OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Neil Shenvi has a few examples, surely? He cites Stephen Wolfe recommending using CRT's premises, and taking his opponents' weapons and growing stronger by them, and he explicitly refuses to abjure a critical theory approach. Shenvi also cites Abrahamsen to the effect of there being a 'Gramscian right', and credibly cites people like Sam Francis or John Fonte acknowledging Gramsci's influence on their own work.
That seems like a pretty reasonable prima facie case that at least some far-right or white-nationalist-adjacent people are genuinely influenced by critical theory.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'm going to start with a petty nitpick:
More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause)
Storge (στοργή) does not actually appear in the scriptures. A handful of words derived from it do (there's φιλόστοργος in Romans 12:10 and ἄστοργος in Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3), but στοργή itself is not in the Bible.
Now that said...
I don't think much of any kind of Christian-inflected atheism. I understand that a religion can cast a long shadow and retain immense psychological power even among those who reject its core claims. However, what I find in cases like this is a kind of sentimental appropriation of the power of Christian rhetoric even alongside the rejection or outright destruction of Christian faith itself, and I think I would prefer honest enemies to friends like that.
What I read in Zizek's essay is a kind of substitution. He appropriates the language of Christian faith but swaps out its referent, such that the Holy Spirit can become 'an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause'. What is there to say there but that the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause, and the substitution can only do violence to the Holy Spirit, which is, after all, not merely a linguistic flourish, but (as Christians believe) the Third Person of the Trinity.
I think this is trading one's birthright for pottage. Maybe the Christian hope is right, maybe it's a delusion, but either way it's not just the hope for a fairer world in the here and now.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
It's more specific than that, surely? "The reason it's instituted" is a term that admits of a lot of interpretation. Why do searches require warrants? To protect people's privacy? To protect people full stop? To reduce the scope of arbitrary government action? To prevent tyranny? Almost any policy can be interpreted to have multiple reasons for its existence, and then each of those reasons can be defined narrowly, or so broadly as to enable almost anything.
I take "don't kill the baby" to be shorthand for "human life overrides all other concerns".
Put like that it's a principle that I see coming up in all sorts of other contexts. You probably heard it when learning to drive, for instance - you may break any road rule if it is necessary to do so to preserve human life. Most organisations have, whether implicit or explicit, an exception like that. Heck, religions have exceptions like that, where both Jewish and Islamic law may be violated if human life is at risk.
That said this doesn't resolve the issue in the scenario, which I interpret as a probabilistic one. It's possible that the man with the basket is just an innocent fisherman. The policeman and lawyer are making a judgement call, and one for which no explicit rule can be laid down. "Always search people who might be guilty" makes a mockery of the law; "never search people who might be guilty" means more drowned babies than we're probably comfortable with. They both need to show a practical wisdom, weighing the trade-off carefully and making a risky decision.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Subsequent writings are merely of the 'adding more epicycles' kind of truthseeking. First it was literally believing that men were created by God ex nihilo.
This is a nitpick, but I feel obligated to note that no, it wasn't. In Genesis 2:7, the first man is formed out of the dust of the ground. The Bible does not say that men were created ex nihilo, but in fact says the explicit opposite. I would gently suggest that if you want to seriously engage with Christian thought on a complex issue, you may wish to start by familiarising yourself with what Christian texts actually say.
Is this a nitpick? Is it not massively germane to your point? No, perhaps not, and if you want to look for all the ways in which Genesis 1-2 are not a scientifically accurate account of abiogenesis, you'll succeed. But then it is hardly the case that Christians, even long before Darwin, have understood it that way. Thinkers as older as Augustine, in 401, have understood that this narrative is not to be understood in that sense. Likewise Calvin, again prior to modern science, frankly writes "that nothing here is treated of but the visible form of the world" and adds "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere". As with astronomy, so with biology.
You may condemn Augustine and Calvin as adding epicycles, but I would say, rather, that the burden of proof lies with your assumption that the only reasonable way to understand Genesis is as a historico-scientific account of the origin of the universe. It seems to me that as Christians have taken other approaches, even many centuries before modern science, it is by no means obvious that that's the natural reading of it. My view, actually, is that the automatic reading of Genesis as scientific is itself a kind of modern debasement, an error characteristic of post-Enlightenment thinkers.
Now to the rest...
I actually don't find the Riddle of Epicurus particularly overwhelming here, not least because the Riddle predates Christianity by many centuries, and in fact the Problem of Evil is itself voiced with great eloquence and force in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Confronting the earliest Christians with the fact of evil, in the face of God's omnipotence, would not surprise or challenge them in the slightest, and the difficulty that humans have understanding evil was as familiar to them as it is to us.
What I would say is that Christian faith does, in a sense, require the belief that there is some kind of answer to the Problem of Evil, even if we do not know it. And that in itself is not absurd. If we have good reason to believe that God exists and is benevolent, and yet we observe evil, it would seem to follow that there must be some kind of reason for evil. We need not be able to articulate that reason in order to believe that there must be one. The question has an answer, even if we do not know it. Christianity does not declare that there are no mysteries.
Thus, say, Peter van Inwagen's response to the Problem of Evil is what he calls a 'defense' rather than an 'theodicy'. He writes:
The construction of a theodicy is not demanded of a philosopher or theologian who is concerned with apologetic problems. If apologists for theism or for some theistic religion think they know what the real truth about the existence of evil is, they may of course appeal to this supposed truth in their attempts to expose what they regard as the weaknesses of the argument from evil. But apologists need not believe that they know, or that any human being knows, the real truth about God and evil. The apologist is, after all, in a position analogous to that of a counsel for the defense who is trying to create “reasonable doubt” as regards the defendant's guilt in the minds of jurors. (The apologist is trying to create reasonable doubt about whether the argument from evil is sound.) And lawyers can raise reasonable doubts by presenting to juries stories that entail their clients' innocence and account for the prosecution's evidence without maintaining, without claiming themselves to believe, that those stories are true.
Typically, apologists dealing with the argument from evil present what are called “defenses”. A defense is not necessarily different from a theodicy in content. Indeed, a defense and a theodicy may well be verbally identical. Each is, formally speaking, a story according to which both God and evil exist. The difference between a defense and a theodicy lies not in their content but in their purposes. A theodicy is a story that is told as the real truth of the matter; a defense is a story that, according to the teller, may or may not be true, but which, the teller maintains, has some desirable feature that does not entail truth—perhaps (depending on the context) logical consistency or epistemic possibility (truth-for-all-anyone-knows).
This much, I think, may be required of the Christian - not that they prove that this-or-that theodicy is true, but merely to prove that it is conceivably possible that evil may, for now, exist in a universe created and governed by a benevolent God. The bar required is reasonable doubt.
It seems to me that my justifications for understanding God to exist are sufficiently strong, and the possible explanations for evil's existence sufficiently many, that Epicurus' Riddle does not snuff out my bright candle.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Wait, I've not heard this one - does ChatGPT garbage use dashes the way I just did?
Are LLMs using my own writing style?
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.
Surely this has been a powerful theme in science fiction for well over half a century?
Science fiction authors, or at least classic science fiction authors, have been asking "What if AI are bad?" for a very long time, and while I could easily make a list of classic SF stories with pro-AI or pro-robot messages, the list with anti-AI or anti-robot messages is very long too.
As such I would intuitively expect SF fans to be more likely to have strong feelings in both directions, both strongly pro and strongly anti.
(Disclaimer: I do feel some hesitation in describing WorldCon attendees and the current crop of Hugo voters as 'SF fans'.)
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think the key here is to trust tradition, which means some establishments but not others. Dumbledore is the central authority figure in the book and he is to be trusted implicitly. Where establishments are to be defied, it's because those establishments are modernising, bumbling bureaucrats. Dumbledore and Umbridge are both figures of institutional authority, but only Dumbledore is a figure of tradition. Umbridge is a come-lately, an interloper appointed by an authority that is both ignorant and interfering with something beyond its proper scope.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Harry does in fact use two of them, right? In Deathly Hallows he uses both Imperius and Cruciatus. The only one he doesn't use is the Killing Curse, and even that seems a bit hollow considering that the conclusion of the novel hinges on him using magic to kill the villain.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think Harry Potter is an interesting example of the author not understanding her own text.
Or, well, it's an extraordinarily interesting text because of how widely and inconsistently it has been interpreted.
Structurally, as it were, the bones of Harry Potter are conservative or Tory. This is probably inherited a lot from the boarding school novel that it imitates, but it can't all be accounted for that way. Regardless of the origin, Potter is a series about legitimate institutional authority, tradition, family, and virtue. The demagogic populist Voldemort and the inept bureaucracy of the Ministry must both fold before these things. Harry is exuberant to the point of disobedience sometimes, but that is the necessary energy of a young man who is being trained into a stalwart defender of the moral order. Note the exaltation of marriage and family as well - Harry's significance comes from his parents, while Voldemort is from an orphanage after being abandoned by his mother.
J. K. Rowling, however, is a liberal feminist and a Labour woman, and when asked she interprets her own work along other lines - tolerance, feminism, anti-racism, a plea for equality, and so on. There are elements of the text you can read like this (anti-muggle-blood prejudice is certainly mocked), but on the whole this has never come off as terribly convincing. Hermione's experiments with civil rights activism, for instance, are generally played for laughs, and no character really takes a serious interest in large-scale change.
Finally there's the progressive fan read of it. Though the books are arguably pretty conservative, like Kirk/Spock, Harry Potter slash was massively influential and I don't think you can write a history of fandom in the 20th century while omitting it. That goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Hogwarts as something like a giant closet, and eventually the whole Resistance-coded reading of Potter that we've all seen widely mocked. Despite my tone here, I don't actually want to treat this reading with contempt. What a book becomes 'in the wild' can vary considerably from what the text actually says on the surface, and from what the author thinks it's about, and the huge explosion of creativity and fan interest in this version of Potter suggests that, however unintentional, there have been resonances here.
(I theorise that it's to do with the academic setting - the classic boarding school novel is set in a world where secondary and higher education are genuinely Tory, but the world of the 21st century, especially in America, is one where higher education has become a progressive bastion, so now the idea of the authority of the school and the values it seeks to impart to those in its care reads as progressive.)
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I don't think that's what people who make that argument believe - Tolkien's convictions are too transparent and visible for that. I think it's more Death-of-the-Author, that regardless of what Tolkien personally believed, the text can (and implicitly should) be 'queered'.
I've encountered this method in, for instance, academic biblical criticism, where the exegete says quite openly that what they are doing is 'breaking open' or 'queering' the text to find a meaning that was certainly not intended by the human author, but is powerful and liberatory in its own way, and so on.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
You don't even have to go the Mormons - I believe some people have linked that prophecy to the idea of the Wandering Jew.
That said, as a Christian I don't think your interpretation of that claim is constraining. This is one way to read that verse but it is not clear to me that it necessarily excludes all others.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'
I think you would find this claim very hard to square with even simply the Bible itself, much less the subsequent writings or even behaviour of Christians.
Christianity might be false - we may be, in Paul's words, of all people most to be pitied - but it is absolutely making truth claims, and those truth claims matter. They matter to Christians. The theology that you blithely dismiss can only exist because Christians care about this.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I'm not sure how the procedure for electing a pope bears on the truth of Christianity as such? Even leaving aside that Christianity could be completely true even at the same time that Catholicism is not (or rather, particular Catholic doctrines could be false and Catholic institutional practice ramshackle and poorly-grounded), I'm not at all clear on why you would an apostolic constitution of 1996 must be eternal and unchangeable even vis-a-vis Catholicism. The process by which the church elects a pope belongs to the freedom of the church - Catholics do not believe that it has been handed down by God. They believe that God allows them, as an institution, to decide the next pope.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
My experience was probably atypical, because I went to a boys' school. It had a parallel institution, a girls' school, and the idea was that they would occasionally crossover for social events. The girls' school was both much older and much larger, so it had a significantly larger student base.
I remember at social events and dances, what usually happened was that the boys were maybe 20-25% of the room, and they would all bunker up defensively in a corner, unsure of the female strangers who made up the rest of the room, and likewise the girls would eye all the boys nervously. There was a large gap between them and neither side crossed it.
This was before smartphones so I don't think you can blame it on that. This is all millennials. It's just that when your social scene is extremely segregated by gender, you're naturally going to cluster with your friends whom you trust, and nobody wants to draw attention to himself or herself by being the first one to try to cross the gulf.
(There was, for what it's worth, zero mention of homosexuality on either side - neither ironic nor serious. I attribute this mostly to them being conservative religious private schools. I don't think I fully understood the concept of homosexuality until after I had graduated. In many ways I wish for that innocence back.)
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I tend to agree about cultural politics - I was cringeing inwardly when Penny Wong and Albo both doubled down on some of the indigenous stuff during their victory speeches. The Voice would seem to show that even when the Opposition itself is unpopular, there is very little appetite in Australia for SJ-tinted institutional change.
However, as you say, the American or Trumpist style does not work in Australia at all, and is experienced as both alienating and repulsive by most Australians. I think we've seen some of that with Jacinta Price, for instance, or Dutton's failed experiment with 'government efficiency' ideas, or with the completely unsuccessful Trumpet of Patriots. There is a strong element of resistance to, or at the very least skepticism of, SJ ideas in Australia, but Trumpism is not the way to access it. They will need to find a more distinctively Australian way of articulating the criticism.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
For what it's worth, there's pretty much zero likelihood that the Coalition would have slashed immigration either. The Coalition tend to go hard on illegal immigration while increasing legal, skilled immigration. It is effectively bipartisan consensus that Australia needs large-scale immigration, and they don't even disagree that much about the criteria for it (i.e. they like skilled professionals). Immigration fights tend to be around the edges, about illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers - an incredibly small proportion of the total.
I'd bear in mind that it has been this lopsided or worse in the past. Labor have just won 85 seats, possibly a few more once counting finishes, but for comparison, Labor won 83 seats in the 2007 landslide, and then the Coalition won 90 seats in their own 2013 landslide. The Coalition won 94 seats back in 1996. Victories on this scale have happened in the relatively recent past and the other party fought its way back.
That said, it is undoubtedly true that the Liberals need to do something to expand their appeal. One commentator on the ABC said something that seemed apt - that increasingly the Liberals are the party of the boomers and only the boomers. That is not sufficient to win an election now. In particular they need to find a way back to winning urban voters, and aspirational migrant communities as well.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I wonder how much this is due to Peter Dutton's personal brand being terrible? He is famously off-putting on the individual or human level, and his flailing election campaign didn't help matters.
In some ways Albo has been very fortunate here - running against ScoMo and then Dutton means that, for two elections in a row, he's been able to take a small target strategy and focus on getting his opponent into the spotlight as much as possible.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
Hm, I'm not sure how much I follow the categories that you're using. Australia doesn't really have what I would call a MAGA base. If you're looking for blood-and-soil types, well, firstly a lot of indigenous people are just straightforwardly blood-and-soil in their approach, but presumably they don't count, so secondly you're looking at One Nation and the nativists.
The thing is, the constituency for Australian nativism is somewhat complicated. Over 30% of Australia's population was born overseas, and because we have compulsory voting, all those people turn out. So you can't win an election just with people born here. Fortunately, the One Nation position isn't that immigrants simpliciter are bad - they tend to distinguish along the lines of culture, or less charitably, race. Nobody cares about English immigrants, for instance. They're where Australia comes from in the first place. Likewise we don't care about, say, New Zealand migrants, which are actually very common anyway. (Long story short, if you're an even slightly ambitious young New Zealander and seek opportunity, you come to Australia. And we're fine with that.) One Nation complained about being 'swamped by Asians' in the 90s, and today they're more likely to complain about Islamic immigration. The idea is hostility to people who don't share Australian values or a common cultural identity. Thus, for instance, around 70% of Australians are in favour of open borders with Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. We perceive ourselves as pretty closely connected to all of them.
(It will be interesting to see if demographic changes in Canada alter popular opinion on that, but I digress.)
At any rate, think of the right-wing 'blood and soil' position in Australia to not be 'Australians only', but rather 'Australians and the countries we like only', with the understanding that 'countries we like' means basically the white parts of the British Empire. People who take this view too explicitly will probably be accused of wanting to re-enact the White Australia Policy.
To Trump specifically -
I sometimes think of Australia as being the most America-like country that isn't America. (I would say we beat out Canada only because Canadian identity is specifically formed by not being American. They have a much more intentional sense of resistance against America.) However, there are still important differences, and I think the big one is probably that America has a very different idea of greatness or success to us. You couldn't have 'Make Australia Great Again' as a slogan because we don't have that kind of ambition or pride. That's not how we think of Australia. However, the American influence on our political tradition is significant - while structurally we are a Westminister democracy and the UK is the biggest influence on us, the framers of the Australian constitution read and were significantly (but not slavishly) inspired by the American effort. If you look into Australian patriotic writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, there is a strong feeling that we can use America as a model, or that Australia can be a kind of 'second America' (only loyal this time). Then you have to add to that, of course, the American alliance that has persisted since the Second World War, and we do just look to America for a lot.
This means that when anything in America reads well or sympathetically to the Australian electorate, politicians suddenly get keen on copying it; and likewise when anything in America reads unsympathetically, politicians need to struggle to distance themselves from it. In the past the Coalition has been more vocally pro-America than Labor, and have had close relationships with the Republican party. John Howard made a big show of his friendship with George Bush, for instance, and while it's been a bit more complicated since then, you can see how proud ScoMo was to be next to Biden. (And Biden apparently forgetting his name caused a minor scandal.)
So the issue for Peter Dutton in particular is - the Coalition has generally marketed itself as pro-America, or closer to America than Labor (which has instead been quietly proud of rebuilding our relationship with China). Dutton has also experimented a bit with American-style culture politics, and generally is perceived as a more 'American' politician.
And that seemed to be going well up until Trump lashed out with tariffs, and while we only received the lightest of American tariffs, Trump also refused to give us an exemption (which he had done in his first term). Add in that Trump's self-aggrandising, bullying style of politics plays very badly with an Australian culture that tends to prefer humility and self-deprecation and America's brand is currently in the toilet.
Dutton gets some of the overflow from the hatred of Trump. He and his party are too close to Trump and too close to America. When it comes to foreign policy, I suspect voters currently want a leader who will stand up to America.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
A billionaire who is pretty much in it for the entertainment value. He's rich and he likes being on TV and having his face on billboards.
Trumpet of Patriots in general is a good case study in why Trumpism doesn't work in Australia. They are copying Trump-style campaigning while making zero adaptation to the local context and it is pretty miserable.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
Australians who are interested in politics are pretty much bound to follow American politics, at least in the vague outline. I'd guess that your average person on the street either doesn't know who Tucker Carlson is, or knows him only as some pundit in America. Among Australians who take an active interest in politics, I'd expect much higher recognition.
I would not expect Carlson's endorsement (or disendorsement) to have any significant impact on Australian politics, though. If anything, I expect that his endorsement would hurt a candidate. We have a federal election tomorrow where it looks like what would have been a very winnable election for the Coalition has turned into a disaster, substantially due to Trump. Trump and MAGA-style voices are widely hated over here and any association with them is more likely to harm than to hurt. It's not as bad here as in Canada, but it's still true, I think, that Trump has been a disaster for conservative parties throughout the wider Anglosphere.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
Let me rephrase. Let's consider the possible options here, for someone who is genuinely fascinated by fascist thinkers from the 20s and 30s:
You don't call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people identify you as a fascist anyway, into the ghetto you go, or 2) people don't identify you as a fascist but you're an obscure weirdo interested in irrelevant niche thinkers from a hundred years ago and get zero attention.
You do call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people immediately associate you with Hitler and you lose all credibility, or 2) your pseudointellectual protestations of not being that kind of fascist lead to endless obscure hair-splitting that stand in the way of any wide appeal.
The problem is that there is no way forward for this kind of movement. The Hitler/Nazi/fascist brand is completely tainted. It does not work, and no amount of hair-splitting about different kinds of fascism or fascist-adjacent politics suffices to defend you.
The people closest to that space who are most successful - think Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and AfD - have gotten there by vocally distancing themselves from any fascist associations and condemning them. Jean-Marie Le Pen was unelectable; Marine broke up his coalition and condemned his positions and allies. Meloni has distanced herself from and condemned the idea of fascism. If you call yourself fascist, or if you can be credibly accused of fascism, you are stuffed. The most successful nationalist right movements, even the ones that have some genealogical links to fascist movements, have needed to powerfully disassociate themselves from fascism and fascist thinkers.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
This is going another direction, I suppose, but I also find Hitler an odd choice if your goal is to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism in a general sense, and if you're not interested specifically in Jews or Germany. There would also seem to be plenty of great examples from the same period - you could always idealise Mussolini or perhaps Dollfuss, but if they're too much of failures for you, there's still Franco or Salazar. If you allow yourself to include thinkers, there are plenty of far-right writers and thinkers in the 20s and 30s who don't have Hitler's baggage.
I recall once knowing someone who identified openly as 'a fascist', but immediately qualified that to explain that she's anti-Hitlerite, and is instead more along Dollfuss' lines, and took heavy inspiration from José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It's possible to adopt a fascist-ish position along those lines, while resolutely condemning anti-semitism.
The problem, I suppose, is that that doesn't get you attention. The moment you say the F-word you are associated with Hitler whether you like it or not, and if you don't say it, well, you're just some weirdo enthusiast for a bunch of obscure thinkers no one's ever heard of. It's optimising for being unique and special in the vast terrain of weird internet politics nerds, rather than for appealing to real people or building any kind of movement.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
Well, I suspect that a Germany that went communist in the 20s or 30s would also end up on the losing side of a world war. A communist Germany, it seems to me, would be likely to feud with Russia over who the de facto leader of European communism is. The Soviets were very invested in that, and they would rather a foreign communist movement fail than turn into a rival to them - as with Spain, for instance, where they prioritised defeating left-wing rivals over defeating the Nationalists. Communist Germany likely either gets absorbed into the Soviet sphere, or it has to fight to prevent it. That's either an earlier GDR, or it's a world war. Neither outcome seems particularly rosy for Germany.
Is either worse than our WWII? I really don't know. It's very difficult to speculate about counterfactuals, especially in a case like WWII where we might have to weigh up competing moral intuitions. Suppose OTL-WWII is on average better for all Germans, but far, far worse for German Jews, whereas AU-communist-Germany is on average worse for all Germans, but German Jews are only a little bit worse than average. A strict calculation of utility favours OTL-WWII, but it's also singled out a small minority for especial suffering. How do you weight that in your calculation? Does it matter? Does it not? I know that to me it feels rather icky to say that I'd prefer the timeline which is slightly better for everyone but which requires throwing a minority group that I'm not in under the bus.
(Maybe it makes a difference that in this alternate history, we, in addition to not having a Holocaust, also probably don't have Israel either. From a Jewish perspective, is it better or worse to never found the state of Israel? Another question that depends a lot on your values.)
There have been people who've taken that line historically. That's the line of the Gospel of Judas, for instance: that Judas was a hero because he caused the Crucifixion, which saved the world.
However, this is obviously heretical, and to my knowledge orthodox Christianity has never had any time for it. The Crucifixion may have been the means by which the world was saved, but it was still nonetheless an evil deed.
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