IPFS Edwin Sumcad

Straight Light

Edwin Sumcad

More About: God, Government and other assorted myths....

When Reason Is God So Is The Media

    When one reasons out that there is no God, to that person there is no God. But when one reasons out that there is God, then to this other person there is God.  Reality in the world of reason could be as delusional as a mirage in the desert or as real as life and death itself. But REASON is Greater than God when it creates God this way, as much as it denies God the opposite way.

     It is also a cause of a lot of attention between my dog and myself as to whether or not my pet is more rational than the man who turns irrational at certain given circumstances.

     My giant-size St. Bernard named Liver short for Leviathan, just loves me without a reason except when one moonless night he barked fiercely and saved the family from a burglar who broke the glass of the kitchen door then scampered away for dear life.  And that’s a reason good enough for me to love Liver even more!

     The fact that we love our pets and treat them humanely, is perhaps reason enough for them to adore their master.  But we don’t know if that is really the case. Obviously, dogs can feel, but unlike humans, they cannot reason out the way we do what they feel, or explains their likes and dislikes.  We only “infer” that they have their REASON for looking up to us as some kind of God in the animal kingdom where we both belong in the order of things.

     This seems to hold the argument at bay, that REASON is an attribute of a rational being only.  If a canine like Liver can be more human than this man who commits burglary or even murder, or can bark its protest that what the intruder was doing was not right, are dogs not rational in their own way?

     When St. Bernards act what’s in their dog mind – their animal way of “reasoning out” what they do, i.e. to be loyal to and protective of their master as Liver was – then REASON as God of the Godless lives in animals too. If so, where does this place Darwinism and Creationism in the order of things?

     To answer this question, I do not need to go to Blaise Pascal’s “God Rules” [4] for help to once again state that Revelation “inspires” belief on Intelligent Design and that Theologians “reason out” the existence of the Omnipotent and Omniscient Being.

   This comes to mind when my long odyssey in search of the Intelligent Being ended up in Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas’ “Theory of the Primemover”. The “watchmaker analogy” was equally overpowering in William Paley’s Natural Theology [1802] that ultimately led to Darwin's theory of the origin of species.  The Godless’ theistic evolution emanates from and therefore compatible with the concept of a Supernatural Designer. 

       But in law as in logic, no court of the land can supplant REASON for God in the classroom. [United States Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard.]  Any purported violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not make Jones’ REASON a legal deity equal to or in place of God.

     But who cares about any of those academic works similar to what I have on “causality” in metaphysics and qualitative reasoning that proves God exists?  To a die-hard Darwinist, it is crap.  There is no God. Only REASON is God.  As long as the Godless is free to reason out that no Omnipotent Being exists, God is just a fusty swearword.

     It is in this philosophical zone that Media can become God. In online publication, the site is owned by the publisher. He can do whatever he wants. A writer’s account can be cancelled or revoked anytime as long as the owner feels like doing it.  If he is not God himself free to do whatever he likes in his own site and since REASON is God in the analogy I just explained, canceling a writer’s account is an act of God.

      But REASON in the exercise of media ownership is not supposed to trump anyone’s constitutional freedom of expression.  In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said so himself. That right of ownership is froth with public interest.

      Be that as it may, the media owner has to contend and defeat a greater God – the American public.  In most cases, the public wins.

      In defeat, the publisher’s hidden agenda in publishing a medium of expression froth with public interest, unwittingly brings the owner down in the name of public accountability.

      Rarely do owner-publishers run media networks without a bias agenda. CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and major newspapers like New York Times, The Washington Post and allied broadcast groups in Robert Lichter, et. al.’s “The Media Elite, 1986” are hopelessly Liberal in such controversial issues as abortion, affirmative action, gay right, global warming, and the like. 

      To complete this dichotomy of media bias, the Conservative media cannot be less prejudiced. Magnate Rupert Murdoch would run his giant News Corporation, “the parent of FOX News” with a Libertarian political hammer striking like mad on the tyranny as well as sensitivity of rival publications. He has the strong support of propaganda organizations like NewsMax and WorldNetDaily for Republican candidates to win the national election.

       Since corporate conglomerates control the Media, stories that are of public interest but less useful to them normally cannot be run, more so when the story is beneficial to the public, but inimical to the corporations’ interest. 

      For instance, a breaking freelance editorial that immigrant postal worker Joseph Ileto who came from the Philippines was murdered by a Skinhead for coming here to take a local job away from jobless Americans, can hardly be run in a conservative website.  But a liberal website will look for it to support a media bias that Republicans have an attitudinal murder in mind when they try to put an end to immigration, whether the arrival of foreigners in this country is legal or not. 

       Ergo, what free journalists are telling the public at the risk of catching a swinging baseball bat is that murder is not the way of solving this nation’s illegal immigration problem.

     The Republicans reportedly lost the 2006 election due to their mean-spirited agenda on this issue. I for one published my editorial take on this imbroglio, viz: that those who think like Supremacists do in solving our immigration problem, had forgotten what the Statue of Liberty stands for.  This is a country of immigrants.

     However, for daring to write down the truth that has always been in my mind, I could not avoid getting a black eye.  Perhaps I deserved it knowing before hand that what I would write about would drive conservatives into a fit of blinding anger. 

     As a consequence of mean-spiritedness that many angry conservatives demonstrate, it is easier to be kind-hearted and fair-minded Americans who until now mourn Ileto’s senseless murder. Skinheads’ murderous binge to stop immigration is not the American way of solving our illegal alien problem. There are a million ways of doing it other than drain the street with blood.  But this would hardly see print in any rabidly politicized websites owned by publishers from the extreme Right that are fuming mad.

       It is a little bit different here in Freedomphoenix.com and in some other websites that I know. The clash of opposite political and ideological biases, appears in the front page if not alternatively, at the same time in the next page.  

      Yet a caveat is posted that like in any similar freedom online publications, the owner is God of his own domain.  He can do whatever he likes and/or he can do anything that pleases him anytime he wants.

      But know that this is not without a bell of alarm that hangs in the cat’s neck. The capitalist model of online media which perhaps only few knew, are operated for profit, “mostly funded through the sale of advertisement.”  In the name of freedom of expression, the media is driven to mercantilism [Thomas Mun].

       Is this bad? The argument is, as long as the publication is a medium of free expression and at the same time a well-known profiteer, the publisher whose two legs each separately stands on two boats while sailing down the river, serves the public good.

     In 1728, Benjamin Franklin did the same thing. American Weekly Mercury where Franklin wrote his editorial under the name Busy-Body, advocated for the printing of more money. The hidden intention was that his printing company would get the contract for the printing of money. While Franklin stands to profit, the printing of more money stimulates trade.  It benefited his pocket and at the same time served public interest.

     One of the excesses beyond this is when the Media attracts good writers for profiteering purposes, i.e., multiplies the number of readers and expand its advertisement haul. At the same time, writers publishing contrary opinions are being badly used for both commercial and ideological-political purposes. 

     In almost every online publication, there is another group of contributors called “pet writers” who “interpret” news and articles written by those in the opposite side of the great divide.

    This interpretative opinion over a targeted “pigeon” opinion is slanted to favor a Libertarian agenda if the publisher is a Libertarian ideologue, or skewed to conform to a leftist agenda if the owner is like Bill Ayers, a supposedly reformed American bomber in the academe, or tilted towards the right if the ownership of the publication is similar to Bill O’Reilly’s presumed “ownership” of cultural warriors in Fox News.

       “Slanting” an editorial against the view of “pigeons” requires a certain degree of writing “skill”.  The absence of this required “skill” results in the launching of attacks aimed at the person of the knowledgeable writer whose contributed work is selected to be neutralized if not discredited.  Name-calling has become the major source of entertainment on the part of the reading public and the publisher that encourages it to capture a larger number of patrons and subscribing advertisers.

             The Media’s slide from being the vanguard of freedom of expression down to just acting as a medium of clandestinely motivated entertainment is Infotainment. Critics believed this turned Geraldo Rivera into a “sleaze reporter” representing a “trash TV” that “have little social value or redeeming intelligence” but gathering a lot of entertainment followers [crossovers] that make Infotainers jump with joy as they whistle their way to the bank.  

      Somebody may get hurt but hey …! that’s part of this business.

      When Media becomes God, it can do and will do as in a song whatever Lola wants.

     To freedom of expression, we say goodbye and hello to freedom of exploitation. #  

 

The writer is an award-winning journalist.  Know more about the author by reading his published editorials and feature articles or you may e-mail your comment to ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg.


www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm