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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Fallacy of the Epicurean Paradox

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One of the most common quotes and memes of the era of the “New Atheist,” the very online phenomenon of virulently polemic, attention-seeking, anti-God “intellectuals” that took root in the early part of this century and (fortunately) seems to have run its course for the most part, is this one. It still is quoted a lot, however, by lingering and aging followers of the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and other celebrities of the “Angry Atheist” cadre, as well as a few social-media acquaintances who have had bad experiences in their lives, therefore in their minds, God must not exist.

Epicurean Paradox Meme

The fallacy behind this supposed “paradox” has been apparent to me vaguely yet powerfully (a big but blunt mallet) for a long time, 25 years or more, in the wantonly presumptuous judgmentalism directed at God by statement two of that string (malevolence). However, not until recently, in a comment to another hoisting of the tiresome meme, I finally struck the root problem and then was able to articulate it.

Epicurus’ paradox is trite and superficial. The issue ultimately revolves around the concept of God-given liberty (free will). How?

* God values significantly free creatures: A world containing intelligent beings with genuine moral freedom (the ability to choose good or evil) is more valuable than a world of automata who always do good because they have no real choice. True love, virtue, and relationship with God require the real possibility of refusal. That’s because involuntary love is not love. To allow for voluntary love, He permits malevolence to exist. This doesn’t mean He is malevolent, any more than my permitting my kids to fail and risk pain (in order to learn) would mean I hate them. Put another way: tough love!

* Freedom and evil are logically linked: It is logically impossible for God to create beings who are significantly free to choose, yet guaranteed never to choose evil. If God forces them always to choose good, they are not truly free to make that choice. As Plantinga put it, even an omnipotent God cannot do what is logically contradictory (e.g., create a square circle or free creatures who are not free). This is not a constraint on God if you realize that logic and reason are His creations, bestowed upon us as gifts of capability.

Therefore, moral evil is possible and actual: Much of the evil we see (war, murder, cruelty) results from the free choices of humans (and possibly fallen angels). God allows it not because He is powerless or malevolent, but because eliminating the possibility of evil would require eliminating genuine freedom — a greater good.

This is logically consistent with God’s Biblical attributes; in the Bible, he knowingly allowed numerous good people, even his own Son, to suffer, deeply. Before Jesus, He also directly inflicted suffering and death upon evildoers and those who disobeyed Him, precisely for those reasons. Under these contexts, God quite possibly — reasonably in fact — has a morally sufficient reason for creating a world with free creatures, even though it contains evil. Plantinga constructs a possible world (a coherent scenario) where God and evil coexist without contradiction.

The skeptic must prove it is impossible for God to have such a reason — something no one has successfully done.

Faced with that, the skeptic either admits that hole in his argument, or claims (without evidence) that there is no God. I’m thankful not to be in that person’s shoes, and instead, to understand that God, having an intellect infinitely superior to mine, logically must possess reasoning and reasons I cannot possibly grasp without being on His level, and live with that. That includes reasons for evil and suffering. So it is.

I’ll acknowledge, I’m smart — since I was a little kid, many have said, very much or extremely so. Regardless, I still cannot compare to God, who graced me with a strong gift, yet still, an infinitely tiny fraction of His own capacity for understanding. I’m content to concede that without hesitation, and with waiting until I’m in His infinite and holy company to find out more than I’m capable of understanding, under the current physiological limitations of my quite imperfect, earthly neurological construction. Once one has reached that level of both self-awareness and surrender of pride, it’s actually easier to comprehend His vastness, even if in the smallest of ways. I encourage the same from fellow “intellectuals,” because it’s both a reassuring and rational place to be with one’s own capacities.

Charlie Kirk’s Murder, Response and Legacy

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As somebody who was born four floors above and four years after JFK’s murdered body was rushed into the ER in futility, who was immersed in knowledge of his assassination throughout childhood, and who has studied it extensively, along with the killings of RFK and MLK, I know a bit about political violence. We seem to be back into that sort of terrible era again with two attempts on Trump, a couple of state-legislator killings by a sicko in Minnesota, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month. [This occurred on my flight to Hawaii for Kilauea Episode 33…more on that later.]

Charlie leaves behind a lovely young widow, Erika, and their two little kids, all because some deranged radical didn’t like his ideals. Must it be this way?

Political violence is evil, absolutely intolerable, and has no place in civil society. Disagreements and grievances should be aired through rational debate and discussion, with logic, reason, facts, and the humility that comes with not having all the answers. That is a nonpartisan statement.

So far, I’ve seen posts from men, women, people of different faiths, nationalities, backgrounds and appearances, mourning the loss of Charlie Kirk. Let their voices ring truest—none I’ve read yet more well-written under intense personal grief than Dennis Prager’s (below), who knew Charlie as a brilliant mind, faithful servant of God, and also, husband and father to a young family.

As an American, as a Jew, and as Dennis, I am devastated at the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The truth is, as I write these words, I can’t believe I am writing them. I am in the denial stage of mourning. As an American, we have lost the most articulate spokesman for America and its unique value system—a country founded to be free, based on Jerusalem and Athens, the Judeo-Christian value system and the Greek emphasis on logic and reason. Charlie was a uniquely gifted individual who, in his teens, created the largest movement of young Americans committed to preserving and growing America and its ideals. He tirelessly went from campus to campus, from Oxford to Utah, dialoging with any student who wished to debate him. Using his vast reservoir of facts and his exceptionally speedy and articulate mind, he gave them what seemed to be unlimited amounts of time, and then calmly eviscerated all their anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Judeo-Christian positions. I watched an inordinate number of these exchanges and thanked God that Charlie Kirk was there to do this work. America’s youth in particular have lost a moral and intellectual leader, one who would, perhaps, have one day become their president. As a committed Jew, I thank God regularly that a non-Jew, a committed Christian, became one of the few great public spokesmen on behalf of Israel and the Jewish communities outside of Israel. Few Jews could match Charlie’s knowledge and eloquent arguments on behalf of those two entities.

As Dennis, I have lost a very close friend. Charlie repeatedly visited me in the various hospitals that I have been in since November 12 of last year, when I suffered a catastrophic fall which has left me paralyzed. When members of the nursing staff heard that Charlie Kirk was visiting me, my room became the most popular one in the hospital. Charlie brought me the manuscript of his forthcoming book arguing that everyone—Christians as well as Jews—should observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, just as he and his family had begun to do from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. It is a measure of our close relationship that he dedicated the book to me. His brilliant exposition of these arguments provide clear evidence for the non-necessity of a college education for most young Americans.

My heart breaks for his young widow, Erika, and for his two children, who have lost as great a man and a father as children can have. And for Charlie, who did not live to see them grow up. For one of the first times in my 20 years with my wife, Sue, I have seen her sob uncontrollably. The Prager home is in deep mourning, as are the homes of countless Americans. The loss to us personally and to the country generally is immeasurable.

Commentator Ivyonna Corrine had a brilliant post too, which I’ll also reproduce below, corrected for punctuation and grammar:

It’s wild to me how quick people are to slap labels on Charlie Kirk without actually knowing what he stands for. He’s been called racist…but where is the evidence? Go back through his years of speaking at college campuses, podcasts, interviews, debates, you won’t find him using racial slurs, degrading a race, or promoting hate. Not once. What you will find is him debating issues like immigration, education, the economy… and culture. Those are policy discussions, NOT racism.

Calling him racist because you don’t like his politics is lazy. It waters down the meaning of the word and takes away from the fight against actual racism. If someone truly believed he was racist they would be able to show proof. But they can’t, because it doesn’t exist. All they have is name calling.

He’s had thousands of open conversations on college campuses with people of every background, and guess what? The majority of those exchanges end with respect, even if they disagree. He’s been called sexist, but why? Because he’s pro life? Because he believes men and women are different? Having a conviction about protecting unborn children or recognizing biological differences doesn’t make you sexist. It means you are willing to stand for life and truth even when it’s unpopular.

He’s been called homophobic/transphobic, but again, where’s the proof? Saying “men can’t become women” is not hate on his part. It’s biology. Protecting kids from being pushed into irreversible decisions isn’t hate. It’s compassion. He has debated LGBTQ+ issues face to face without name calling, without hate, with facts.

He’s been called a fascist/Nazi, which is honestly laughable. Fascism silences speech. Charlie has spent his entire career defending free speech. Nazis took away rights, and Charlie advocates every day for the protection of rights in the Constitution. The comparison doesn’t even make sense.

He’s been called a bigot or accused of spreading hate, but what is hateful about encouraging young people to think critically, question government, and protect their freedoms? If you actually listen, he debates respectfully, and even when people scream at him he holds himself fully. That’s not hate, that’s self control.

And he’s been accused of spreading misinformation, but here’s the thing: every time people try to “fact check” him, the debates usually end with the person walking away because they can’t answer his questions. He brings data, statistics and constitutional backing. That’s not misinformation, that’s inconvenient truth.

At the end of the day, Charlie Kirk was not racist. He was not sexist. He was not hateful. He was bold. He was outspoken. And he was unafraid to say the things that needed to be said in a world where people get canceled for speaking how WE FEEL and the truth. He’s allowed his thoughts, just as in America you are too. So if you’re going to label him at least label him correctly: unapologetically American.

Let voices like these drown out those demonic cackles of celebration sprinkled over social media. The overtly diabolical celebrators are obvious. Block and move on if it helps, but do pray for the expulsion of their demons.

Perhaps more insidious are the passive-aggressive folks—some even labeling themselves as fellow Christians—who assigned Charlie such wholly unfounded labels as Ivyonna covered, based on weak and out-of-context interpretations and assumptions, but not actual hard evidence, who haven’t read his literature nor seen multiples of his videos, who talk often about tolerance, love, kindness and empathy without showing those qualities toward Christian conservatives, and who are showing two faces.

When people reveal themselves from behind the mask of virtue signaling and faux tolerance and “empathy”, pay attention. Observe, be watchful, and pray for them. A mask of kindness and empathy, hiding a mindset of the very opposite, reveals itself in such times as these. Charlie wasn’t perfect. None of us are free of sin. That includes me. I certainly recognize sin when I see it, and I see a lot of stones being cast Charlie’s way from behind those “kindness and empathy” facades.

To all fellow conservatives/libertarians who are infuriated, feeling helpless in the face of this and other recent violence, tempted to lash out: I get it. This enrages me as well. But remember who Charlie followed: Jesus. And remember how Charlie both followed and set a great example in taking obvious risk to go into hostile atmospheres to engage through dialog and ideas. Never resort to true hate (not the same as the false equivalency of hate and disapproval continually posited by the left), destruction or retaliation in kind. Be better than those psychopathic ghouls and mouth-foaming zealots of the left who readily could be found celebrating or rationalizing evil, across social media in the days following the killing. They need urgent psychological treatment, and most of all, they need to find the Lord, who ultimately will be the final judge of all events and people.

Finally, for 50 years, I’ve read and watched great speeches by political figures from antiquity through the men on Mount Rushmore, to Churchill, Reagan and beyond. This, from Utah Governor Spencer Cox, has come out of nowhere to take its place among the very best, not only for the transcribable text, but for the raw and unvarnished sincerity plainly apparent behind the wise words. For context in posterity, I linked not just to the video, but a local news story containing it.

We all could do well to heed. As I’ve stated in some recent comment: Freedom of speech under threat of violence is not freedom at all.

Rest in Heaven, Charlie. We can honor his legacy, and that of other nonviolent agents of change like MLK and Jesus, by fighting bad ideas not with violence and destruction, but with better ideas.

Mass Murder as Godless Societal Nihilism

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The problem of mass killings, and casual murder in general in our cities, goes much deeper than governmental regulations, weapons, or even mental-health issues and what to do with sociopaths. All are interesting but second-order in influence, and brutally overplayed flashpoints for division and discord.  There’s a greater, overarching issue to be seen!

The mass murder, as a small subset of an even more-pervasive nihilism problem, is indeed one born of a pervasive culture of moral degradation — directly paralleling incremental cultural abandonment of Biblical principles.  Yes, I’m talking about God, right at you, and not the least hesitant to do so.

Don’t believe me?  While correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causality, the massive mountain of statistical evidence leaves no other viable common thread.  I’ll leave it to the skeptical reader to self-motivate enough, to go through the effort, to find graphs of the following since the Supreme Court’s 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision (all of which I have seen):
*  Teen pregnancy
*  Abortion (teen or all)
*  Divorce rate
*  Single-mother households
*  Adultery rate
*  Unmarried and living together
*  SAT test scores
*  Teen murder rate
*  Teen suicides
*  Preteen suicides
*  Arrest rates of minors
*  Illegal drug use (teen or adult)
*  Venereal (sexually transmitted) disease
*  Rape rate in any of several pre-adult age groups
*  Homelessness rate (any age group)
*  School killings.

Any one of those trends corresponding so well with Engel can be dismissed as coincidence.  The more you examine, the less “coincidental” it becomes.

Not a single one of these mass killers (from this one back through the Murrah bombing that included a day-care center, to the perpetrator of the deadliest school massacre, in 1927, with dynamite), had the Holy Spirit in his heart. If he had, there would have been no killing.

There is the common denominator. Not race nor ancestry. Not type of weapon. Not geography. Godless thought and action. A failure of society, parents, schools and individuals to put the Lord first and follow His will, and in doing so, nourish and flourish a culture steeped in worship and reverence for someone much bigger and more important than self.

This nation can not fit a government-shaped peg into a God-shaped hole.

“No theocracy!” someone reflexively and defensively replies.

“theocracy” = red herring

I type not of a governmental solution (whether theocracy or “gun control”). Again, you’re not going to fit a government-shaped peg into a God-shaped hole. To ban guns, our Constitution will need amendment.  Good luck with that; the Founders quite deliberately made it a drawn-out, arduous process so as not to subjugate our rule of law to the whim of social fads and short-fused reactionary emotionalism.  Even in the unlikely event of Constitutional amendment, it will be no more effective than the last prohibition we attempted that way (alcoholic beverages). Did that lesson not get learned?

Instead, I’m talking about *societal mores* and the one perfect source for them.

See the forest from the trees. People are focused on the bark of the trees here, indeed on galls on the bark and worms inside. Back out of the forest and see the social disease yellowing all the trees.  What is that disease?  Individual failure to obey our Lord, multiplied my tens of millions into a collective, malignant societal cancer spreading across decades.  Hence all the trends those graphs show in societal and moral degradation.

Want a common demonstrator? I gave one, from a Christian perspective. Christians believe the Lord’s word. That includes John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  That quote from Jesus Christ means exactly what it says.

No one gets to God but through Jesus — the ultimate eternal purveyor of love and justice.  You bet it is an exclusive statement, one that makes even a lot of Christians uncomfortable, because they want to go along to get along, to fit in with wordly “inclusivity”, not make waves, not be principled and courageous.  So yes, being a former God-denying heathen myself, and still a sinner as long as I’m of this world, I can imagine how it would discomfort unbelievers.  I used to resent that statement too.

But there it was, in His own words, like it or not. That’s why I specifically use Jesus and not any other gods, including government, power, money, celebrities, so-called “social justice”, or any other common objects of idolatry.  Instead I worship the God of the Trinity, not anything or anyone worldly.

That’s fundamental Christian doctrine 101, right from the Source himself. Don’t like it? Maybe you should be uncomfortable. Part of agape love includes tough love: delivering what you may not want to hear, but need to hear. Often in life, the best results arise from discomfort.

“Non-religious people can have morals too!”  Sure they can.  But whose?  His or her own, of course.  And since everybody is different, and everybody is flawed, everybody’s self-defined morals will be different and flawed too. Which one of those 7+ billion is right?  Without the oversight of a consistent, higher authority, how do you determine that?  Feelings?  Suuuure.

Only one higher authority is perfect.  It ain’t government, which is made of sin-ridden people.  It ain’t the U.N., likewise.  It ain’t even “society”, again, likewise.  It’s God the Father of Jesus Himself, who always has been and always will be.

What other objective, consistent, unambiguous moral truths are there? Feel free to stake your claim to them if they exist, and explain how they fit those three adjectives.  Hint:  Not happening.

Consider why you may be uncomfortable with shedding imperfect worldly human standards and instead adopting the objective moral truth of the Lord. Don’t answer to me; your morals are not my concern as much as God’s. So please instead bring them to Him, in prayer. You might be surprised what you hear back, whether right then, or in due time.

If the ideals of the Holy Spirit in people (who, I reiterate, don’t commit mass murders when under that influence), and of the “agape love” are troublesome, that is a manifestation of the larger cultural problem about which I type.

Love solves this.

I don’t mean the dreamy, foggy, ambiguous, new-agey, Marianne Williamson hocus pocus BS either, but the true and unchanging love of God, whose Word prescribes values and virtues wholly antithetical to premeditated violence of any sort.  Fill individuals with the Holy Spirit, and they don’t shoot nor bomb schools, nor gas subways, nor blow up day-cares with Ryder trucks full of fertilizer, nor fly planes into skyscrapers.

Love. Agape love. The kind that you find when a whole, spiritually healthy family gathers around the dinner table to pray. That’s what this society needs.

Broken families, and fatherlessness in particular, aren’t part of God’s design. Want evidence? Look all around the news and your communities at how the incomplete families, including not just the wreckages of divorce, but those where both parents are there nominally but at least one is checked out into some other world (work, addictions of some sort, partying, etc.).  Al of us know troubled and fractured families, unless we live in an Amish commune, in which case you aren’t reading this.

That familial brokenness, writ en masse, is how we get the results we see.

So before I found it out, I told Elke:  “This kid in Uvalde was from a fatherless household. Mark my words.” Then she informed me that yes, that was true. We storm forecasters get really good at pattern recognition, and not just in meteorology — especially the very few of us from the inner city, who have been there, seen that, many times over.

Most single-parent and broken homes don’t produce killers. Yet most killers arise from them.

Society must address that at the root. God offers a way. It’s up to us and our free will to choose that way, or reject it.

Yes, I stand by my claim the abiding love and reverence of the Lord, accepted and adhered, short-circuits the cultural degradations that lead to the devaluation of life underpinning mass killing of kids, both before and after birth.

Still, even if you don’t bring God into the picture, it’s clear we have a culture problem. Crime novelist Robert Bidinotto expressed it well in a recent Facebook post:

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For simplicity’s sake, let me limit my answer to citing the theme of my first thriller, “HUNTER,” where hero Dylan Hunter paraphrases Edmund Burke’s famous quotation thus:
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is an enabler.”

Want to know why we are experiencing an epidemic of slaughter in America’s streets and schools? Because America has become a culture led by and filled with enablers of evil — from professors to politicians to pundits to parents. Today’s plague of rampant nihilism arises from the unchecked virus of excuse-making.

The only cure is the inoculation of moral accountability: the injection of *individual self-responsibility* as a moral ideal, throughout our culture and all its institutions. However, too many of our social leaders and influencers are the ethical equivalent of anti-vaxxers.

Until we reject and banish the cult of excuse-making for bad behavior, and begin to enact and enforce self-responsibility throughout society, we will continue to enable, encourage, and empower nihilists. And we will remain their accomplices in the collapse of our civilization and the hideous slaughter of innocents, such as the babes of Newtown and Uvalde.
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For more on the secular side of the reasons for mass murder, Bidinotto offers a full-length, well-written essay here.

I happen to believe that following the will of God short-circuits the enabling of evil.

Perfection? Of course not. Everyone is a sinner. Everyone. But perfection is not the same as righteousness, nor vice versa. It’s an attitude, a worldview, most properly passed from present, attentive, loving, whole-family, functional, God-worshipful, wed, mother and father, parents to children.

When we as a society celebrate immorality, foster dysfunction on mass scales, and bust up God-ordained family structures, we get what we have: more killers. Go look up the home situations of these mass kid killers, one after another, and you shall see for yourself. Start with Uvalde.

Let’s therefore get the Holy Spirit into the picture on a mass scale. As a Christian, I am bound, with gratitude, to this ethos.

We indeed have a problem. God will be the only and ultimate solution. Come, Lord Jesus.