Our Cosmic Impiety and The Slaughter of Innocents

"Well . . . I believe, when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties . . . they lead their country by a short route to chaos."Thomas More -A Man for All Seasons, Act I, sc.2.

Our cosmic impiety is the root cause of the monstrous events set in play by marginalized people like the twisted killer in Connecticut.  We are a democratic republic who decided in 1971 to consider an unborn child mere tissue.  If abortion can be as easily dismissed as a woman's 'health choice' and nothing more, what evil can we not not chalk up to legislated pre-packaged necessities like gun control, security monitors, cameras, or mandatory thought control training as levies to hold back the flood of insane acts and actors?

Perhaps, to be marginalized is now what we used to call disappointment.  Perhaps the marginalized shooter did not get what he really desired in the mistaken notion that desire is the same as need. Perhaps the marginalized person has been encouraged to expect what he could not obtain those outcomes and tossed the most horrific of tantrums.

We wring our hands about murder on Chicago streets, but immediately turn  to 'fact-based' artificial answers to root problems like codes of silence, systemic racism, wrongful convictions and corruption as a very moveable feast for fools. Verifiably satisfying outcomes is what Americans understand truth to be; they comprise new secular catechism.

The simple answer to why Chicago, and other cities, are plagued with gang/drug/black-on-black thuggery is that thuggery may, can and will.  A gang funeral can and will be the site of slaughter on church steps, because it may, can and will.  Prior to Roe v. Wade, American Progressives made sure God, in any manifestation was outlawed in the Republic - schools, public buildings, public gatherings and et cetera.    Once the Old Bearded myth was shunned any exercise of  public power at the local, state or federal level was justified and exercised beginning with conception. John Dewey, the ACLU, our courts and our universities have made it so -Fiat, caedem!

Yesterday's slaughter of full-term babies took place in a public school.  The killer of the babies is now being profiled as a lost soul with ironic name of Adam.  Adam Lanza grew up in John Dewey's Eden - a fact based, science-loaded secular laboratory. For the sake of argument, let's leave the religious issues aside and turn to Dewey's greatest critic - the piously agnostic Lord Bertrand Russell:

The main difference between Dr. Dewey and me is that he judges a belief by its effects, whereas I judge it by its causes where a past occurrence is concerned. I consider such a belief 'true', or as nearly 'true' as we can make it, when it has a certain kind of complicated relationship (sometimes very complicated) to its causes. Dr. Dewey holds that it has 'warranted assertibility' -- which he substitutes for 'true' -- if it has certain kinds of effects. This divergence is connected with a difference of outlook on the world. The past cannot be affected by what we do, and therefore, if truth is determined by what has happened, it is independent of past or future volitions; it represents, in logical form, the limitations of human power. But if truth, or rather 'warranted assertibility', depends on the future, then, in so far as it is in our power to alter the future, it is in our power to alter what should be asserted. This enlarges the sense of human power and freedom. Did Caesar cross the Rubicon? I should regard an affirmative answer as unalterably determined by a past event. Dr. Dewey would decide whether to say yes or no by an appraisal of future events, and there is no reason why those future events could not be arranged by human power so as to make a negative answer the more satisfactory.

If I find the belief that Caesar crossed the Rubicon very distasteful, I need not sit down in dull despair; I can, if I have sufficient skill and power, arrange a social environment in which the statement that he did not cross the Rubicon will have 'warranted assertibility.'

Throughout this book, I have sought, where possible, to connect philosophies within the social environment of the philosophers concerned. It has seemed to me that the belief in human power, and the unwillingness to accept 'stubborn facts', were connected with the hopefulness engendered by machine production and the scientific manipulation of our physical environment. This view is shared by many of Dr. Dewey's supporters. Thus George Raymond Geiger, in a laudatory essay, says that Dr. Dewey's method 'would mean a revolution in thought....'...
Dr. Dewey's world, it seems to me, is one in which human beings occupy the imagination; the cosmos of astronomy, though of course it is acknowledged to exist, is at most times ignored. His philosophy is a power philosophy, though not, like Nietzche's, a philosophy of individual power; it is the power of the community that is felt to be valuable. It is this element of social power that seems to me to make the philosophy of instrumentalism attractive to those who are more impressed by our new control over natural forces than by the limitations to which that control is still subject.

The attitude of man towards the non-human environment has differed profoundly at different times. The Greeks, with their dread of hubris and their belief in a Necessity or Fate superior even to Zeus, carefully avoided what to them would have seemed insolence towards the universe. The Middle Ages carried submission much further; humility towards God was a Christian's first duty. Initiative was cramped by this attitude, and great originality was scarcely possible. The Renaissance restored human pride, but carried it to the point where it led to anarchy and disaster. ... Man, formerly too humble, began to think of himself as almost a God...
In all of this I feel a great danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety.

The concept of 'truth' as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness -- the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.  From B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, "John Dewey", Ch. 30

Our society tears up and hugs after the slaughters of innocents in malls, theatres, college campuses and elementary schools, but there never seems to summon up the genuine will to examine the root causes of such monstrosities, because that would be the a necessary step in the right direction and a forthright challenge to pet projects and programs.

Adam of the Old Testament is denied by the disciples of Dewey, but Adam Lanza is as real as the guns and bullets he used to terminate the off-spring of parents who welcomed children into life, cherished and nurtured their every step, cry and giggle.  Adam Lanza is as real as Dr. Kermit Gosnell of the Philadelphia ' infant charnel house' where he and nine of his Planned Parenthood co-workers ensured fetal demise ( " . . .   late-term babies were delivered alive — fully intact and breathing — and then killed. Gosnell “called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’( The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ’snipping.’ Over the years, there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’ ’’)  for some sad little Julia.

This is the Hanukkah and Christmas season, let us remember the slaughter of the innocents by our Herods  and our Hitlers -two fine examples of Hegelian will and big government chaps.  Let's pray before the next marginalized, purposeless Adam, or sad little Julia act out.

Our public officials who have violated conscience for policy created the chaos that soaks the halls and playgrounds in Connecticut with the blood of innocents and the tears of anguished mothers and fathers. 

We are a mess and that is about the only verifiable fact on the table.  We might look elsewhere than programs and policies for answers to cleaning up our mess.

May God welcome the little hands and hearts taken from their parents by Adam and ease the collective pain of sad people with the very hard work of shaking off our cosmic impieties.

History? Just a Bunch of Stuff That Already Happened - American Education Fails Fabulously!

Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. Of History -Lord Bertrand Russell

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Life without even a basic understanding of the past has been accomplished by John Dewey the Progressive Hegelian Father of American Public Education. Sadly, even some Catholic schools and far too many universities ape Public Education and have cashed in classical learning for Dewey's shell game.

Here are the results of Mr. Tests & Measurements' handiwork:

The overall lackluster performance is certain to revive the debate about whether history and other subjects, such as science and art, are being pushed out of the curriculum because of the focus on math and reading demanded under the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The federal law mandates that students be tested in math and reading.

Sue Blanchette, president-elect of the National Council for Social Studies, a national association of K-12 and college social-studies teachers, called the results disheartening and said history education has been marginalized in the last decade.

"Everyone is going to participate in civic life by paying taxes, protesting against paying taxes, voting, and we must teach our children how to think critically about these issues," she said. "Clearly, we are not doing that."

Click my post title for the Wall Street Journal's report on the American social studies shame.

Sue Blanchette is 'disheartened' that is Progressive speak for "more tax dollars."

Here is a critical thought, Sue, how about teaching civics and history. Here is another gem from Johnny Dewey - "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." John Dewey and Jane Addams and Mary McDowell and other turn of the 20th Century Hegelian's bullied educational methods into place that eroded public education and murdered America's sense of History.

The History Channel is a monument to John Dewey. History is series of Nostradamus, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, Swamp People, American Pickers ( "Fabulous Bric-a Brac!") Larry the Cable Guy and UFO's. Reality TV as History.

The American public school classroom is no different. A coach (of whatever sport is necessary) pops in a disc of Glory and accepts a paper posing the question of why they didn't use flame-throwers or call in airstrikes. No teacher would consider recording the Sunday Morning lectures from the Pritzker Military Library on every Sunday on cable, because the lectures might be too boring.

Dewey demanded that education be play! He built the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago upon that very dictum.

Education is preparation and our students are unprepared.

Teaching should be harder than learning and learning is everything that it is cracked up to be.

History was written by 'Dead White Men' we are told by Educators. White Guys like Berossus of Babylonia which is now called Iraq, St. Augustine the Bishop of Hippo, a suburb of Carthage which is in North Africa; Ban Zhao of the Han Dynasty - not the Swedish Zhaos mind you. There were a few skirts too, like Mary Bonaventure Browne, Poor Clare 16th Century Irish historian.

How many Chicagoans could tell you why Comiskey Park was built on Shields Ave*.? That is a leading question. All good teaching is leading. Education comes from a Dead Language - educere - to lead away from . . .that would be from ignorance. John Dewey encourage education to be contrarian -that is Progressive: No exceptionalism!

Here, in essence, is American Eduction ala John Dewey:


I'm not kidding.

Ignorance is temporary but stupid is forever. It seems Education in America is Dewey forever. We can do and have done much better, but that would require a sense of history and John Dewey helped kill that with a great deal of help.

* James Shields Elementary School in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood is named for Senator/General james J. Shields the only American to be elected a United States Senator from three states ( Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri), who nearly fought a dual with Abraham Lincoln, was a hero of the Mexican American War and the only Union General to defeat Confederate General Thomas Stonewall Jackson in the field at 1st Battle of Kernstown in 1862. Likewise Shields Ave. is named for the same man. Charles Comiskey's father served in the Union Army and prior to that was a member of the Shields Guards Militia which partly formed the 23rd Illinois Irish Brigade. History is a big deal made of very small things.

Update from Mr. Dan Kelley, historian/journalist/attorney

Honest John Comiskey was also a Chicago alderman. His son was tipped to the fact that street car lines were going to be routed towards the area where the ballpark was eventually erected (on the site of a former dump) and this was a valuable consideration for the site of the Baseball Palace of the World.

Oddly enough, the same architect worked on both Comiskey Park and Weegham Park (later remodeled and renamed Wrigley Field), but Charles Comiskey scaled back on Zachary Taylor Davis' plans and cut expenditures whereas the Northside Park was built on a more liberal basis.