A completely useless analogy followed by an old man’s fallacy.
What are you referring to, please?
Not sure what that means!
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The difference in the injustice, the violence of inequality between fascist and persecuted communist regimes in the developing world once the revolution is over.
I got online access to the book in question through the library and poked about in it. I was unimpressed. I looked mostly at the chapters on the Big Bang and on fine tuning, since they’re closest to fields I know something about. The chapter on the Big Bang was big on hyperbole and weak on the science. On the science side, Metaxas (along with many others) confuses the concept of the BB and black holes with the idea of singularities.In this case, singularities occur when you extrapolate General Relativity into conditions of extremely high density. Metaxas treats this as some kind of mystical feature of reality and a signal of the end of physics. In reality, singularities occur in models, not in reality, and they are a pretty good indication that the model breaks down in a particular regime. But we already know that General Relativity breaks down in the regime in question, since it is not consistent with the quantum mechanical description that comes from particle physics and that becomes relevant in that regime.
The result is overblown rhetoric like this:
If the laws of physics do not exist independently of the universe forever, they can cease to exist anywhere and anytime, at least theoretically. This idea put science on a leash, and some scientists didn’t like that at all, as it defied their sometimes-deified versions of themselves as the ultimate arbiters of truth and knowledge, as the priests of the new religion that was beyond religion. So it could be humbling and embarrassing.
I didn’t look at the fine-tuning arguments in detail since I’m pretty familiar with them (and largely unmoved by them). As usual, I find the paired arguments to undercut one another:
- The physical laws of the universe are exquisitely tuned to permit humans to exist, and
- The universe is so hostile to human-like life that it requires something like a miracle for a planet like Earth to exist in it.
I will also note one argument: the equal apparent size of the sun and the moon, which makes solar eclipses like ours possible and which let us learn some stuff about the sun, is an amazing coincidence about Earth that helps demonstrates divine design. I think this is a surpassingly dumb argument.
Sorry to detract from the no doubt fascinating discussion of authoritarian regimes…
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That’s a major turn off for me as well. Another anti-atheism book I picked up in the last year or so started off like that, and I didn’t make it 10 pages in.
I wonder about ‘singularities’ as something which can affect change without changing, and also how such a ‘thing’ would be unobservable by nature.
A couple years ago I got into a heavy discussion with a person who claimed to have won a Nobel prize and retired early (as part of a team and because of early investment in crypto is what I assumed). Either way, he was very knowledgeable and a hell of an opponent.
This person’s big thing was, “no novel testable prediction, no evidence.” Finally after great discussion, they claimed M-theory makes novel testable predictions. Irregardless of how an uncaused happening is theorized to be explained by extra dimensional strings, if something just occurs without cause, then there can be no explanation for it.
Now if something is the immediate effect of an uncaused cause, it would then appear to come from nothing or seem acausal.
Cuba is much worse under communism. I have read books and heard speakers. I have known refugees. Castro terrorized our whole country in the Cuban missile crisis.
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I know a Cuban pastor who is here and trying to get his family out. It is awful there, hunger is the norm and basic services like electricity are off and on, and mostly off.
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I read Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag by Armando Valladares, and it was the most horrifying prisoner account I have ever read. Few books have had such a chilling effect on me, and I’ve read many holocaust stories. Most Cubans are wonderful people. May God help your pastor friend get his family out! (He should consider asking a French diplomat to intercede, if possible.)
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I followed the crumbs and figure that’s the worst there is against Metaxas. The thing is, on his better days, which we all are more or less prone to, he makes a good argument. This article is one I read yesterday out of the blue, and I haven’t read anything by him before:
“Moore’s parting sneer, citing fears of “Satan-worshiping pedophile rings,” completes the calumnious portrait, conflating thoughtful conservatives with Q-anon conspiracy theorists.”
I started it and was doing okay until I got to one line. Speaking of conservatives, he describes them as ‘those who would fight for the unborn’ – okay, fair enough – ‘or for free and transparent elections…’ Uh, no. In the era of the Big Lie, anyone who claims that current American conservatives are fighting for free and transparent elections is either lying or too delusional to take seriously.
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Problem is, like with other less than apparent issues as with whether a person should be vaccinated after they have recovered from the delta variant, there’s a muddy middle that doesn’t work well for political change.
I like how Pollak, who takes a more nuanced approach, can still fault aspects of the election:
“Only after the election did America we learn that Trump’s vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, had been a stunning success; that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s troubled son, was under investigation by the Department of Justice, and that his laptop was real; that the coronavirus may indeed have escaped from a laboratory in China; and that Trump never called neo-Nazis in Charlotte “very fine people” — something many of us tried to point out, for months, during the election.”
That article by Metaxas is a good example of what is wrong about his approach. He distorts, demonizes, and misdirects. On the other hand, I enjoyed Moore’s article he linked to.
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Moore also writes a good article with much that we would do well to pay attention. It is a muddy middle as I just said to someone else here.
As I read Moore’s article now, which I would have been better off for reading before, I do wonder if Moore is conflating Metaxas with Q-anon conspiracy theorists.
Oh no, here it is again:
“Yes, there were irregularities in 2020. Two of them are undeniable: Mark Zuckerberg’s injection of $420 million to turn public elections administrators into get-out-the-vote activists in swing-state Democratic municipalities; and the FBI’s pressure on social media to censor reporting detrimental to Biden, including the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/09/an_open_letter_to_donald_trump_148448.html
Those had nothing to do with irregularities in vote counting. That is the Big Lie, that there were irregularities in voting and counting, and why Trump got laughed out of every court (dozens, I think) where he filed suit. Influence is a whole different issue.
Much worse than what? Where? Haiti? We’ve all read books. Western interference created the Russian Revolution and then spent 45 years opposing it up to Cuba and another 25 after. Russia felt terrorized by America’s Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey prior to Cuba. Where the CIA put Castro in power of course.k
Batista. Cuba. I had a dear aunt and uncle who were wasting their privilege as missionaries in Cuba. They had to leave post-revolution.
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Cuba became much worse under Communism than it was under the right-wing dictatorship of Batista.
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