← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · TexasAnarch

God of Gods, Dreck of Dreck

Thread ID: 16339 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-01-18

Wayback Archive

TexasAnarch [OP]

2005-01-18 02:23 | User Profile

argument for hating all Bush sipporters unto death

God of Gods,  Dreck of Dreck

                    Civic Religions are the Devil’s work

Suppose someone argued:

“Every man holds to One God; therefore, there is One God to which all men hold. I bring news from Him.”


“Wait!” the critic responds.   “Not so fast!. It doesn’t follow that what is true of men taken separately is true of them taken as a group. The illusion of a logical inference results from the fallacy of reasoning from “every” to “all”.  In the premise, “holds to One God” is predicated of  “every men” distributively, as if taken one at a time;  in the conclusion the predicate is asserted of “all men” collectively, as a given whole (totality).”

  Certainly the critic is right.  The same fallacy occurs in the classical [I]non-sequitor [/I] often used to illustrate the logic of number predicates:  “the apostles were 12; Peter and Paul were apostles; therefore Peter and Paul were 12”.  The absurdity of predicating the number of the class as a whole of each of its members is transparent. In no case are “all” and “every” to be taken as identical in predicative sentences. Ignoring the difference leads not just to examples of absurdity, such as these, but to paradoxes and antinomies (seemingly justified assertions of both sides of a contradiction – e.g., “My God and your God are identical, because all men have one God and we are both men..”

 However, suppose that while in the process of making his point, the critic notices that the one proclaiming “monotheism”, as they call it, have gone from talk to action.  Not just predicating on, but making war for their notion; then, wallah! -- calling for a “democratic vote” of approval by God-fearing people.

 Every American must raise their voice with this critic, over against the mad attempt to install a civic religion as instrument of governance.  It is true that the fallacy above has not been used explicitly.  But what it does, namely, shift “God”- use from individual/private to collective/public context, is what the Bush administration has done as policy.   The so-called “faith-based initiative” tacitly advances what [B]this[/B] president means by “God”, himself knowledgeable that others will take his words as proclaiming what “God” means for the country as a whole.  Now, today, 1.16.2005, he has declared  the last election’s vote expressed approval of his destruction of Iraq.

/**

 On this same day, a Sunday, it is reported that Abu Ghraib prison guard Graner has been sentenced to merely 10 years for what he did, which is what he obviously is…No regret, no remorse.  Not disabused of the idea his death-drive sadism represents all. And all who voted for Bush do deserve death with him, for the way they are.  Kept in Saddam Hussein's prison, no records, no Schindler.

People are now allowed, encouraged, to regard this as authorizing his way of thinking. Each and all Americans now have been brought under his stick. All manipulated by collective use of “God.”