Here, thanks to Scott at Scottish Nous 2005-09-07, we have the latest contribution of the Religious Right to a vibrant Christian culture in America:

No, I’m not kidding. This is for real. You can buy your own Bush Fish car magnet for $3.25, with discounts if you buy in bulk. (Of course, those who follow the comings and goings of creepy Freepers may note that this is not the first time that G.W.’s boosters have been aiming to save the right-hand seat for him.)

Meanwhile, Mike Tennant at Strike the Root 2005-11-09 brings us the following conversation, overheard on a Christian talk radio show out of Pittsburgh:

Caller: “[George W. Bush] led the country through 9/11 and Katrina in the most moral and righteous way possible.”

Host [Jerry Bowyer]: “I don’t think it would have been possible for him to do it in an immoral way. It’s his moral core.”

Apropos of nothing, here’s an item that was featured a while back in some obscure little left-wing rag that nobody pays attention to anymore:

9 What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made de the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. 10 As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
11 there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
13 “Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 ruin and misery mark their ways,
17 and the way of peace they do not know.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, …

Also, while we’re at it:

8 But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

9 And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

10 Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

11 But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

12 And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

And:

6 But when they said, Give us a king to lead us, this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. 7 And the LORD told him: Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.

10 Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.

The weirdest thing about the culture of the God-and-Country set these days isn’t even how chillingly statist it is. It’s how belligerently anti-Christian it is. Perhaps they need a new name for the civic religion they are creating; I’d like to suggest Caesarism, or perhaps simply blasphemy.

Further reading

• WikiPedia: ICHTHYS
• WikiPedia: Christian Anarchism
• Austro-Athenian Empire 2004-11-13: God and the State
• GT 2005-02-25: Old Time Religion
• GT 2004-10-28: Jesus
• GT 2004-10-18: Civic religion
• GT 2004-10-12: Humor for Hawks
• GT 2004-06-17: A Cheap Shot

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but other projects (some of them tangentially related, others not) delayed the happy announcement for a while: not only one, but two of G. E. Moore’s chief works on Ethics are available online, in full, for your reading and citing pleasure. As you may have already known (cf. GT 2005-07-11, GT 2005-06-28, GT 2005-06-01, GT 2005-02-18, GT 2004-12-19), I spent eight months off and on (mostly off) plugging away at a full transcription of Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). I polished off Chapter VI: The Ideal back in August, meaning that the Fair Use Repository‘s copy of PE is now complete.

What you may not have known is that I also took some of the free time that I had at the end of the CTY session to knock out a complete transcription of Moore’s 1912 follow-up to PE, which he gave the inventive title of Ethics. (The hat tip for the idea goes to Roderick Long and Kelly Jolley, who mentioned the book to me and also expressed their pious hopes that an anonymous somebody-or-another might just happen to put the book online.)

Ethics is rarely read today, probably much more rarely than should be the case. Not because of its earth-shaking influence: no responsible history of contemporary philosophy could be written without a discussion of Principia Ethica; but it’s unlikely that even a history of the major developments in Analytic philosophy during the 1910s would take much notice of Ethics. (In fact, even folks writing specifically about Moore’s ethics mainly seem interested in Ethics only insofar as it illuminates, qualifies, or modifies his positions in PE.) And the scholarly neglect may very well be perfectly just. Ethics is neither as influential or as ambitious a book as Principia Ethica, and if your chief interest is telling the story of how early Analytic philosophy developed and how it bears on contemporary philosophy, Ethics is not going to be the most pressing item on your agenda. That’s all true, but of course it would only prove that you oughtn’t bother reading it if the only good books were influential books. The fact is indeed that Ethics is a much quieter book than Principia Ethica is; but that means only that it is quietly brilliant, where PE is obviously brilliant.

What’s so nice about Ethics is how clearly it exhibits Moore’s approach to ethics, and to philosophy as a whole: his extremely careful approach to philosophy, his precision, and most of all his apparently inexhaustible intellectual patience. There are some wonderful things that PE has and Ethics lacks–most noticeably, it lacks anything corresponding to PE‘s sustained discussion of the Naturalistic Fallacy, which Moore had made the center of his argument back in 1902. But what it lacks in treatments of specific topics, it more than makes up for in its method. Especially remarkable highlights are Chapter III and Chapter IV on The Objectivity of Moral Judgments, which contains what Kelly rightly described as one of the most subtle and suggestive treatments of relativism in the literature, and which are remarkable not because of some flashy or brilliant technical apparatus that Moore unleashed on the intellectual landscape, but rather just because he takes it so damn slow and draws out, in ordinary language and with an extraordinary amount of care and intellectual good faith, just what the relativist might want to say and just how it systematically fails to capture what we’re actually doing when we think about, talk about, or act on moral principles. The stuff is simply brilliant.

Ethics makes the third complete work of G. E. Moore which has been made available through the Fair Use Repository. (Besides Principia Ethica, there is also Moore’s 1903 review of an English translation of Franz Brentano’s The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong.) Since finishing up with Ethics, my two main projects for the Repository have been (1) transcribing some new works–at the moment, T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics (which is cited in passing in Principia Ethica, and was quite influential on English moral philosophy at the turn of the century, but is now almost impossible to find outside of academic libraries), and several articles from fin-de-siecle issues of Mind–and (2) improving the script that slices and dices data for the works in the Repository — so that, for example, it can represent the structure of a book like the Prolegomena to Ethics. Expect to see more soon–and in the meantime, read and enjoy!

The first definition comes courtesy of Norman Singleton on the LewRockwell.com Blog:

Definition of Irony

Posted by Norman Singleton at August 29, 2005 08:47 PM

Nat Hentoff endorses creating another unconstitutional educational program to teach the Constitution! One of the Congressional champions of this measure is none other than Ted Kennedy, who wants a constitutional education program that will create more opportunities for internships and service-learning, in order words teach children to dedicate their lives to the state. I don’t think Madison (or even Hamilton) would approve.

Good one, Norm. I’d like to add a second:

i-ro-ny, n. – anti-state, anti-war, pro-market anarchists talking as if you should care whether some invasive government program was or was not authorized by the U. S. Constitution.

(See also: Strike the Root 2005-08-30: Disaster Relief? We Need Neocon Relief!)

Come on, now. Put down your pocket copy of the Constitution for a second and read a book, for the love of God. Or a letter for that matter, or a newspaper, or anything else, really.