Saturday, May 6, 2017
Friday, May 5, 2017
Thursday, May 4, 2017
Freedom of religion in the United States
By God! Trump lifting ban on political activity by churches
The
Washington Times
President Trump signed an executive order Thursday (May 4th 2017)to make it easier for churches to
actively participate in politics without risking their tax-exempt
status, and to protect faith-based groups from being forced to pay
for abortion services under Obamacare, the White
House said.
..................................................
The
order is aimed at easing an IRS provision that prohibits churches
from directly opposing or endorsing political candidates. Mr.
Trump has
been promising to get rid of the measure.
The
action will direct the IRS to immediately “exercise maximum
enforcement discretion to alleviate the burden” of the so-called
Johnson amendment, a tax provision dating from 1954.
The
action also will allow non-profit organizations to deny certain
health coverage for religious reasons. It’s aimed at protecting
Christian groups like Little Sisters of the Poor that were
“persecuted by the Obama administration” from being forced to pay
for abortion services, the official said.
“They’ve
been persecuted by Obamacare’s preventive services mandate,” the
official said. “This order would provide regulatory relief.”
The
Affordable Care Act requires insurance plans to cover contraceptives
at no cost to patients. After a Supreme Court ruled that the mandate
violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the government
created an accommodation for closely held, for-profit businesses that
have a religious objection, involving filling out a form to arrange
for a third party to provide coverage instead.
But
the Little Sisters and several other religious groups say the
accommodation still forces them to be complicit in providing people
with contraception against their religious beliefs.
By
administratively removing the Johnson amendment, Faith & Freedom
Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed said, the president’s order “removes
a sword of Damocles that has hung over the faith community for
decades.”
He
said ending the Obamacare mandates that violate the religious faith
of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other faith-based nonprofits
“lifts a cloud of fear over people of faith and ensures they will
no longer be subjected to litigation, harassment and persecution
simply for expressing their religious beliefs.”
“This
is just the first bite at the apple, not the last,” Mr. Reed said.
We still support the full statutory repeal of the Johnson Amendment
and Obamacare mandates, but this order is a giant step in the right
direction in protecting the First Amendment rights of Christians and
other Americans of conscience and faith.”
Attorney
Stuart Lark said religious organizations have a “vital interest in
their ability to exercise and express their beliefs as communities of
faith.”
“Our
country has a long history of protecting religious organizations from
laws that substantially burden their ability to act in accordance
with their beliefs,” said Mr. Lark, who has represented religious
organizations for two decades. “These protections foster pluralism
and minimize the impact of government action on private religious
choices, and in so doing they advance core principles underlying the
First Amendment. To the extent the executive Order expands these
protections, it will be a welcome development for the many diverse
faith communities in this country.”
At
the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Mr.
Trump vowed
to “destroy” the provision, known as the Johnson Amendment.
“I
will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson amendment and allow
our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of
retribution,” Mr.
Trump said
at the time.
The
1954 provision prevents tax-exempt organizations from campaigning for
or endorsing political candidates. Some Republican lawmakers and many
conservative faith organizations want to repeal it.
Two
House Republican lawmakers and Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma
Republican, have introduced legislation that would amend the tax code
to “restore free speech” for churches and nonprofits as long as
the speech takes place “in the ordinary course” of the
organization’s activities, and related expenses are minimal.
Some
human-rights groups, including the ACLU, expressed concerned
Wednesday that Mr.
Trump also
is planning to issue an order on religious liberty that, in their
view, would allow religious organizations to discriminate against the
LGBT community by repealing Obama-era regulations. A draft of such an
order was circulating early in the administration, and Mr.
Trump’s
daughter Ivanka was said to be one of those advisers urging him to
shelve the proposed action.
The
ACLU sent an “action alert” to its members Wednesday night,
urging them to flood the White
House with
emails to protest the impending order on religious liberty.
“Religious
freedom does NOT mean the right to discriminate against or harm
anyone,” the group said. “This White
House thinks
it can actively encourage and legitimize discrimination against LGBT
people, women, and religious minorities. The ACLU won’t stand for
it.”
The National Day of Prayer
"Fasting and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the time for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and right can never be safer than in their hands, where the Constitution has deposited it."
—Thomas Jefferson, 1808
First Call of Prayer in 1775
Because of the faith of many of our founding fathers, public prayer and national days of prayer have a long-standing and significant history in American tradition. The Supreme Court affirmed the right of state legislatures to open their sessions with prayer in Marsh vs. Chambers (1983).
The National Day of Prayer is a vital part of our heritage. Since the first call to prayer in 1775, when the Continental Congress asked the colonies to pray for wisdom in forming a nation, the call to prayer has continued through our history, including President Lincoln’s proclamation of a day of “humiliation, fasting, and prayer” in 1863. In 1952, a joint resolution by Congress, signed by President Truman, declared an annual national day of prayer. In 1988, the law was amended and signed by President Reagan, permanently setting the day as the first Thursday of every May. Each year, the president signs a proclamation, encouraging all Americans to pray on this day. Last year, all 50 state governors plus the governors of several U.S. territories signed similar proclamations.
Significance of the National Day of Prayer
The National Day of Prayer has great significance for us as a nation as it enables us to recall and to teach the way in which our founding fathers sought the wisdom of God when faced with critical decisions. It stands as a call for us to humbly come before God, seeking His guidance for our leaders and His grace upon us as a people. The unanimous passage of the bill establishing the National Day of Prayer as an annual event, signifies that prayer is as important to our nation today as it was in the beginning.
Like Thanksgiving or Christmas, this day has become a national observance placed on all Hallmark calendars and observed annually across the nation and in Washington, D.C. Every year, local, state, and federal observances were held from sunrise in Maine to sunset in Hawaii, uniting Americans from all socio-economic, political and ethnic backgrounds in prayer for our nation. It is estimated that over two million people attended more than 30,000 observances – organized by approximately 40,000 volunteers. At state capitols, county court houses, on the steps of city halls, and in schools, businesses, churches and homes, people stopped their activities and gathered for prayer.
The National Day of Prayer is Ours
The National Day of Prayer belongs to all Americans. It is a day that transcends differences, bringing together citizens from all backgrounds. Mrs. Shirley Dobson, NDP chairman, reminds us: “We have lost many of our freedoms in America because we have been asleep. I feel if we do not become involved and support the annual National Day of Prayer, we could end up forfeiting this freedom, too.”
Historical Summary
- 1775 – The first Continental Congress called for a National Day of Prayer
- 1863 – Abraham Lincoln called for such a day.
- 1952 – Congress established NDP as an annual event by a joint resolution, signed into law by President Truman (82-324)
- 1988 – The law was amended and signed by President Reagan, designating the NDP as the first Thursday in May (100-307).
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Finality and Intelligence: Is the Universe Designed?: Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a Greek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.E. (born ca. 500–480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in Athens. He propounded a physical theory of “everything-in-everything,” and claimed that nous(intellect or mind) was the motive cause of the cosmos. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including the claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. Anaxagoras maintained that the original state of the cosmos was a mixture of all its ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients are thoroughly mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is evident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or homogeneous. Although every ingredient is ubiquitous, some ingredients are present in higher concentrations than others, and these proportions may also vary from place to place (even if they do not do so in the original state of the cosmos). The mixture is unlimited in extent, and at some point in time it is set into motion by the action of nous (intellect). The mixture begins to rotate around some small point within it, and as the whirling motion proceeds and expands through the mass, the ingredients in the mixture are shifted and separated out (in terms of relative density) and remixed with each other, ultimately producing the cosmos of apparently separate material masses and material objects, with differential properties, that we perceive.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaxagoras/
Finality and Intelligence : Chapter 1
Leszek Figurski
One
A Historical Note On the Idea of Final Causality
Before Saint Thomas Aquinas
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras was the first among the Greek Philosophers who explicitly
mentions an “ordering mind” as an explanation of the order present in nature. This is
why we have to analyze his philosophy in some depth.
The philosophy of Anaxagoras1 is in many respects a variant of the philosophy
of Empedocles, who was very much influenced by the Ionian philosophers of Nature,
especially Heraclitus on the one hand, and Parmenides and Zeno on the other. With
Parmenides, Anaxagoras accepts the principle that what is cannot stop existing; on
the other hand, being more of a realist, he accepts the obvious fact of change. Thus he
says: “The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and
passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and
separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being
mixture, and passing away separation” (Fragment 17). Here is an attempt to reconcile
the fact of change with the Parmenidean approach. The elements of the world are
unchangeable and infinite in number, a departure from Empedocles, and everything
has a portion of everything else. “All things were together, infinite both in number
and smallness; for the small, too, was infinite. And when all things were together,
none of them could be distinguished for their smallness…” (Fragment 1).
Instead of the “four elements” accepted by the Ionians, we have an infinity of
qualitatively different “seeds” which are united in everything: “And since these
things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and all sorts in
the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of colours, and shapes and
savours. None of the other things is like any other. And these things being so, we
must hold that all things are in the whole” (Fragment 4).
The Anaxagorian theory of nature is thoroughly qualitative and infinitist. There
is an infinite number of qualities in everything and matter is infinitely divisible,
therefore, “All things were together infinite, both in number and in smallness”
(Fragment 1). To the question: how can we distinguish one thing from another, since
“everything is in everything,” Anaxagoras answered by pointing to the predominance
of some elements over others in a thing. This variability in proportion between the
amount of some “seeds” and the amount of other in the thing enables us to distinguish
between them. The “infinitist” element in Anaxagoras' philosophy is not original.
Zeno taught infinite divisibility of matter before him. What is original is the infinity
of qualities introduced by Anaxagoras into his view of the universe. This notion has
an interesting affinity with the two thousand years younger system of Leibniz, where
every monad “reflects” the whole universe.
So far Anaxagoras’ thinking moves on the physical level. In his endeavor to
explain change he did not develop the notion of act/potency. That is why he needed
the infinity of “seeds” all of which he conceived as actual; therefore, „Since it is
impossible for there to be a least thing, they cannot be separated nor come to be by
themselves; but they must be now, just as they were in the beginning, all together”
(Fragment 6).
Anaxagoras, as well as Empedocles, distinguished between matter and
movement or the moving element. Following Parmenides, he accepted matter as
inert. Movement had to come from a separate principle. In order to separate the
elements which were all together, and in order to start movement in the universe, an impulse was necessary and this impulse was supplied by the Mind. Here lies the
original contribution of Anaxagorian philosophy. He was the first one to introduce
the idea of the Nous or Mind. Aristotle praises him for this: „When, therefore,
someone said that mind is present as in animals, so in nature, as the crucial factor
accounting for all order and arrangement, he spoke like a sound-minded man, in
comparison with his fair-spoken predecessors. We know that Anaxagoras certainly
maintained these views.”2 Hegel remarks with admiration: „With Anaxagoras, a light,
if still a weak one, begins to dawn, because the understanding is now recognized as
the principle.”3
Anaxagoras rejected the view that the beginning of the universe and its ordered
development could be the outcome of blind chance or blind necessity; such a view
was incompatible with the order in nature and its rational arrangement. Such an
impulse could come only from a non-mechanical cause, i.e., an Intelligence, from a
Mind. He states it very clearly when he. says:
Nous has power over all things, both the greater and smaller, that have life.
And Nous had power over the whole revolution so that it began to revolve in the
beginning; but the revolution now extends over a larger space and will extend over a
larger one still. And all the things that are mingled together, and separated,
and distinguished are all known by Nous. Nous set in order all things, that were to be,
and all things that were and are not now, and that are, and this revolution in which
now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the aether that are
separated off. There are many portions in many things; but no thing is altogether
separated from nor distinguished from anything else except the Nous. And all Nous is
alike, both the greater and the smaller; while nothing else is like anything else, but
each single thing is and was most manifestly those things of which it has most in it
(Fragment 12).
Two points need elucidation here: the nature of the Nous, and its relation to the
universe.
The nature of the Anaxagorian Nous has received quite divergent
interpretations by different historians of philosophy. We shall not go into technical
details, but the fact that different interpretations are possible is indicative of some
obscurities present in the idea itself. To begin with: “Nous is infinite and self-ruled,
and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself” (Fragment 12) Nous is not
limited by any boundaries; it is infinite and it is alone “itself by itself.” That spells the
ontological independence of the Nous. It is in itself by itself separated from nature in
the sense that it transcends the world. The Nous as transcendent over and above
nature is “the thinnest of all things and the purest and it has knowledge about
everything and the greatest strength” (Fragment 12). The Nous is not differentiated in
itself in any way. Thus “… all Nous is alike, both the greater and the smaller”
(Fragment 12). It seems certain that the Nous is one in itself and not composed in any
way. Anaxagoras seems to have taken some pains to make sure that the Nous not be
conceived as material, or as one element among many in the universe. In his own
words he explains: “For if it (Nous) were not by itself, but were mixed with anything
else, it would partake in all things if it were mixed with any; for in everything there is
a portion of everything, as has been said by me in what goes before, and the things
mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now, being alone by itself'„ (Fragment 12).
Nevertheless, some commentators, e.g., Burnet and Windelband, interpret the
Anaxagorian Nous as a material force only. This would make Anaxagoras a
materialist. It is true that he speaks of Nous, in a language taken from descriptions of
material objects. Words “thinnest,” “great,” “small,” “purest,” are not abstract
enough. He also speaks in one fragment as if the Nous were in space: “And Nous,
whichever is, is certainly there, where everything is, in the surrounding mass, and in what has been divided with it and separated from it” (Fragment 14). However, this
seems to be too narrow and one-sided an interpretation and not a common one. For
instance, Father Copleston remarks: “Probably the most satisfactory interpretation is
that Anaxagoras in his concept of the spiritual did not succeed in grasping clearly the
radical difference between the spiritual and the corporeal.”4
Briefly, the matter can be summarized in the following way. The Nous is
infinite, non-material, transcendent in relation to the world, eternal, ontologically
independent, self-contained, self-ruled, all-powerful. It is Mind, Intelligence.
A more complete picture is shown through an investigation of the kind of
relation the Nous has to the world. To that we shall direct our attention now.
The relation between the Nous and the universe is, despite the fragmentary
nature of the texts, described by Anaxagoras quite amply. The Nous, first of all, “has
all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and Nous has Power over
all things, both greater and smaller that have life” (Fragment 12).
Anaxagoras very often uses the word all. The Nous has “all knowledge” and
“power over all” things. In different terms, it means that the Nous, is all-embracing in
its influence; nothing escapes it. Nothing is outside of its reach. Can we conclude
then that the Nous is all-powerful? Anaxagoras uses the word “greatest strength” in
the context, and since the Nous, as we have seen, is infinite, the inference to “allpowerful”
seems to suggest itself; but we shall not make it. It is enough to note that if
we did, there would be little risk of falsifying his thought.
The word “power” used by Anaxagoras is a bit obscure. He does not elaborate
this notion further. However, it indicates a real influence, a real action and, as such, a
real causing. The Nous, in relation to the universe, is definitely a cause. The nature of
this cause consists in starting an ordered movement in the primitive and inert chaos.
And Nous has power over the whole revolution so that it began to revolve in
the beginning. And it began to revolve first from a small beginning, but the
revolution now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a larger space still.
And all the things that are mingled together and separated off and distinguished from
are all known by Nous. And Nous set in order all things that were to be, and all things
that were and are not now, and that are, and this revolution in which now revolve the
stars and the sun and the moon, and the air and the aether that are separated off. And
this revolution caused the separating off, and the rare is separated off from the dense,
the warm from the cold, the light from the dark, and the dry from the moist. And
there are many portions in many things. But no thing is altogether separated off nor
distinguished from anything else except the Nous (Fragment 12).
This somewhat lengthy quotation is necessary because it contains the main
points related to the question: how is Nous related to the universe?
Commenting on the above passage, it can be said that the Nous is the cause of
all movement in the world; “it has power over the whole revolution.” This means that
any movement in the world is there because of the Nous. The Nous at the same time
is the source and cause of ordered movement: “And Nous set in order all things.”
Putting both elements together we can say that, according to Anaxagoras, the Nous is
the cause of the whole movement in the ordered world. The Nous is at once the
Mover and Orderer of the world. The word “order” here means the opposite of blind,
chaotic, unstable, irrational. Anaxagoras stresses the harmony and stability of the
celestial region (stars, sun, moon, etc.) most, but the Nous also “has power over all
things both greater and smaller that have life” (Fragment 12). It is true that he does
not elaborate further on this point, but he is careful to assert that nothing is without
the influence of the Nous. It is important to stress that the Nous, which sets the inert
matter in motion, by this same action also ordered it. The moving is identical with
ordering and all movement therefore is ordered because it originates from the Nous.
Nous is present in all things including animals, men and all. “And Nous, whichever
is, is certainly there where everything else is, in the surrounding mass, and in what
has been united with it and separated off from it” (Fragment 14).
The relation of the Nous to matter (primeval chaos) can be summarized in the
following points. The Nous is transcendent to it, but also immanently active in it.
The transcendence was sufficiently seen already, and the immanence is obvious from
the passage discussed above. The Nous originates and causes movement in the
material world; it orders the world; it is in the world; it determines the regularity in
everything; it changes inert chaos into a dynamic cosmos. It is the cause and principle
which brings lawful, rational, stable order out of the disorder of the primitive chaos.
It is safe to say that, although not elaborated enough, Anaxagoras proposed the
rudiments of the teleological view of nature. His main contribution consists in
introducing into Greek philosophy transcendent Mind as a real active factor in
cosmology. Nobody had done it before him. The rationality and harmony of the
universe had indeed been observed by the Greek thinkers before, e.g., Heraclitus, but
no one had developed the notion of a Transcendent Mind as explicitly as Anaxagoras.
The teleological approach represented by Anaxagoras was subject nevertheless
to very serious limitations. The principal limitation is lack of precision both in
language and in deeper insight. Anaxagoras, in spite of all he said, did not elaborate
his system on a metaphysical level with enough clarity. The idea of Nous is not fully
developed; it is appealed to only insofar as it is necessary for explaining movement
and order in the world. It certainly is not portrayed as personal. Cosmic elements,
celestial bodies, even the whole world was believed to have a soul. Nor is the Nous a
creator of the world in the sense of cause of its total being. The primeval “seeds” are eternal or co-eternal with the Nous.
A more serious limitation is that Anaxagoras seems to have limited the action
of the Nous to the first moving impulse after which the rest of the process develops
mechanically by itself. “And Nous had power over the whole revolution so that it
began to revolve in the beginning. And it began to revolve first from a small
beginning; but the revolution now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a
larger still” (Fragment 14). “And when Nous began to move things, separating off
took place from all that was moved and as much as Nous set in motion was all
separated. And as things were set in motion and separated, the revolution caused
them to be separated much more” (Fragment 14).
Thus the Nous gave only the first impulse of ordered motion, although
Anaxagoras did suggest that this impulse once given spreads itself more and more.
But how? What governs this spreading? Is it mechanical? To these and similar
questions Anaxagoras did not give any answers. Thus Aristotle, who praised him for
introducing the Nous into the explanation of nature, seems to be justified when he
says: “Anaxagoras introduces mind to create the world mechanically, as a god is
introduced on the stage in a play. When he is confronted with the difficulty of
explaining why a thing is of necessity, he drags the mind in sideways; in other
explanations, however, he uses everything rather than the mind to account for the
facts.”5 A similar complaint is put by Plato into the mouth of Socrates: “I once heard
a man reading a book, as he said, of Anaxagoras, and saying it was MIND that
ordered the world and was the cause of all things. I was delighted to hear of this
cause, and I thought he really was right. But my extravagant expectations were all
dashed to the ground when I went on and found that the man made no use of MIND
at all. He ascribed no causal power whatever to it in the ordering of things, but to airs,
and aethers, and waters and a host of other strange things.”6
It is difficult to quarrel with Aristotle and Socrates, both of whom probably had
access to far more material and consequently had a more adequate insight into the philosophy of Anaxagoras than we have today. Nevertheless, and in spite of all its
limitations, the Anaxagorian approach represents a significant and original
contribution on the level of the metaphysical explanation in Greek cosmology. We
repeat that the introduction of a transcendent mind over and above nature as a
principle of movement and order is certainly a great step forward and a crucial
beginning in the introduction of the idea of final causes into the philosophy of the
cosmos in the West.
There is very little ground for assuming that Anaxagoras directed much
attention to the explanation of living organisms, the adaptation of organs and their
ends, or the system of nature as beneficent to man. He does not develop any genuine
idea of purpose, or end, as a good to be attained, and that is why it is difficult to know
whether he had such a notion of finality at all. In the extant fragments none of those
notions exists. From the above mentioned remarks by Aristotle and Socrates it may
be assumed that he quite often explained things mechanically. The Nous is nowhere
mentioned as acting for an end, neither is there any overall end assigned to the
cosmos. None of the basic elements of his philosophy are really elaborated in detail
as a thorough metaphysical analysis would require. The distance between his position
and of that adapted by Aristotle or Plato, not to mention Aquinas is still immense.
Nevertheless, the significance of Anaxagoras, as the philosopher who pointed to the
necessity to the necessity of accepting a transcendent Mind, as a necessary element in
cosmological explanation of the world and the order found in it, on the metaphysical
level, remains indisputable. In the light of all that has just been pointed out, it is
extremely difficult to agree with Burnet when he sees the main contribution of
Anaxagoras as his theory of substance!7 Hegel, already quoted in this paper, seemed
to be closer to truth when he said: “With Anaxagoras, the light, if still a weak one,
begins to dawn, because understanding is now recognized as the principle.”
Finality and Intelligence
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Posted by Irene Saunder the managing editor of http://www.dpl21.com/
www.distanceprofessionallearning.com
and Leszek Figurski org.com
www.distanceprofessionallearning.com
and Leszek Figurski org.com
Monday, May 1, 2017
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