AtF: Frustration Sets In

I am really starting to despise Bill Cooper’s methodology. I mean, if I didn’t know any better, I’d be thinking he’s actually some sort of crackpot approaching historical discovery with a pre-determined answer already in mind. Oh. Wait. Anyway, today we get to start with a quote from Chrysippus. (Side note, mostly because I need this sort of thing to keep myself from committing ritual suicide: I’m on my new laptop, which runs 64-bit Vista as its OS. I was just switching between windows and instead of hitting alt-tab, which I usually do, I hit windows-tab. Instead of getting the window switch, I got a little rolodex-looking thing of all my open programs and the desktop. That’s awesome. In case you’re wondering, I fully intend to play with this feature throughout the writing of this post. So just pretend I’m giggling like a small child while doing something utterly pointless that’s probably not all that neat.) Oh, right, Chrysippus. He was a Greek Stoic philosopher. We’re now to the point in the program where Cooper tries to argue that the Stoics were even more, um, seekritly Jewish, I guess, than Plato. This, I suppose, is something that should be addressed. Christianity has a problem. Well, okay, it has several. The big one, though, is that whole Hell thing. When you claim to be a world religion and base your god off of a relentlessly tribal diety borrowed from the National Epic of a decidedly introverted people you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. Moreover, when you insist on giving your revelation a date and time and telling everyone that those who don’t accept the revelation are doomed, you’re by default fucking over everyone from before that revelation. You’re also not really helping those people who don’t have a chance of hearing the revelation. At the time of Jesus there were millions of Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Australian aborigines, American Indians, and for that matter, Celtic, Germanic, and African tribes on the outside of the Roman Empire that probably didn’t have a chance to hear about the noble sacrifice of god to god for the propitiation of their sins. That just doesn’t seem very fair, does it? It is, in fact, a pretty good attack to level against the Christian missionary. Of course, Christianity has had almost two thousand years to come up with ways of addressing this particular issue. Considering that some of the greatest minds of the Western world have been preoccupied with this belief system, they’ve managed to make a few stick… There’s the simple repetition of the Bible verse that says the heavens declare god’s glory. This is from, as I recall, (and, now, the internet tells me) Psalm 19. According to the use of this phrase from a poem of praise, the next logical response is to worship the one true god. Therefore, those poor, benighted Chinese have no excuse because all they have to do is walk outside, look up at the sky and say, “Oh. God. I get it. Somebody pass the Eucharist.” Just in case somebody, somewhere, had the perspicacity to notice that this is an extremely dumb argument, several other ideas were put in to place. This is why, for instance, the very outer circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno contains the righteous pagans and once contained the heroes of the Jewish Bible. It’s also why Virgil escorts Dante through Hell, but cannot ascend even as far as purgatory. Dante didn’t just make this stuff up. He was cribbing off of a thousand years of Church theology. And, just in case anyone decides to ask why those pagans were righteous (for it certainly could not have been simple human nature. Humans are debased and horrible and cruel at all times without the revelation of the one true religion, after all), the explanation comes that we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. So through the first couple we’re all debased, but we also still have the tiniest glow of walking in the Garden in the cool of the morning with god hisownself and all stories and myths are actually corrupted attempts to hand down the oral history of that whole Applegate thing. And even if you did manage to crack the super secret code (as, apparently, we’re to believe Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and a bunch of other philosophers did), you’re still fucked without Jesus. Just, y’know, in a slightly nicer way where you have to spend eternity in Hell’s suburb constantly encumbered by the knowledge that you’re not actually going to get to go anywhere fun and all those evil sinners are passing through and bringing down property values. So it’s kind of like living in Wheaton, Illinois (oh, hometown burn! No, seriously, I was in Wheaton just yesterday. It’s lovely in the spring. I stopped at the jewelry store to get my watch fixed for the second time in two weeks and was assaulted by, I think, the David Crowder Band. I spent most of my time muttering, “Fucking Wheaton,” under my breath. Also, they screwed up ordering me a new watch band. And they told me the battery was weak, even though I got a new battery less than six months ago. I should find a new jewelry store.) Now, all the theologians who worked on the whole righteous pagan problem ever got around to applying old William of Ockham’s celebrated razor to the issue. Ironically this list seems to include William of Ockham himself. Nobody seems to think that maybe we shouldn’t be blaming creation for being so dense. It makes a lot more sense to blame god for not inventing YouTube until, like, six thousand years after Adam and Eve screwed it all up for the rest of us than to blame people for being, well, people and communication for being so very slow way back in the day. Ultimately, this brings us to Bill Cooper’s book itself. And this explains why I’m spending my Sunday mornings writing about it. Hell, it beats going to church. For one thing, the music is way better. So’s the TV. Unfortunately, at the moment this means I get to spend my Sundays wandering around in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. In case anybody out there needs to answer the question, “What’s Geds’ least favorite book,” in order to win a million dollars from Regis, put ol’ Cicero at the top of your list. Of course, it’s made much, much worse by the fact that Bill Cooper CAN’T PROPERLY CITE WORKS FROM ANTIQUITY. Seriously. They’re broken out according to book, chapter, paragraph, and sentence. Or, um, pick three. This dipshit doesn’t even give page numbers half the time and there’s a question mark next to the year of publication in one of his footnotes. So, I guess, the question is, “What the hell did you really expect, Captain Actuallyhasadegreeinhistory?” Anyway, I digress. So Cooper has decided that Chrysippus had the last, best thing to say about the nature of the gods. He cribbed this from Cicero:

If there is anything in nature which the human mind, which human intelligence, energy and power could not create, then the creator of such things must be a being superior to man. But the heavenly bodies in their eternal orbits could not be created by man. They must therefore be created by a being greater than man ...Only an arrogant fool would imagine that there was nothing in the whole world greater than himself. Therefore there must be something greater than man. And that something must be God.

I’ve got a great argument against this one. These arguments are founded on the same erroneous principles as Zeno's, for he does not define what is meant by being better or more excellent, or distinguish between an intelligent cause and a natural cause. Okay, I’ll admit it. I stole that last sentence. You’ll never guess where it came from, though. Are you ready? It’s the very next line in De Natura Deorum (search in page for "The arguments of Chrysippus appeared to you of great weight"). Not only that, it’s spoken by Cotta, who is Cicero’s mouthpiece for Stoicism. Context. It’s kind of important. And, seriously, trying to figure that out confused me for about 20 minutes. Either way, it’s a stupid argument to try to make in the 21st Century, anyway. No one is going to tell you that humans made the heavenly bodies. We’re also not going to claim that those orbits are eternal. What we’re really looking at is a modified ontological argument. The standard ontological argument says that if you can imagine something as good as god, then there must be a god. In this case the situation is reversed and says, “I can’t imagine something without god, therefore god.” I can’t imagine being able to wake up tomorrow without a naked Kristen Bell in my bed. I also can’t imagine going to work in anything other than my brand-new Corvette ZR1. I’ll, uh, I’ll let you know how that works out for me. Either way, this chapter keeps pulling me in two different directions. I want to point out how dumb Bill Cooper’s arguments are. But in doing that I have to ignore the purpose of his arguments. So let’s regroup and remember. He’s not trying to say that the ancient Greeks were right or wrong. He’s trying to say that the smart ancient Greeks were that way because they somehow knew the Bible. So it doesn’t matter whether I agree with Epicurus, Zeno, or Cicero. What matters is that they don’t agree with the ancient Jews. Actually, even that isn’t the case. What matters is that they didn’t get their philosophy from ancient Judaism. Even though Cooper does his best to not-argue the Jews in to the equation. Of course, he does this by insulting the Greeks. What other way is there to do things? In reference to the Chrysippus quote I’ve already brought up, Cooper claims, “This may be a good place to briefly reflect upon the somewhat mysterious source of such endearingly plain logic, a plainness of logic indeed that is quite uncharacteristic of Greek philosophy.” I’m not actually sure how to respond to this one. I mean, just because Plato, Epicurus, Aristotle, and probably the horse crap Xenophon scraped off his sandal on the shores of the Black Sea were way smarter than Bill Cooper, that doesn’t mean anything. Just because Plato, Epicurus, Aristotle, and Xenophon are still smarter than Bill Cooper even though they’ve been dead for nearly as long as Cooper thinks the Earth is old, that doesn’t mean that this quote makes a damn bit of sense in any context. Endearingly plain my left foot. The reason you think it’s endearingly plain, Mr. Cooper, is because you think it sounds kind of like an argument you would make. “I don’t have to twist the words beyond all meaning to make them say what I want them to say,” is not “endearingly plain.” Our author might actually want to go with an “endearingly plain” argument from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Of course, Cooper would probably get that wrong, too. Socrates’ statement was one of the most self-aware philosophies in human history. I think that self-awareness is in precariously short supply in the six-day, 6000 year-old Earth crowd. Either way, he goes on with this endearingly plain bit of stupidity:

The Christian faith had yet to be born, its influence on Greek thought still lying some centuries into the future. So could it perhaps have been through the agency of the recently Hellenized Jews who, albeit they horrified the orthodox of their faith by mingling much of Judaism with Greek thought and practices, unwittingly carried with them into the Greek camp an inherent knowledge of the God of Genesis in a kind of theological Trojan horse?

Not a lick of this makes sense. And it’s not just because Cooper apparently can’t be bothered to learn the sorting method to choose between “albeit” and “although.” Merriam-Webster tells me that “although” is actually a meaning of “albeit,” but I pretty much refuse to believe that. And there’s no way that’s not clunky in the above sentence. Anyway, there are any number of problems with this line of thought. Fortunately, I don’t have to point them out because Cooper helpfully follows his previous thought with, “[t]he answer is no, for apart from the fact that one can hardly claim that Jewish philosophical thought was any less complex and sophistic than that of the Greeks, there are also strong historical and chronological grounds for denying Jewish influence in the sphere of Greek philosophy at this particular point in history.” Yeah. You saw that. Cooper just accused the Jews of sophistry. Probably because they had the audacity to not accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior even though it’s right there in the Bible. Specifically, it’s page 176 in my version. Right there, in bold face in the middle of the page. Poor Jews. Always getting shat upon for not believing things other people claim are in their texts. Then again, if it’s apparently possible to read the Christian god in to the texts of Plato and Zeno, I guess you can read the guy in to any book. Anyway, next time around I’ll try not to put a knife through my skull while I try to parse Cooper’s thoughts on the Hellenization and Romanization of the Jews. And, I promise, I’ll get to the world’s earliest watchmaker analogy next time. Pinky swear.