Entertain Me Now! I Don’t Care How!

For those not 'in the know' as far as pro football goes, a former New England Patriots employee has come out of hiding (i.e. playing golf in Hawaii) to say that he has info about what the Patriots have done in the past (as far back as 2000) as far as videotaping defensive signals and using them to win games, and that Head Coach Bill Belichick's previous claim that he "misinterpreted the rule" is completely false. When Walsh met with NFL commissioner Goodell, Goodell gave a statement that pretty much said, "This guy didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I'm not going to punish the Patriots any further than I already have. Everything is A-OK." However, when Walsh met with PA Senator Arlen Specter, Specter wanted an investigation into the matter and released a rather large statement on what he learned from Walsh. Now, I admit there are some things in the statement that seem kind of overkill. For example, the claim that the Patriots filmed offensive signals….what offensive signals? Maybe they are referring to offensive formations, I don't know, but that part doesn't make sense.

My point in all this, however, is not about the Patriots or Matt Walsh at all. It's about the flippant attitude of the general public that I am seeing in the comments on various NFL news websites. Everyone says, "This is stupid, can we just get this behind us, all teams cheat, Specter's just mad because New England beat the Eagles in the superbowl, Specter is doing this because he gets money from Comcast and Comcast doesn't like the NFL/NFL Network, this is conspiracy theory, nothing wrong was done, etc. etc."

If everyone cheats, that's not grounds for not punishing the Patriots, it's grounds for punishing/penalizing everyone that cheats! Why does no one care that the games being enjoyed are not genuinely competitive? Because we all just want to be entertained. Who cares if the wins are legit? Why do we have to listen to all this serious stuff? I just want to watch football, even if all the teams cheat to get ahead. Some people would say that since all the teams cheat (which I don't think is true by the way) that no one actually gets an upper hand by cheating and so should not be punished. That's the most inane, ridiculous thing ever. You don't punish the team because they gain an upper hand by cheating! You punish the team because they cheated regardless of the result of said cheating! If a group of students cheat on an exam, but only one actually gets an A, you don't punish that one student because he got an A and the others who cheated didn't. You punish all of those who cheated…because they cheated. OH, but punishing the Patriots or Belichick would disrupt our entertainment, we'd rather watch a good cheating team than some teams that genuinely want to compete…well, boo hoo for you.

What Are You Committed To? The Means or the End?

Obervation->Hypothesis->Experiment->Conclusion/Analysis->Repeat

This is, in it's simplest form, the scientific method. Scientific Method. A method is a way to do something or a way of going about doing something. What are we doing in science by using the scientific method? We are exploring and finding truth. Finding truth about how things in this existence work. How things really are; that is our main concern in science. So, how did things get so inverted and distorted so that rather than truth our goal towards which we strive is not the purpose of the method; truth, but is the method itself. Several New Atheists (R. Dawkins for example) will talk about our commitment to methodological naturalism. Why? Why does this commitment exist? From what evidence of the truth of physicalism and naturalism, does this commitment to the scientific method as a means to discover all truth come? None. There is none. We have chosen to vacuously commit ourselves, as a culture, to the means rather than the end that the means exists for! Why don't we as a culture strive for truth? And if we find that there could exist things in this world that are outside the physical, that there could be things that analysis of the physical and the scientific method cannot explain, then why should we be so closed off to that possibility? What a dead world this is, if all our emotions: happiness, sadness, excitement, disappointment, joy, surprise, and all social interaction are nothing but molecular interactions in our brain.

If all the glory of our humanity and our being is to be found in these chemical reactions occurring inside of us, then what is there to worship but ourselves? (everyone worships something/someone...different argument for a different day) Truly, the reason we, as a culture, are in love with and commit to methodological naturalism, and the means rather than the end is because it gives us a reason to worship ourselves...because if we didn't adhere to these things, then their surely wouldn't be a reason to put ourselves high up on a pedestal, and since we worship ourselves anyway, regardless...we might as well falsely justify it by rationalizing it with a false assumption, right?

Harry G. Frankfurt effectively defines bullshit as; the disregard for truth. I leave you with a quote from his book called On Bullshit:

It is Just this lack of connection to a concern with truth -- this indifference to how things really are -- that I regard as the essence of bullshit...

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Jude Michael

Here's my boy! Born 2/21/08

Jude 1:24-25 Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.