Taken away, indeed, would be the praise of human virtue which is nothing, if man does not act freely. Taken away, also, would be justice which rewards and punishes, if man could not freely do good or evil. Even the careful consideration of circumstances in processes of deliberation would cease, for it is useless to dwell upon things that are done of necessity. Therefore, it would be against the very character of providence if liberty of will were removed.

Notes Those who deny free will often speak of punishment and its horrors, but they always seem to forget that if we remove punishment we must necessarily remove praise.

6 Hence it is said: “God made man from the beginning and left him in the hand of his own counsel”; and again: “Before man is life and death, good and evil, that which he shall choose shall be given him” (Sirach 15:14, 18).

7 Now, by these considerations the opinion of the Stoics is set aside, for they said that all things come about by necessity, according to an irrevocable order of causes, which the Greeks called [sinful].

April 6, 2019 | 10 Comments

The Week In Doom — White Anti-White Edition

Most or all places with white majorities have a minority of whites who are working, or seem to be working, to remove the white majorities. All criticism against these moves is labeled “racist”, a word that only applies to whites.

Item Biden rips ‘white man’s culture,’ regrets Anita Hill hearing

Biden, a Democratic presidential prospect who often highlights his white working-class roots, said Hill, who is African-American, should not have been forced to face a panel of “a bunch of white guy” about her sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas…

Biden called on Americans to “change the culture” that dates back centuries and allows pervasive violence against women. “It’s an English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change,” he said.

I’m with Biden. There must be a problem with white culture. After all, it allowed an appalling man like Biden to rise to prominence.

There’s more to it: follow me closely here. I wonder if the white Dems who chose the open-border strategy to reduce influence of white voting bloc knew they’d have to signal anti-white in order to remain viable candidates. White Biden in early 2020: “Oops.”

It’s worse than it sounds. Jeff Bezos’s paper also had a piece on Biden’s biggest shortcoming. Which is that he is white. Meaning the paper acknowledges the two parties will soon be anti- or non-white versus white. And whites will be shamed into taking part in the non-white side. So far, that’s a winning strategy. Anti-white whites (“fellow white people”), who may be a minority, are extremely active and vocal.

Item Two black candidates for Savannah’s mayor attend meeting that bars white reporters

With signs stating “Black press only” on the doors of the church where the meeting was held, white reporters were barred from entry, while black reporters for at least two television stations were permitted inside…

Savannah Alderman Estella Shabazz, who also attended, said that she had once owned a newspaper and she was a member of the black press, but she declined to comment – when repeatedly pressed – on the policy barring white reporters from going inside.

Well, tribal politics. Whites will come to the conclusion that they have to begin to play or they will lose out. And, say, doesn’t Congress have a Black Caucus, and other such Caucuses? I’m not an expert. Are non-Blacks allowed inside Black Caucus meetings?

Item More than one in ten primary school boys is labelled with mental disorder

More than one in ten boys at primary school are being labelled as suffering from a mental disorder, amid growing concerns about their classroom behaviour, research suggests.

The NHS report, which examines the factors which may increase the risk of mental illness, found young boys were twice as likely as girls the same age to suffer such problems.

Experts said “difficult” behaviour in young children could be a sign of emotional distress that they struggled to talk about.

The figures from NHS Digital show 12.2 per cent of boys aged between five and 10 were found to be likely to be suffering from a mental disorder, along with 6.6 per cent of girls.

Emotional disorders were equally likely in both genders, but behavioural problems which can include autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were twice as common in boys.

“Experts”, when I am Emperor, will be among the first to go. Anyway, it is astonishing as our culture becomes feminized greater and greater proportions of boys are “discovered” to have “mental disorders.”

But by all means, keep your kids in school.

Item https://twitter.com/jeffgiesea/status/1110986231645638661

Of course, Facebook will allow black African, Hispanic, Jewish, and other nationalist discussions. Try speaking against these and see what names you’re called. Somehow people have got it in their heads, especially white people, that whites are uniquely dangerous. Part of this is because Facebook wants to shut down any negative discussion of open borders, which is the strategy the left has fixated on to cure all ills.

You do realize, dear reader, that once whites are yet another minority, that (as said) tribal politics will naturally and necessarily come to the fore? Not in our low level way now, but for nearly every question. Why people are anxious for this to happen is beyond me. Unless it’s the sincerely believed that once we’re a nation of Identities all it will take is the government to wave its finger and say “Now, now. Let’s all get along.”

Meanwhile, we recall this headline: Facebook fights for the right to follow users—and nonusers—around the web.

April 5, 2019 | 8 Comments

How Might Angels (Good or Bad) Work?

First best and truest answer to the titular question is: I do not know. That non-material, i.e. spiritual beings, are real is, in my mind, indisputable. So is whether they are active. They are. I know for a certain fact that I have interacted with non-material beings, beside God, and it is likely you have, too. Here is how this might work.

The argument I give today is no way conclusive. I tried looking up these ideas, which are surely not unique or original, but my ignorance on the technicalities of the subject is profound, and my search inadequate. At any rate, let’s push on!

Cast your mind back to Chapter 13 of the Summary Against Modern Thought. We learned that God must exist or no change or movement could take place. The link has the full details, but briefly they are this.

Right now—not in some distant past—but right here, right now, as you hit the scrollbar, the scrollbar moves. The muscles in your arm and hand flex. The chemicals in your hand and arm act and react to cause the flex. The electrons in the chemicals move in certain ways to cause the chemical interactions. Whatever is inside the electron changes state to cause the electron to move.

What is inside whatever is inside the electron again changes to cause the change “above” it. And so on. But not and so on ad infinitum. The process must terminate at some finite point. If it didn’t, no movement or change would ever occur. That finite termination point is God. God is therefore the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, the first cause in every change. Every as in every.

I do not mean this slight review as the full proof. The details, again, are in Chapter 13.

Here is what is interesting. There is a causal chain, a here-and-now change which is actual and which turns a potential into an actuality, i.e. makes a change. There is the first or primary cause, which is God, followed by the series of secondary causes.

Could these secondary causes include acts by angels (good or bad)? Certainly.

God is immaterial, the scroll bar and your hands and arm are material. So are the muscles, chemical, electrons, and some other things below that. But as we get lower, we get further from materiality. Quantum materials exist as both actuality and potentiality. Strings, they say, are only two-dimensional curls of strange matter. What’s below strings? Something one dimensional? Why not? And what’s below that? The non-material. Given that God is at base, and God is immaterial, yet the material moves, there must be some way for the two to interact.

God could set the chain in motion, to make a pun, and assign the real labor of secondary causes in the immaterial to angelic beings. Every time? I have no idea.

Consider angels have to make a living, too. So it could very well be that certain non-material beings are assigned specific duties, duties regarding types of act or in definite places. There is holy water, relics, other blessed items. Meaning, perhaps, the assignment of particular non-material individuals to the secondary causes associated with these items. We also have the idea of guardian angels, which are beings that follow each of us about and, at times, interact with us, at least with our non-material intellects.

This idea is no different. And accords with ideas and notion every culture save our own, deep as it is into scientism, has had.

We, even the atheists among us, tend to view angels as bewinged beings that show up with soft glows behind them, speak in thee and thous, use cushy vowels, and dispense greeting card wisdom. Demons are rare but inveterately evil, ugly with snotty gleaming features, their whole being bent on corrupting or damning us.

This is a rather boring story, unlikely to be true. Instead, like us, non-material beings have personalities. Everyone but us has always thought so, though we do not call these beings “gods” as they did. Why should each and every demon care in just the same way about your demise? Could not some instead be incorrigible, pranksters, imbued with twisted senses of humor? Could some angels be a trifle bored with being just on this side of tears? Could not some, albeit in complete accord with God’s will and acting well within orders, carry out their task with more or less assiduity or with regard to your feelings?

We don’t see, often, what we don’t look for.

April 4, 2019 | 26 Comments

Canadian Man Fined $55K For Calling Biological Male Biological Male

Our Canuk, one Bill Whatcott, distributed a flyer which said that a certain man who pretends to be a woman is a “biological male.” The man who would be a woman, but is in fact a biological male, took exception to this and had our Canuk hauled in front of one of Canada’s “rights” kangaroo courts.

Whatcott had brought a doctor with him to certify that the man who pretended to a woman was, indeed, a biological male. Here, according to Lifesite, is what the judge, who if this were America we’d suspect was an Affirmative Action appointee, said:

Tribunal judge Devyn Cousineau, however, ruled “the ‘truth’ of the statements in the flyer is not a defense.”

“Therefore, to the extent that Mr. Whatcott intends to call witnesses to establish the truth of his impugned publications, that evidence is simply not relevant to the legal issue and will not be heard by this Tribunal,” she wrote.

Nice scare quotes around truth, eh?

Now it’s not unnatural to suppose Cousineau took one too many pucks to the head. But it’s a better bet her raving ideological stance is sincere. For she also wrote “even questioning transgenderism is discriminatory.” There’s the state of Canadian science, right there. “Discrimination” was the real reason for the fine (or most of it).

“‘[T]he proposition that we should continue to debate and deny the existence of trans people is at the root of the prejudice and stereotypes that continue to oppress them,’ wrote Cousineau.”

“‘Throughout his testimony, Mr. Whatcott refused to recognize Ms. Oger as a woman, or to abide by the Tribunal’s frequent orders not to call her a man,’ she wrote in a footnote.” Stones.

There no such things as “trans people”, of course. Not in any essential sense. There are lots, and growing numbers, of men pretending to be women, and women pretending to be men. And some even elevate the pretending to full scale delusion. These people exist, all right.

Prejudice should be applied to those who are not quite all there. Prejudice in this sense is a good thing. I mean, you wouldn’t want these people to, say, read books to your kids at story hours at libraries, and in doing so encourage your own flesh and blood to abandon reality for fantasyland. You’d love them far too much for that. Right?

Stereotypes are also important—and largely true. Can you, even if you were in support of sexual LARPing, think of a stereotype about a man pretending to be a woman that is not true? Enter it below.

Anyway, what’s with all this negativism about stereotypes? They are largely true everywhere they are applied. They are useful and almost always correct distillations of information about certain groups of people. Even people like bloggers.

Never mind that. Whatcott is going to be out 55-thousand loonies. We are not the first to recognize the appropriateness of this nickname. It’s a lot of money. Imagine it’s you. Imagine you called a biological male who is a biological male a “biological male”, and this biological male then caused you to pay an extraordinary sum for saying a simple truth. It would sting, wouldn’t it?

And it would cause other people inclined to tell the truth about Reality to keep their mouths shut.

Now my ignorance of Canadian jurisprudence is vast, so I have no idea how this will all play out in its courts. Maybe Whatcott can convince some higher-level entity that Reality is still a going concern. Maybe not.

Either way, it’s clear that Canada, at least at this level, is willing to use violent means to force people to deny Reality. This is not violence on the level of thumbscrews, but it is violence nonetheless, because Cousineau’s punishment has the full force of the entire Canadian government behind her. Whereas Whatcott is one man, or one man plus one lawyer.

There is no disincentive for Cousineau not to threaten or use violent means. What would be such a disincentive is clear enough. But we’re not quite there yet.