when I was born there were two of me

Ray Hinman (June 20, 1956-Jan 24, 2014.) in honor of the birthday I shared with him.


My brother Ray wrote those words at one time, "when I was born there were two of me.". We did come into the world together. He was always there, I never knew a time when he was not there. As kids we were rambunctious, obnoxious, noisy, hyperactive, sarcastic. We were always there for each other. When we walked home from kindergarten bigger boys would pick on us because when they grabbed Ray I would cry, and shout "leave him alone!" When they grabbed me he would cry and shout. We always knew what each other meant by cryptic comments when  no one else did. We always looked out for each other's feelings. Always knew what the other felt.

In sixth grade the teacher read to the class an unpublished story by Mark Twain, from life magazine. That's when he set his sites on being a writer, He taught himself all about literature. It came from out of nowhere, he began spending all of his time reading, He would get home from school and go right to the books instead of football as had been his passion. In eight grade he gave an oral book report to a speech class on Goethe's Faust part I. It as brilliant the class as thunder struck. I was amazed at his erudition and his poise and his eloquence. People were coming up to me  all day and saying "I didn't know your brother was a genius."

That was crucial because we had dyslexia and early schooling was marked by failure and being treated like dunces (until they tested our IQs!). Spanked with boards for being lazy (by the principle--Texas schools of mid 60s). We could barely read, we hated ourselves and we shored each other up by mutual support. Then this literature thing turned Ray on to using his mind. He just got the idea he could teach himself and he began doing it. This was really in opposition to the teachers. He actually knew more at the end of high school than many of his teachers and I know that's true.

He was also brash and rebellious, sharp and critical of authority. We were both attracted to the "movement" of the 60s. Anti-war, we went to protests (this was 7-10 grade1971-72). An example of how Ray was in eight or ninth grade. We went to a  little private school ran by church of Christ. They had a big Dress code and we hated it. We wanted long hair they would not let us have it. One day we missed some school for snow (rare in Dallas). The school administration declared that we had to go for a make-up Saturday but to make it less odious we could dress any way we wanted to (except no short skirts on the girls). Everyone wore ragged blue genes and t shirts except Ray. He wore a suit and tie.

In the period that followed (72-77) he really was my hero. I resented him but also admired him. He was much more socially able and more successful in dealing with the opposite sex. Sex being the operative word there. Dressed like a hippie but not in a pretensions way. Ran around all over town with all kinds of women, getting drunk and smoking dope and going to parties, making his own -parties by the turtle creek or Bachman lake or some place. He dropped out of high school and moved down town. Took GED and scored one of the highest scores in the City.

In the high school years, 16, 17 he went on several hitchhiking trips. My parents were terrified but he was nota run away, He got them to sign a letter saying he had their permission because the deal was, he was going anyway. He did have stories from the road. He hide in the dark in the Rockies and watched a coven of some kind do something with torches and someone (he really didn't know what they were doing he just didn't want to be seen). He was shot at in West Texas and attacked by a ghost in Denver. He stood on a dark rainy highway in Oregon and did not see Bigfoot (said he never thought about it), He first went to Colorado, the up the West Coast to Vancouver, Then up the east coast to Toronto.

He was lean and strong and full of life and what the Bible calls "The pride of life." He was brilliant, he read a lot  of Nietzsche and decided he would become an ubermench. He told me once he knew he wasn't one but he wanted to force himself to be one anyway. He wrote prodigiously. After growing apart in high school--I had debate and he had hitchhiking-- we got back together in college. He started to community college took philosophy was on the honor Roll and my parents were elated. He was also at odds with them about being a writer. They wanted him to be able to support himself.  He just wanted to write. We developed a world around ourselves and our books. It centered on the coffee shop. Discussions were to us what water is to a duck. We discussed everything fueled by books and our own writings.

Everything changed in 77. That's when Ray had his break down. He saw the goddess Dianna fly past the moon while smoking dope on the roof at our parents home. He was never again free of delusions. Gradually over time he became like my child. By the time he died I had almost forgotten the strong rash independent young genius he was in his youth. He was lucid but developed a lot of delusional fears. We struggled through the maze of the mental health care industry for two decades before I realized they were nuttier than he was. In the end we wound up wild catting with nutrition and forgot the shrinks., He tried hard to make it as a writer. Every passing year grew that much more desperate; He finally quite trying the last eight years of his life. He was always going to get back to it.

I think the two great defining moments for him were the Central America movement and taking care of our parents. We worked as organizers in the central America movement from about the dawning of Iran=contra (85?) to the anti-climatic end of the Sandinista government in '90. Ray poured his heart and soul into it, s=he shown as an activist. Quoted in the Newspaper for some protest we organized (Dallas Morning News) "Ray Hinman, 31 year old Poet.." I said "hey you are officially a poet, says so in the paper." He said, "I am also officially 31, says so in the news paper." He saved a woman's life. Jenifer Casolo was charged by the Salvadoran government and her lawyer too. Both arrested a d tortured. Ray threw himself into calling all over the country to get urge t action alerts generated. When Casolo came to Dallas Ray was introduced to her as "The person primarily responsible for getting you out." The Lawyer was saved too.The other great moment was in caring for our parents. We basically ran our own private nursing home 2/7 for three years. Our mother had Alzheimer's our father had a big heart attack and then some kind of dementia.  He was invaluable in care for  them. I could not have done it without him. I could really see what he was made of then in his unselfish caring for our parents.

There were more struggles involved in fights criminals disguised a mortgage company who stole our house and living in our car for a short time. This all took it's toll on Ray, his fragile mental condition. The last few years we found a cozy rent house, parents gone, just Ray and I and our little dog Arnie (black and tan coon hound but the tan parts were white).  He loved drinking coffee in the kitchen or on the back Patio and reminiscing. We lost the fire for the great intellectual discussions we had thrived on. He lost the fire for writing he was no longer building for a career as a writer, he was feeling like a a failure and reminiscing about what he loved in the act of trying to be a writer. Nursing his delusions. If only he had written those into novels. He did get the one collection of poems published I think he really just rested in that one accomplishment.

The last Day he was upset because I kept trying to convince him to go to the hospital. He wanted to be at home. He thought I wanted to get rid of him. I told him I wanted to stick together and be old men together, He seemed happy and was perked up. I made him a cup of coffee he drank it and smoked and said it was the best coffee and smoke he ever had, He wanted me to help him to the bathroom and on the  way he had to sit down, He began roaring like a lion, spewed stuff out his mouth and I saw his eyes roll up in his head. I ran for the phone and called 911. By the time I got back he was gone. I was shouting "come back!" After the coroner left I spend hours alone shouting  "Ray! Ray!" I sat out on the patio for days just reliving our times there and try8mng to find peace about it. I eventually realized he was just tired of conflict he made the choices he did for that reason. He was tried of being mentally ill and tired of struggling to make it as a writer in an illiterate society that no longer understands literature.


see a more detailed bio

I am sending this to everyone I know

 

Sunday two years since my twin brother and best friend died. I am asking everyone I kno to do a couple of things in his honor.

Read some of his poems, you can see them on his blog

http://citiesvanish.blogspot.com/

Buy Ray Hinman's Poetry book on Amazon

"Like" facebook page https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=435341879999817&id=435328036667868
any or all, thank you

The Salvation of The Modern Individual

There is a trend in evangelical thinking to a turn from the highly individualistic self of the enlightenment, where salvation is a matter of the individual finding herself in relationship with God alone, to communal sort of thinking where one is part of the tribe as in identity politics. "This culture [of the enlightenment individuality] has also deeply affected the Church of the West. All of our songs are wrapped in the language of me, rather than us. Our taking of the Eucharistic table of the Lord (communion) is highlighted by each one making sure they have no unaccounted for personal sins before taking..."[1] Of each one making sure he or she has no uncounted sins is in the New Testament.  I see the potential in this movement for political control. Ironically at the same time secular scholarship is coming to see Christianity as the basis of enlightenment individualism,

An example of the trend in the church is found in the book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by Randolph Richards and Brandon O'Brien. [2] They argue that most of the time when Paul writes "you" it should be read as a collective second person address,such as our southerner "you all," (that's not it, it's really "Yall") "you guys" as you Yankees say. Direct application is found in passages such as 1 Cor 6:19 "do you not know that your bodies are Temples of The holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God, you are not your own." Our modern translator has made the individual's bodies into each a temple so we have multiple temples. This new collective understanding sees that the Greek for temple is singular and You is plural.So you all are the temple not individual temples. Does that mean smoking is not a sin? where was this passage 40 years ago when I needed to show my Mom? 

Another such passage is 2 Cor. 5:17 "therefore if any one is in Christ he is a new creature." NASB. The NIV says "New Creation has come" giving it a more collectivist potential. One has joined the collective of the new creation (the Church itself is the new creation).  The problem is the Greek is individualistic. "Ei Tis en Christo" --if anyone is in Christ...It's not plural, anyone is a highly individual word, It does say old things are passed away all things have become new, Or could be "the new has emerged" --yeyonin  kina, the new has emerged, The passage ends "Moreover, all things are of the one God." de ponta ek tu theou tou. Sort of summing it all up with a reassuring reference to God's all pervasive originating creativity, This all things implies a collective but it includes the individual as part of the new things.

That's all fine and good, Individualist  mentality is too acquisitive. We need more socialism in the Gospel. We need more emphasis upon social cohesion in  the modern church and we need more understanding of the cultural perspective of the first century in reading the New Testament,But salvation itself is and  always will be an individual  matter. We cannot be saved by following orders or being part of the heard or by letting others decide our actions for us,Paul's sense of membership did not exclude personal relationship with God nor did it exclude personal responsibility. First Paul's metaphor of the body of Christ does assume coordination and that requires unity, yet it also recognizes the individuals and their differences that make up the body. That's the point of the gifts,each has a different gift according to her function. Individuals and their individual functions make up the body and their coordination and cooperation make it a functional body.

We see Paul Himself acting as an individual when he stood up to Peter for giving preference to the delegation from James over the Gentile members. Lest we think this is only because he was an apostle there were cultural influences behind him from both his Hebrew and  Greaco-Roman upbringing, that made his individualism possible. First there is a scholarly move to see individualism as predicated upon the Hebrew faith as well as the Greeks. Even though the Hebrews were tribal and collectivist, nor did they manifest a primary value of individualism many scholars now feel that their culture contained in the law and it's moral nature the basic elements that made individualist possible in Christianity. Moral philosophers understand personal morality to be a prerequisite for individuality. Ilan Wurman Makes this argument, He uses two other books,which are come from opposing ends of the spectrum, to illustrate.[3]  



Yoram Hazony’s new book, The Philosophy of the Hebrew Scripture,  . Joshua Berman argues the Pentateuch was written to be read as a whole and in order.[4][5] What both agree upon is the notion of a coherent whole. Berman in Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, argues the egalitarianism of the Pentateuch is communitarian, while Hazony's ideal is more Hierarchical. What it looks like Hazony has done, from the description by Wurman is to take the old Prophet vs Priest split that can be traced back to Nietzsche, and either reading into or re-discovered in the Pentateuch (Nietzsche got it from someplace). Wurman combines the two views to argue that Hebrew ethics made individualism possible.[6]

There is a much more pronounced individualism among the Greeks, even though they too had their collective spirit. Some have argued that the Greeks had no individualism that view (a manifestation of 20th country anthropology) is ably refitted by Gary W. Burnett, in this work, Paul and The Salvation of The Individual [7] Writing against and extreme form of this view he warns that anthropological approaches that attempt to emphasize the difference in ancient world and ours smother the humanity of the people of antiquity to overplay the dominance of the social.

The trends in modern anthropology, which recognize the importance of self consciousness, an cognitive models of culture combined with the classical scholarship just reviewed, indicates strongly that human beings of early and classical Greece, and the inhabitants of the Greaco-Roman world of the first century CE were human beings fully in the sense in which we understand the modern person--self aware, conscious of himself or herself as a unique person pro-active in the world, making sense of the culture ad world around and contributing to the continual change of their era...there can be no doubt that these societies were much more collective in outlook than our own, Western individualistic society, but individuals were persons in this important self conscious sense.[8]

Paul benefited from both the Hebrew law and the Greaco-Roman individualism,  Having grown up in Asia minor he would have exhibited the cosmopolitanism sophistication and Greek cultural ferment for which Jews of Asia minor were known.  Larry Siedentop argues that Pauline thought overturned the established assumptions of natural inequality. It's that understanding of leveling between us and the stranger that enables us to see ourselves in them.[9]

...[Paul's] understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection introduced to the world a new picture of reality. It provides an ontological foundation for ‘the individual’, through the promise that humans have access to the deepest reality as individuals rather than merely as members of a group …For Paul, Christian liberty is open to all humans. Free action, a gift of grace through faith in the Christ, is utterly different from ritual behaviour and the unthinking application of rules.For Paul, to think otherwise is to regress rather than progress in the spirit. This is how Paul turns the abstracting potential of Greek philosophy to new uses. He endows it with an almost ferocious moral universalism. The Greek mind and the Jewish will are joined”[10] 

We can see these effects of individualism on Paul. Everything Pal says is about him,He boats of his background and education, he's constantly referring to his experiences and what he's been through,He boasts of his relationship with Jesus, He acts as an ethical lone individual in the face of controversy and moral conviction (in the conflict with Peter and with James). He  is willing to stand up against the authority of the church in Galatians 2:11 I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong." This upstart who never met Jesus in the flesh was not there when Jesus was crucified and who actually imprisoned Christians is willing to stand up to Jesus' no.1  side kick, to his face and tell him he's wrong. Yes that is being an individual.

Salvation is still about a personal 1x1 relationship with God. We see that on the cross where Jesus tells the thief "you will be with me this day in paradise," (Luke 23:43). Unless we are willing to think He was saying all thieves are now saved he's speaking to an individual not to a collective. Then one of the foundation passages in the OT establishing the fact of a new covenant puts it in very personal individualistic terms. Jeremiah 31:
31 

 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
    “when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
32 32 It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to[d] them,[e]”
declares the Lord.
33 33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

The reason the new covenant can't be broken is because it's not predicated upon merely obeying law but is actually internalized by the individual. He says "you will all know me from the greatest." That is a clear statement of individuality and personal relationship with God that supersedes orders from church authorities, or government, or anyone else. While we need to take solidarity seriously and work together to spread the gospel,we need to be sensitive to the leading of the spirit and to cultivate our relationships with God 1x1. that passage (Jer 31:31-24), is quoted in full in Hebrews (8:8-12). I read a good article by Daniel J.Harrington  on the overall use of the passage in NT.[11]

The great irony is that at a time when the church is moving away from the individual of modern Western thought and towards a collectivism,the secular world of scholarship is waking up from Marxist collectivism and beginning to recognize Christianity as the origin of modern enlightenment individualism. We've seen an allusion to this already in the quote above by Burnett. His reference to new trends among anthropologists (en 8). Ian Burkitt points out that it was the Greeks who first used the concept of the persona, which shows up again in the Trinitarian doctrine. He points to Stoicism and the development of  biography as hallmarks of individuality.[12]  Charles Taylor  starts reckoning the dawn of the modern self with St Augustine, (that's ancient Rome).[13]

Siedentop is scoring great apologetics points to make reviewers like Nicholas Lazard of  the Guardian change from a life time of witting off Christianity as having nothing to do with modernity and turning to it as the major source of the modern self:

It comes towards the end of this remarkable book, which made me rethink a great deal. Like many, I had assumed that notions of individual liberty didn’t come into play until the latter end of the Enlightenment. It was something to do with Voltaire, perhaps, or the second sentenceof the American Declaration of Independence. If the Church had anything to do with individuality, it was as a brake on it, or a countermeasure. We were all just anonymous units before the power of God...

it is Christianity we have to thank, and particularly the Christianity that was being formed in the dark and early medieval ages, for our concept of ourselves as free agents. He starts in ancient Greece and Rome: there, the faculty of reason was only to be found in the ruling elite, which, in effect, meant men of a certain class in a city state. If you were a woman, merchant, or slave, all you could really use your brains for were, respectively, gossip, mercantile calculation, and unthinking obedience. (A glance at newsagents’ shelves these days may make you suspect that civilisation has gone retrograde in these respects, but let us pass on that for the moment.) Even philosophers, who had no direct alleçgiance to a specific place, were for a while suspect. However, seeds were sown, and things got interesting when Greek- and Latin-speaking urban dwellers around the Mediterranean started encountering the Jewish diaspora...But the book is, once you get past the superficial difficulties, not too hard to grasp, and its basic principle – “that the Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society” – is, when you think about it, mind-bending.[14]

Sources


[1] J. Scott Lencke, "Misreadimg Scriptire with Western Eyes (4) Idividualism and Collectivism," The prodigal Thought.  (May 4, 2013) blog, URL:
https://prodigalthought.net/2013/05/04/misreading-scripture-with-western-eyes-4-individualism-collectivism/  (accessed 6/9/17)

J. Scott Lencke: Candidate in Doctorate of intercultural studies and missology  at Fuller Theological Seminary MTS from Fuller Theological Seminary. 

[2] Randolph Richards and Brandon O'Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. Downer's Grove Ill.: IVP, 2012 no page indicated.

[3] Ilan Wurman, "Individualism, Community, and Moral obligation in The Hebrew Bible," Public Discourse, The Witherspoon institute, Ryan T. Anderson Editor, On line Resource, UTL:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/09/6463/
(accessed 6/10/17)

[4] Yoram Hazony’s new book, The Philosophy of the Hebrew Scripture, Cambriodge, Lodom:
Cambridge University Press,  2012.

[5] Joshua Berman  Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, 
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011

[6] Wurman, op cit.

[7]  Gary W. Burnett Paul and the salvation of the individual, Leiden, Boston,Koln: Brill, 2001, 45-46

Dr. Burnett (Ph.D.) Taught New Testament at Queens University Belfast.

[8] Ibid. 

[9]  Larry Siedentop, Inventing The Individual" The Origins of Western liberalism. Cambridge Mass.:Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, 60.

Sir Larry Alan Siedentop CBE (born Chicago 1936) is an American-born British political philosopher with a special interest in 19th-century French liberalism.received a DPhil from the University of Oxford (equivalent to a PhD elsewhere) for a thesis on the thought of Joseph de Maistre and Maine de Biran, written at Magdalen College, Oxford, under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin.

From 1965 to 1968, Siedentop was a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, but he spent most of his academic career as a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and a University Lecturer.(wik)

[10] Ibid., 63-640.

[11] Daniel J. Harrington, "Jeremiah 31:31-34 and the New Testament," Bible Odyssey, (2017 no other date given) On line resource URL:
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/jeremiah-31-3134-and-the-new-testament
(accessed 6/10/17)

[12]  Ian Burkitt , Social Selves : Theories of Self and Society. London:Sage Publications Ltd. second edition, 2008, aoriginally 1992, 5.

[13] Charles Taylor, Sources of The Self:The Making of The modern Identity. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992,127-143.

[14] Nicholas Lezard, "Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism By Larry Siedentop--review," The Guardian (Jan 27,2015) on Lime addition accessed 6/10/17)URL
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/27/inventing-individual-origins-western-liberalism-larry-siedentop-review
(accessed 6/10/17)

Tie breaker: God cannot be a brute fact

This is called Tie-breaker because it moves us past the log jam that results in saying God is uncased and timeless always has been always will be with cause, vs. the atheist argument that this is no better than  just saying the universe happens to be here for no reason. My friend Eric Sotnak, who has a great gift for sarcasm that is not lost on me, set's it up as a matter of brute facts. There is a huge literature on brute facts but I wont go into it because I don't have time and I'm no expert. A brute fact is a thing that exists for no higher purpose, it has no reason for being it just is. [1] Now some will argue that brute facts can have physical causes or not. Since we have no examples of anything in nature that has no cause that just leaves the universe as a whole. So the comparison between atheism and theism is between  God who has no cause vs a universe that has no reason for being weather it has a physical cause or not. Having no reason means it could as easily not be. Sotnak turns this into an argument agaisnt the existence of God, but couches it in terms of God as a brute fact:

Traditionally, theists have felt extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a “brute fact” – that something could have just happened without explanation. Instead, they have committed to variations on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).I think the main reason for this is that they know quite well that without PSR, they will have no way to rule out the hypothesis that maybe the universe is just a brute fact (no God required).But I think theists could comfort themselves a bit by shedding their anxiety about this. Imagine a conversation like this between a theist (T) and an atheist (A):

A: I think the universe is a brute fact. 

T: Not I. I think it was made by God.

A: But then where did God come from? 

T: God is an eternal brute fact. 

A: How does that make you better off than me, then? 

T: Well, while no logical proof of God’s existence is possible, I have subjective or existential reasons for being a theist. It seems to me that I can feel the presence of God in the laughter of my children, for instance. For me, theism helps me to make sense of the world and comforts me with the hope that death isn’t final. 

A: But if God is a brute fact, that means he could, logically speaking, have failed to exist. 

T: Yup. So I feel extra lucky that he does.

Since God cannot fail to exist (definition of  necessary),that is an intrinsic part of the definition of God; then to say God is a BF in this sense is to say there is no God. One might believe in a demoted god who is not the God but a sort of very power strange being we don't know about. Zeus or something. This is why we need a tie breaker because there is a supposed tie between God as BF and the Universe as BF. God cam't be a brute fact and still be God in the Christian sense. Yet there is this seeming tie between un-caused God and uncased universe. We have to do this in such a way that the universe can't be without a cause and God who has no cause cannot be a brute fact.

To break the tie we just need to distinguish between the two kinds of un-caused nature. The argument is going to turn-on the concept of a BF. The nature of God's un-caused state is not the same as the nature of BF. To be a BF a thing must have no connection to a higher purpose. God can't have a purpose higher than himself but he can have a purpose higher than mere brute facticity. Semantically the two are different, Brute facts have NO higher purpose, God has aseity not brute facticity. That it is part of the definition of what God is that he is eternal and necessary. It's not part of the definition of the universe that it exists. That's existence as a predicate. On that basis Bertrand Russell ruled out the ontological argument. Existence is not a quality to be defined as part of the object, "I have one of those brick houses it;s the kind that exists." That goes beyond the semantic aspect and it can be understood in terms of the nature of being.

God is being itself or the ground of being.[2] The universe is not the ground of being. Even if it has no cause and has always existed the universe cannot be called the ground of being without attaching to it some higher sense of special nature such that we can think of it as "holy being." But before we go deifying the universe there is no reason to assume that the universe is eternal or uncased. If it was, if we could call it God there would be a God and atheists would be wrong , even if Christians were wrong too. We can eliminate that possibility.  We know the universe is not eternal [3] and It did not pop out of nothing.[4] The real contest is between a meaningless accident that somehow came to be for no reason with no higher purpose ,which we call "the universe" vs.  the ground of being or holy being which is eternal, necessary (could not have failed to exist) and eternal cohere's within the infinite folds of a core purpose upon which the all existence coheres. That is not  purpose higher than itself but is it;'s own purpose (that the universe doesn't have). 

Now I hear the question "so what is God's big purpose?" God is not just being itself but as such is being por soir. Jean-Paul Sartre's term meaning being for itself. The alternative is being in itself. (en soir). In itself is inanimate (universe) and for itself is conscious and purpose; the purpose is set by God's nature which is love. Love is the will to the good of the other. Being for itself means it has will, volition and purpose. That purpose is to love to create more being and to provide for the good of such being. That is going to open a lot questions about the nature of life and theodicy, that has to wait for another time, This breaks the tie because it gives God a  purpose, self authorized, which the BF doesn't have.

a couple of notes on Eric's dialogue:

A: I think the universe is a brute fact.T: Not I. I think it was made by God.A: But then where did God come from?T: God is an eternal brute fact.

No that is the wrong answer. He misidentifies aseity as brute fact which it is not. God has a purpose and is self perpetuated, the universe has no purpose and is not perpetuating itself. It has nothing to do with its own existence. Now we come to Eric's real gift of sarcasm:

T: Well, while no logical proof of God’s existence is possible, I have subjective or existential reasons for being a theist. It seems to me that I can feel the presence of God in the laughter of my children, for instance. For me, theism helps me to make sense of the world and comforts me with the hope that death isn’t final.

That's mockery of mystical experience, Yes God ks beyond our understanding, All the things we say about god are either very limited or metaphorical. The fact is the life transformation chances are proven fact established by 200 or more empirical scientific studies in peer reviewed journals. For more on this see my book The Trace of God by Joseph Hinman, on amazon.[5]

A: But if God is a brute fact, that means he could, logically speaking, have failed to exist.T: Yup. So I feel extra lucky that he does.

That would be a conceptual contradiction at the heart of the God concept, thus no God. Such is not the case. God us not a brute fact,

[1] There's a problem with the definition of a brute fact. Different philosophers have different definitions. Atheist from is at work. the definition is changed from the way I learned it (no reason for being) to a definition that has to include god (something we can't explain)I disagree, I don't that as a BF. God being beyond understanding and explainable for that reason is totally different than saying "X just just happens to be for no reason." The chief difference is for the one the could be a reason we just don't understand it,for the other there is none, The fact of a purpose involved with God as being i think breaks the tie

[2] Ground of being is a concept made famous by Paul Tillich and other theologians, I've written about it vociferously. It basically amounts to saying God is the basis of reality. My A"Introduction to Paul Tillich's Existential Ontology" Metacrock's Blog http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2010/02/introduction-to-paul-tillichs.html

[3] Quentin Smith, “The Uncased Beginning of the Universe.” The British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, (1988, Vol., 55, no. 1), 39-57.

[4] Joseph Hinman, "Quantum Particles Do not prove universe from Nothing," The religious a priori, website URL: http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2016/03/quantum-particles-do-not-prove-universe.html

accessed 7/23/16

[5] Joseph Hinman, The Trace of God:Rational Warrant for Belief. Colorado Springs:Grand Vidaduct, 2014.