Considering the considerable volume of sociopolitical punditry that I have emitted from my gob and pen over the years; maybe this is the resolution to go cold turkey by a hopeless junkie - but I have had enough of pointlessly pointing out the obvious; and now feel inclined simply to shut-up and suffer in silence (rather than rage-raging against the dying of the light).
The loop of spiritual rejection and consequence is well set as far as I can see in all directions; and there seems a general satisfaction at the prospect before us.
Of course there is some half-hearted denial of where self-hatred and nihilism will lead - but I intuit the intent of mass suicide (plus, maybe some mass humane killing) as a way to 'escape' the inevitable consequences of hedonic secular Leftism.
I intuit in the hearts of many, many Men a secret plan to die just as things begin to fall apart, and before personal suffering gets too bad - and with the smug assurance of having done the right thing.
This frame of mind lies far beyond reach of soi disant clever punditry, beyond reach of any conceivable earthly campaign. I am convinced that it is a snare, and counter productive, to engage.
The greatest act of faith is actually to have faith - faith that right thoughts and attitudes and personal actions will be of the greatest possible value (given that all possibilities are contingent upon a multitude of autonomous individual choices).
Thursday, 3 December 2015
Wasting time worrying about wasting time
ME
"My cup runneth over" and I am concerned to catch the valuable life experience and not allow it to go to waste doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. There are so many possibilities to choose from in my creative play.
GOD You simply cannot do everything all of the time. Experiment and waste go together and lead to discovery, so don't become anxious about results. Try to enjoy the process itself which allows for lateral thinking and lateral diversions.
The new things are not found where you expect them to be. We can't live "new beginnings" without letting go of the "old beginnings" and allowing them to slip away. All that is really valuable will come back to you when it is needed. This is part of The Game of life which requires forgetting and letting go with good grace and a sense of non-importance of ones valuable Self.
Do not fear to waste your time and energy, you will never run out of them and the "Crisis" in the World is only solved by those who follow the best instincts of their Spiritual Nature. As these work out all together, so each one of you finds yourself holding and demonstrating a bit of the necessary jig-saw puzzle of life...
By William Arkle - written in the last few weeks of his life.
http://www.billarkle.co.uk/prose/enjoytheprocess.html
For as long back as I remember I have had frequent periods - usually in the afternoons, when I worried about wasting time worrying instead of getting on with ... something important.
I neither seem to enjoy the freedom of this time, nor yet actually 'do something useful' with it (such as what I ought to do, or might help other people) but witter and fritter.
There have been vast changes in my life across the decades - yet this characteristic endures.
So, the words of William Arkle, the final distillation of a lifetime of spiritual enquiry and insight, are something I find reassuring and inspiring. In particular, they encourage me not to make matters worse by adding futile and ineffectual worry to the situation.
It is even a genuine possibility that (up to a point) the waste of time is not - but some kind of deep preparation, or even growth - and that the busy efficient productive spells have been the real waste.
GOD You simply cannot do everything all of the time. Experiment and waste go together and lead to discovery, so don't become anxious about results. Try to enjoy the process itself which allows for lateral thinking and lateral diversions.
The new things are not found where you expect them to be. We can't live "new beginnings" without letting go of the "old beginnings" and allowing them to slip away. All that is really valuable will come back to you when it is needed. This is part of The Game of life which requires forgetting and letting go with good grace and a sense of non-importance of ones valuable Self.
Do not fear to waste your time and energy, you will never run out of them and the "Crisis" in the World is only solved by those who follow the best instincts of their Spiritual Nature. As these work out all together, so each one of you finds yourself holding and demonstrating a bit of the necessary jig-saw puzzle of life...
By William Arkle - written in the last few weeks of his life.
http://www.billarkle.co.uk/prose/enjoytheprocess.html
For as long back as I remember I have had frequent periods - usually in the afternoons, when I worried about wasting time worrying instead of getting on with ... something important.
I neither seem to enjoy the freedom of this time, nor yet actually 'do something useful' with it (such as what I ought to do, or might help other people) but witter and fritter.
There have been vast changes in my life across the decades - yet this characteristic endures.
So, the words of William Arkle, the final distillation of a lifetime of spiritual enquiry and insight, are something I find reassuring and inspiring. In particular, they encourage me not to make matters worse by adding futile and ineffectual worry to the situation.
It is even a genuine possibility that (up to a point) the waste of time is not - but some kind of deep preparation, or even growth - and that the busy efficient productive spells have been the real waste.
Wednesday, 2 December 2015
Non-perceptual communication
If we assume that there are forms of communication that are not via the senses; then a whole world of possibilities are glimpsed.
If we communicate only via the senses, then the mass media apparently has the human world in its evil grip; and since 'everybody' is addicted to the mass media and has their thought structured metaphysically by the mass media (i.e. their thought-structure made like unto the mass media's conceptual-structure: the medium being the message) -- then there seems to be no hope of you or I doing anything significantly constructive (a teardrop in a torrent).
But if there are assumed forms of communication which run from mind to mind direct by some undiscovered and unmeasurable medium - by empathic or morphic resonance perhaps, or whatever putative mechanism it might be - then here is potential for good (of various types) to spread from mind to mind. And exclusion by the mass media does not exclude the dissemination of good.
Much depends on the power of this imperceptible yet unstoppable communication - it is possible that it has long been the primary force of cohesion.
If one problem that besets us is a wrong metaphysics - the metaphysics of nihilism - then there is scope for people to become aware of the possibility of better things if only they can be thought.
(Which is why despair is to be shunned.)
If we communicate only via the senses, then the mass media apparently has the human world in its evil grip; and since 'everybody' is addicted to the mass media and has their thought structured metaphysically by the mass media (i.e. their thought-structure made like unto the mass media's conceptual-structure: the medium being the message) -- then there seems to be no hope of you or I doing anything significantly constructive (a teardrop in a torrent).
But if there are assumed forms of communication which run from mind to mind direct by some undiscovered and unmeasurable medium - by empathic or morphic resonance perhaps, or whatever putative mechanism it might be - then here is potential for good (of various types) to spread from mind to mind. And exclusion by the mass media does not exclude the dissemination of good.
Much depends on the power of this imperceptible yet unstoppable communication - it is possible that it has long been the primary force of cohesion.
If one problem that besets us is a wrong metaphysics - the metaphysics of nihilism - then there is scope for people to become aware of the possibility of better things if only they can be thought.
(Which is why despair is to be shunned.)
Tuesday, 1 December 2015
The maladaptiveness of modern Man - what led-up-to my becoming a Christian
Yesterday's post, which provided a possible contributory evolutionary explanation for modern Man's extraordinarily maladaptive behaviours, reminded me of what it was that led-up-to my becoming a Christian:
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/religion-as-proximate-method-of-group.html
I found that there were several cultural phenomena which led me to recognize the necessity for religion - and in some instances Christianity. In sum, I recognized that Religion was necessary to Man - which took me to the doorstep of Christianity as the best religion.
This did not, of course, make me a Christian - but it led me to recognize that some kind of religion was necessary for even a minimally sustainable society - and Christian society seemed to be better than any other alternative when it came to some of the things I most valued.
1. Dishonesty in science (and in public discourse). Anything less than complete honesty about everything seemed obviously wrong, dishonesty was obviously increasing - yet the only acceptable secular criticisms were remote, abstract and ineffective.
2. Subfertility. The fact that all modern societies in the world were sub-fertile and en route to chosen extinction had a big impact on me. That religion was the only effective antidote for suicide-by-sterility I found to be a very impressive fact. I still do.
3. Children. Related to subfertility, I sometimes found myself talking about the question of having children in a way that was - on later reflection, or even at the time - shocking, repulsive and utterly false to my own deepest feelings; I would sometimes discuss matters as if children were simply a part of 'lifestyle' - to be evaluated as (merely) a means to the end of whether they enhanced or detracted-from one's own sense of happiness and fulfilment; or in terms of potential risks and benefits...
4. Human Accomplishment. This book by Charles Murray suggested that without a strong belief in transcendental values (Truth, Beauty, Virtue) sustained by religion - most of the greatest achievements in human history never would have happened.
5. Tough decisions. I noticed that people could seldom make tough decisions - decisions where a good long term outcome required short term suffering or risk, or when overall advantage entailed significant problems and disadvantages that would attract criticism - even when they seemed to know that these decisions were right and necessary.
6. Saying no. This is perhaps related to 'tough decisions' - but I can recall a number of situations in which I found I could not find any reason for saying no to something, or disapproving something, despite that I knew in my heart it was wrong. I realized that without religion, there was, no basis for principled action - and I saw very little indeed in the way of principled action among my secular acquaintances.
7. Transhumanism. I was for a while generally very positive about transhumanism - and excited by the possibilities of abolishing human suffering, abolishing ageing, extending life and so forth. Then it dawned on me that the logical conclusion of this agenda included changing humans to something different-from humans; and a perspective that it was better to be dead (or never to have lived) than to suffer - yet suffering was, in real life, universal and inevitable - so transhumanism was close to being a kind of death cult. And, related to children, I found transhumanism encouraged me to discuss families as if they were purely a technological mechanism for reproduction that could (probably should) be replaced by some reproductive technique that was more efficient, less risky; more controlled and controllable - scientific and rational.
Such considerations took me, as I said, to the threshold of religion where I swiftly recognized Christianity as the best religion for me. So I got to the point where I regarded Christianity as 'a good thing' and acknowledged that I wanted to be a Christian; then it was a matter of waiting to see whether I believed it.
What got me over the edge? I think it was a combination of negative and positive factors - the negative factors included that I realized there was no reason why I should not become a Christian - that there was enough positive evidence of the truth of Christianity that it was rational to be a Christian.
The positive factors included daily prayer, and then a couple of personal (and private) miracles amounting to answered prayers.
So then I was a Christian. It took me absolutely ages to get to that point (a zig-zagging route across the decades); but almost as soon as I was there I realized it was merely a single step over the line, the easy bit; and all the difficult stuff was just beginning.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/religion-as-proximate-method-of-group.html
I found that there were several cultural phenomena which led me to recognize the necessity for religion - and in some instances Christianity. In sum, I recognized that Religion was necessary to Man - which took me to the doorstep of Christianity as the best religion.
This did not, of course, make me a Christian - but it led me to recognize that some kind of religion was necessary for even a minimally sustainable society - and Christian society seemed to be better than any other alternative when it came to some of the things I most valued.
1. Dishonesty in science (and in public discourse). Anything less than complete honesty about everything seemed obviously wrong, dishonesty was obviously increasing - yet the only acceptable secular criticisms were remote, abstract and ineffective.
2. Subfertility. The fact that all modern societies in the world were sub-fertile and en route to chosen extinction had a big impact on me. That religion was the only effective antidote for suicide-by-sterility I found to be a very impressive fact. I still do.
3. Children. Related to subfertility, I sometimes found myself talking about the question of having children in a way that was - on later reflection, or even at the time - shocking, repulsive and utterly false to my own deepest feelings; I would sometimes discuss matters as if children were simply a part of 'lifestyle' - to be evaluated as (merely) a means to the end of whether they enhanced or detracted-from one's own sense of happiness and fulfilment; or in terms of potential risks and benefits...
4. Human Accomplishment. This book by Charles Murray suggested that without a strong belief in transcendental values (Truth, Beauty, Virtue) sustained by religion - most of the greatest achievements in human history never would have happened.
5. Tough decisions. I noticed that people could seldom make tough decisions - decisions where a good long term outcome required short term suffering or risk, or when overall advantage entailed significant problems and disadvantages that would attract criticism - even when they seemed to know that these decisions were right and necessary.
6. Saying no. This is perhaps related to 'tough decisions' - but I can recall a number of situations in which I found I could not find any reason for saying no to something, or disapproving something, despite that I knew in my heart it was wrong. I realized that without religion, there was, no basis for principled action - and I saw very little indeed in the way of principled action among my secular acquaintances.
7. Transhumanism. I was for a while generally very positive about transhumanism - and excited by the possibilities of abolishing human suffering, abolishing ageing, extending life and so forth. Then it dawned on me that the logical conclusion of this agenda included changing humans to something different-from humans; and a perspective that it was better to be dead (or never to have lived) than to suffer - yet suffering was, in real life, universal and inevitable - so transhumanism was close to being a kind of death cult. And, related to children, I found transhumanism encouraged me to discuss families as if they were purely a technological mechanism for reproduction that could (probably should) be replaced by some reproductive technique that was more efficient, less risky; more controlled and controllable - scientific and rational.
Such considerations took me, as I said, to the threshold of religion where I swiftly recognized Christianity as the best religion for me. So I got to the point where I regarded Christianity as 'a good thing' and acknowledged that I wanted to be a Christian; then it was a matter of waiting to see whether I believed it.
What got me over the edge? I think it was a combination of negative and positive factors - the negative factors included that I realized there was no reason why I should not become a Christian - that there was enough positive evidence of the truth of Christianity that it was rational to be a Christian.
The positive factors included daily prayer, and then a couple of personal (and private) miracles amounting to answered prayers.
So then I was a Christian. It took me absolutely ages to get to that point (a zig-zagging route across the decades); but almost as soon as I was there I realized it was merely a single step over the line, the easy bit; and all the difficult stuff was just beginning.
The modern boom in skin-mutilation - the revelatory power of a synonym
The following is adapted from a cheery piece of propaganda for skin-mutilations in the 'Arts and Culture' section of the Huffington Post on 27 October 2015 - It was prepared simply by searching and replacing one well-known word with a synonymous phrase, and editing-out some of the proper names. Think of it as an exercise in re-framing...
What's in a name? - quite a lot, it seems.
Let's face it, skin-mutilations have burst onto pop culture and have taken over the current media scenery. TV shows based on the skin-mutilation industry are springing up on major networks, social media pages for skin-mutilation culture are numbering in the millions of followers, and you would be hard pressed to take a walk on the street and not see several people sporting leg skin-mutilations or full arm skin-mutilations. Not to mention all the skin-mutilations you see on the beach! Skin-mutilations have become a mainstream part of society.
Today, 36 percent of Americans aged 18-25 have at least one skin-mutilation, according to recent report. That's more than one third of America's young adults! It comes as no surprise that the skin-mutilation industry is the sixth fastest-growing retail business in America, as determined by the U.S. News & World Report. This has obviously translated to online interest as well, as there are more than 147 million skin-mutilation related searches each month on Google.
How did this industry achieve this status though? Skin-mutilations have certainly been scrutinized in the past and a visible feature that was once taboo has now become... normal?
Twenty five years ago, skin-mutilations were actually quite common... on sailors, prison inmates, and members of tough motorcycle gangs. If you looked at accountants, pro ping-pong players, or shoe salesmen though, it would have been pretty rare to find a skin-mutilation. So what happened?
Ironically, skin-mutilations have been around since the beginning of human history… So when and where did skin skin-mutilation originate? The answer to this question may remain a mystery, but scientific evidence proves that skin-mutilations have been a part of human culture for thousands of years.
In 1991, German hikers on the Oztal Alps (near the border between Italy and Austria) discovered the mummified remains of a prehistoric human. Carbon dating would prove that the human, named Ötzi, had been mummified more than 5,300 years ago. While Ötzi was discovered with primitive tools and arrows, his most unique feature was that his body was adorned with no less than 57 skin-mutilations, all the way from his upper neck to his ankles.
Findings like this continuously have proven that skin-mutilations have been a part of human societies since their inception, as parts of rituals and cultures throughout history and across the globe.
Fast-forward to 2005. Our society still held prejudices against skin-mutilations and, while some people were getting them on their own, no one would say skin-mutilations were a part of pop culture. What changed this? The moment skin-mutilations stepped into society's limelight can be pinpointed to a very specific event: the launching of the first popular skin-mutilation TV show. A legendary shop on South Beach housed a unique mix of talented and charismatic skin-mutilation artists. Before this show, only the minority of people with skin-mutilations knew what the inside of a skin-mutilation studio was like. People weren't privy to the amazing work being done there or to the dynamic personalities and various styles of different artists. It made for good TV though... It was a huge success and it changed everything.
The shows opened the channels for the average Joe to look into this "underworld" of skin-mutilations. To realize that the art is impressive, beautiful, and attainable. Every person can have an amazing skin-mutilation. Every person can have their own unique skin-mutilation. Having a skin-mutilation can be an expression of who you are. Or what you believe in. Or something you cherish. Or just something you thought was fun. The prejudice, not having disappeared completely, is certainly greatly diminished.
Skin-mutilation artists became celebrities. Rihanna, David Beckham, Angelina Jolie, and Adam Levine, are several examples of mainstream media icons that have skin-mutilations and openly display them. It's a part of who they are now. And fans of these and many other celebrities are now getting their skin mutilated just like their idols.
Enter social media. Another game-changer for the skin-mutilation industry. The same artists that gained celebrity status on the skin-mutilation TV shows are now followed by millions of people on these platforms (and some of these followers don't even have any skin-mutilations of their own!). These same popular artists, or the individual users themselves, can identify new artists -- the up-and-comers -- that impress all with their unique and groundbreaking designs. Skin-mutilation conventions are exploding in popularity, as everyone wants the chance to meet their favorite artists, post a picture with them on their profiles, and maybe even get a skin-mutilation! And skin-mutilation shops are now the place of legend -- the home of major skin-mutilation artists and a site to see in and of itself.
So what's next? The internet will naturally allow the skin-mutilation industry to continue evolving in ground-breaking ways in order to deliver the best possible content and services for the millions of skin-mutilation-culture followers out there. The gap between the skin-mutilation fan and the artist will get smaller and smaller with these new internet-based platforms and we can already see this trend in sites that offer crowd-sourcing for skin-mutilation designs, where people are linked to artists from all over the world in order to obtain customized skin-mutilation designs. Together with the growing mainstream skin-mutilation community, we anxiously await to see the crazy ways this industry will continue to develop and take over pop culture.
What's in a name? - quite a lot, it seems.
How skin-mutilation went from sub-culture to pop culture
Let's face it, skin-mutilations have burst onto pop culture and have taken over the current media scenery. TV shows based on the skin-mutilation industry are springing up on major networks, social media pages for skin-mutilation culture are numbering in the millions of followers, and you would be hard pressed to take a walk on the street and not see several people sporting leg skin-mutilations or full arm skin-mutilations. Not to mention all the skin-mutilations you see on the beach! Skin-mutilations have become a mainstream part of society.
Today, 36 percent of Americans aged 18-25 have at least one skin-mutilation, according to recent report. That's more than one third of America's young adults! It comes as no surprise that the skin-mutilation industry is the sixth fastest-growing retail business in America, as determined by the U.S. News & World Report. This has obviously translated to online interest as well, as there are more than 147 million skin-mutilation related searches each month on Google.
How did this industry achieve this status though? Skin-mutilations have certainly been scrutinized in the past and a visible feature that was once taboo has now become... normal?
Twenty five years ago, skin-mutilations were actually quite common... on sailors, prison inmates, and members of tough motorcycle gangs. If you looked at accountants, pro ping-pong players, or shoe salesmen though, it would have been pretty rare to find a skin-mutilation. So what happened?
Ironically, skin-mutilations have been around since the beginning of human history… So when and where did skin skin-mutilation originate? The answer to this question may remain a mystery, but scientific evidence proves that skin-mutilations have been a part of human culture for thousands of years.
In 1991, German hikers on the Oztal Alps (near the border between Italy and Austria) discovered the mummified remains of a prehistoric human. Carbon dating would prove that the human, named Ötzi, had been mummified more than 5,300 years ago. While Ötzi was discovered with primitive tools and arrows, his most unique feature was that his body was adorned with no less than 57 skin-mutilations, all the way from his upper neck to his ankles.
Findings like this continuously have proven that skin-mutilations have been a part of human societies since their inception, as parts of rituals and cultures throughout history and across the globe.
Fast-forward to 2005. Our society still held prejudices against skin-mutilations and, while some people were getting them on their own, no one would say skin-mutilations were a part of pop culture. What changed this? The moment skin-mutilations stepped into society's limelight can be pinpointed to a very specific event: the launching of the first popular skin-mutilation TV show. A legendary shop on South Beach housed a unique mix of talented and charismatic skin-mutilation artists. Before this show, only the minority of people with skin-mutilations knew what the inside of a skin-mutilation studio was like. People weren't privy to the amazing work being done there or to the dynamic personalities and various styles of different artists. It made for good TV though... It was a huge success and it changed everything.
The shows opened the channels for the average Joe to look into this "underworld" of skin-mutilations. To realize that the art is impressive, beautiful, and attainable. Every person can have an amazing skin-mutilation. Every person can have their own unique skin-mutilation. Having a skin-mutilation can be an expression of who you are. Or what you believe in. Or something you cherish. Or just something you thought was fun. The prejudice, not having disappeared completely, is certainly greatly diminished.
Skin-mutilation artists became celebrities. Rihanna, David Beckham, Angelina Jolie, and Adam Levine, are several examples of mainstream media icons that have skin-mutilations and openly display them. It's a part of who they are now. And fans of these and many other celebrities are now getting their skin mutilated just like their idols.
Enter social media. Another game-changer for the skin-mutilation industry. The same artists that gained celebrity status on the skin-mutilation TV shows are now followed by millions of people on these platforms (and some of these followers don't even have any skin-mutilations of their own!). These same popular artists, or the individual users themselves, can identify new artists -- the up-and-comers -- that impress all with their unique and groundbreaking designs. Skin-mutilation conventions are exploding in popularity, as everyone wants the chance to meet their favorite artists, post a picture with them on their profiles, and maybe even get a skin-mutilation! And skin-mutilation shops are now the place of legend -- the home of major skin-mutilation artists and a site to see in and of itself.
So what's next? The internet will naturally allow the skin-mutilation industry to continue evolving in ground-breaking ways in order to deliver the best possible content and services for the millions of skin-mutilation-culture followers out there. The gap between the skin-mutilation fan and the artist will get smaller and smaller with these new internet-based platforms and we can already see this trend in sites that offer crowd-sourcing for skin-mutilation designs, where people are linked to artists from all over the world in order to obtain customized skin-mutilation designs. Together with the growing mainstream skin-mutilation community, we anxiously await to see the crazy ways this industry will continue to develop and take over pop culture.
Monday, 30 November 2015
High status doubts versus taboo doubts among mainstream 'Christian' leaders
In 'Liberal Christian' circles - which include most of the leadership of most of the largest and most powerful Christian churches it is a high status action to express, to discuss and elaborate, one's 'doubts' about Christianity - for example doubts about theology, doctrines and ethics; about the nature and reality of God, the divinity of Christ, the truth of miracles, prophecies, the Virgin Birth; the truth of the Bible and the meaning of key passages (especially relating to sex and sexuality)...
High ranking Christian leaders are eager to describe their doubts about such matters; and such doubts are status-enhancing in The World.
But to discuss doubts concerning the core tenets of modern Mainstream Leftist Politics is a strict taboo - such doubts are status-threatening in The World, and they are avoided.
So we do not hear mainstream Christian leaders expressing doubts about the value of the abolition of slavery, we do not hear them discussing racial differences, we do not hear them challenge the value of overseas aid - or describe its multiply destructive effects, nor do they question the validity of policies aimed at promoting multiculturalism and 'diversity'; nor do they even dissent from the official doctrines concerning the theory that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is (for sure) going to cause net-harmful global warming - but that this outcome can be prevented by immediate international pluvial action: this theory is regarded, in practice, by high status powerful Christian leaders - as an undeniable fact of life: far less open-to-doubt than the divinity of Christ.
(Leftism is, I believe, fundamentally anti-Christian. Nonetheless, given that all political views are highly imperfect, distorted, simplistic, pragmatic phenomena - it certainly is possible to be a Leftist and a real Christian - so long as it is the Leftism that is contingent and doubtful - not the Christianity.).
The reason for this behaviour of Christian leaders isn't complex nor difficult to understand - it is simply that these leaders are not fundamentally Christians; but instead their fundamental belief is in Leftist politics. They are solid socialists who are Christianized (to a greater or lesser extent), but not solid Christians.
We know this because they doubt Christianity, but they do not doubt Leftism. They are 'tolerant' (which means they do not care) about Christian heresy, apostasy, or decline, or imminent extinction in The West; but they are zealous and fanatical Leftists who try their hardest to prevent political dissent among their ranks: membership of 'right wing' parties or advocacy of anti-Left policies is not tolerated, and is excoriated from the highest levels; and is either explicitly forbidden (eg membership of some legal political parties is grounds for non-appointment or dismissal), or else such people are covertly sanctioned and excluded.
Leftism is the main enemy of Christianity. but this is not because the political Right is correct; it is because the majority of self-identified Christians - and almost all the leadership - are dishonestly fundamentalist Leftist activists whose Christianity is a fake and a lie.
Whether mainstream self-identified-Christian leaders themselves acknowledge or deny this fact concerning their fundamental beliefs and their contingent beliefs is neither here nor there, it is unambiguously and undeniably revealed by their preferences and actions - most clearly by the nature of their doubts.
High ranking Christian leaders are eager to describe their doubts about such matters; and such doubts are status-enhancing in The World.
But to discuss doubts concerning the core tenets of modern Mainstream Leftist Politics is a strict taboo - such doubts are status-threatening in The World, and they are avoided.
So we do not hear mainstream Christian leaders expressing doubts about the value of the abolition of slavery, we do not hear them discussing racial differences, we do not hear them challenge the value of overseas aid - or describe its multiply destructive effects, nor do they question the validity of policies aimed at promoting multiculturalism and 'diversity'; nor do they even dissent from the official doctrines concerning the theory that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is (for sure) going to cause net-harmful global warming - but that this outcome can be prevented by immediate international pluvial action: this theory is regarded, in practice, by high status powerful Christian leaders - as an undeniable fact of life: far less open-to-doubt than the divinity of Christ.
(Leftism is, I believe, fundamentally anti-Christian. Nonetheless, given that all political views are highly imperfect, distorted, simplistic, pragmatic phenomena - it certainly is possible to be a Leftist and a real Christian - so long as it is the Leftism that is contingent and doubtful - not the Christianity.).
The reason for this behaviour of Christian leaders isn't complex nor difficult to understand - it is simply that these leaders are not fundamentally Christians; but instead their fundamental belief is in Leftist politics. They are solid socialists who are Christianized (to a greater or lesser extent), but not solid Christians.
We know this because they doubt Christianity, but they do not doubt Leftism. They are 'tolerant' (which means they do not care) about Christian heresy, apostasy, or decline, or imminent extinction in The West; but they are zealous and fanatical Leftists who try their hardest to prevent political dissent among their ranks: membership of 'right wing' parties or advocacy of anti-Left policies is not tolerated, and is excoriated from the highest levels; and is either explicitly forbidden (eg membership of some legal political parties is grounds for non-appointment or dismissal), or else such people are covertly sanctioned and excluded.
Leftism is the main enemy of Christianity. but this is not because the political Right is correct; it is because the majority of self-identified Christians - and almost all the leadership - are dishonestly fundamentalist Leftist activists whose Christianity is a fake and a lie.
Whether mainstream self-identified-Christian leaders themselves acknowledge or deny this fact concerning their fundamental beliefs and their contingent beliefs is neither here nor there, it is unambiguously and undeniably revealed by their preferences and actions - most clearly by the nature of their doubts.
Sunday, 29 November 2015
Supernatural help in relation to spiritual progress (as the main aim in mortal life) - wants versus needs
People often, quite reasonably, find it bizarre and puzzling that humans do not get a lot more in the way of supernatural help in life.
If, as many Christians believe, the main aim in life really is salvation - i.e. to be saved from a default state of damnation - then it seems reasonable to suppose that the more supernatural help people have, the better it would be; and that all possible threats to salvation should be intercepted by supernatural aid; whether direct from God the Father, Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost - or via the work of angels.
If salvation really is the goal of life, then life can be seen metaphorically as a rescue - helping people out of a pit; or as preventing people from falling back into a pit once they have climbed-out - and if the pit is seen as a place of eternal torment and misery, it seems hard to understand why supernatural assistance in escaping or avoiding an (unfenced) pit would not be obvious and abundant.
And the fact that most Christians do not experience moment by moment (nor even day by day) help from supernatural interventions, even when damnation is threatened, is apparently explicable (assuming that God is Good) only on the basis that people do not deserve to have help (i.e. some version of the doctrine of original sin).
But if, alternatively, salvation is seen as already having been given by the work of Christ (importantly, on condition that we accept this gift, via repentance - which of course does not-at-all-always happen; so salvation is not universal); then mortal life is seen as a matter of spiritual development.
[Spiritual development or progression is also called sanctification (becoming more saint-like), theosis (becoming more God-like), or divinization (developing our potentially divine nature to higher levels).]
If mortal life as seen (as I personally see it) as primarily about spiritual development, and since the human spirit is (for Christians) a free agent, capable of choice and learning; then an educational (not rescue) metaphor applies to mortal life. Mortal life becomes analogous to an apprenticeship or a school or college - in which the goal is to develop an advanced skill.
By such an account, supernatural agents are like the teachers - and the task is for them to bring the apprentices or students to an extremely high level of skill - ultimately equalling and potentially surpassing their own.
For such an ideal teacher, there is such a thing as excessive intervention, of teaching too much and in too specific a detail. (And by analogy, there is such a thing as too much supernatural intervention.)
The ideal teacher does not want mere obedience to a set of rules and practices; the ideal teacher wants to use the student's inner motivation to develop his ability to evaluate the situation, to make decisions and implement them, and then to evaluate the outcome to judge what further changes may be needed. In sum the student must take responsibility for his own learning - and this will not happen is the teacher is continually 'breathing down the neck' of the student.
So a wise teacher of a motivated pianist will aim to point-out only those technical errors that are dead-ends or will lead to problems in the future. Th teacher will not try to dictate all decisions all the time.
Thus the good teacher does not aspire to sit continuously with his pupil correcting and intervening every few seconds; but to give specific and concentrated and intermittent guidance - and then have the student go-off to grapple with the problem in his own way and as best he may. The ratio of explicit teaching to individual grappling with problems (aka 'practice') is very small - maybe one hour of teaching to dozens of hours of solo practice.
This, in a nutshell, is why most of us do not experience continuous, nor even frequent, divine guidance in our lives - because the main thing in life is our individual taking of responsibility for our lives - grappling, making mistakes, then detecting and trying to correct them; then moving on (and up) to repeat the process in (never ending) cycles of ascent and progression.
The best way to learn, probably the only way truly to learn; is for the student to grapple with and solve problems for himself, including making mistakes - because that kind of learning is deep, it is primary; and it enables the student to take over and teach himself - and to become an autonomous agent.
The best way for Man to live his mortal life, probably the only way for Man to live as a Man; is for him to grapple with and solve problems for himself , including making mistakes. That is the path of theosis.
Some supernatural intervention is helpful, and sometimes it is essential - when someone is making the same mistake over and over again; or when someone is headed-off down a blind alley, or into disaster.
But, as with a piano pupil, all teaching must voluntarily be accepted and embraced by the student if it is to be effective. Teaching which is coercively-imposed is, indeed, an impossiblity - since Men just are by their nature autonomus agents with free will.
Since we are - at this stage - weak creatures; we nearly always want and ask for more help, more divine assistance, than is good for us. College students mostly want to get 'detailed feedback' on their essays, which amounts to telling them exactly 'how to get high marks' if they only obey the instructions, and copy-out the advice.
But what such students want is not what is good for them, nor is it effective in building ability. What they need is to work from genuine motivation (and if this is lacking, then nothing genuine can be done); to grapple with the problems, and evaluate the reasons for imperfections and failures of their own work; to understand what went wrong, and try again. Ideally, students may learn the skills, and may become self-teachers - and then potentially teachers of others.
This, I think, is why Christians do not receive very-frequent or obvious supernatural help; because if we are indeed living this life mostly for reasons of spiritual progression, then it would be bad for us (harmful) to be in a situation of merely doing what God (or the angels) told us to do at a minute and moment by moment level.
For then we would not be learning, we would indeed be learning not-to-learn.
We know (and this is faith, and explains why faith is essential) that God is Good and Loves us as individual persons and as Men - so the basic set-up of life must be for our benefit.
We have been given general rules of how to proceed; and we have the assurance that when help is really helpful - if we ask, it will certainly be given.
But if we ask for 'help' and it is not given; then there are Good and Loving reasons (which we probably will not understand exactly, at our stage in development - just as a junior apprentice may not understand why his Master forbids him some kind of superficially effective technique that will lead to trouble later) why this kind of help, at this time, would actually be harmful to us.
Thus, understanding our mortal life as primarily about spiritual development (rather than focused on salvation) may help us to clarify the nature of genuinely-hepful supernatural assistance that we can expect and will happen when requested; and that kind of pseudo-helpful but actually-harmful interference that we should not expect and will not happen.
It is a matter of the difference, familiar to all real teachers, of distinguishing between what the student wants versus what the student needs.
Note added: The above is a frame, by-which and through-which to understand life. It is, in other words, a metaphysical system. For a Christian, this metaphysical system is not arbitrary but a reasonable - not inevitable - consequence of the basic and essential Christian belief in the Goodness and personal love of God, and its implications for this life on the assumption that it was set up by our loving God and for our ultimate good. As such, it cannot be challenged by specific pieces of evidence - metaphysics just is not challenged by specific pieces of evidence, because it frames the evidence, and makes sense of, gives meaning, to evidence. If you do suppose that you are indeed judging a metaphysical system by specific pieces of evidence, then you are making a rational-error; and actually merely using a different metaphysical system but without being aware of it. A metaphysical system can only properly be judged by comparison with another metaphysical system; and to do this, you must become aware 1. that you have metaphysical beliefs, 2. what these are; and 3. that these beliefs are not inevitable but are a choice (although not necessarily, nor usually, a conscious choice).
If, as many Christians believe, the main aim in life really is salvation - i.e. to be saved from a default state of damnation - then it seems reasonable to suppose that the more supernatural help people have, the better it would be; and that all possible threats to salvation should be intercepted by supernatural aid; whether direct from God the Father, Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost - or via the work of angels.
If salvation really is the goal of life, then life can be seen metaphorically as a rescue - helping people out of a pit; or as preventing people from falling back into a pit once they have climbed-out - and if the pit is seen as a place of eternal torment and misery, it seems hard to understand why supernatural assistance in escaping or avoiding an (unfenced) pit would not be obvious and abundant.
And the fact that most Christians do not experience moment by moment (nor even day by day) help from supernatural interventions, even when damnation is threatened, is apparently explicable (assuming that God is Good) only on the basis that people do not deserve to have help (i.e. some version of the doctrine of original sin).
But if, alternatively, salvation is seen as already having been given by the work of Christ (importantly, on condition that we accept this gift, via repentance - which of course does not-at-all-always happen; so salvation is not universal); then mortal life is seen as a matter of spiritual development.
[Spiritual development or progression is also called sanctification (becoming more saint-like), theosis (becoming more God-like), or divinization (developing our potentially divine nature to higher levels).]
If mortal life as seen (as I personally see it) as primarily about spiritual development, and since the human spirit is (for Christians) a free agent, capable of choice and learning; then an educational (not rescue) metaphor applies to mortal life. Mortal life becomes analogous to an apprenticeship or a school or college - in which the goal is to develop an advanced skill.
By such an account, supernatural agents are like the teachers - and the task is for them to bring the apprentices or students to an extremely high level of skill - ultimately equalling and potentially surpassing their own.
For such an ideal teacher, there is such a thing as excessive intervention, of teaching too much and in too specific a detail. (And by analogy, there is such a thing as too much supernatural intervention.)
The ideal teacher does not want mere obedience to a set of rules and practices; the ideal teacher wants to use the student's inner motivation to develop his ability to evaluate the situation, to make decisions and implement them, and then to evaluate the outcome to judge what further changes may be needed. In sum the student must take responsibility for his own learning - and this will not happen is the teacher is continually 'breathing down the neck' of the student.
So a wise teacher of a motivated pianist will aim to point-out only those technical errors that are dead-ends or will lead to problems in the future. Th teacher will not try to dictate all decisions all the time.
Thus the good teacher does not aspire to sit continuously with his pupil correcting and intervening every few seconds; but to give specific and concentrated and intermittent guidance - and then have the student go-off to grapple with the problem in his own way and as best he may. The ratio of explicit teaching to individual grappling with problems (aka 'practice') is very small - maybe one hour of teaching to dozens of hours of solo practice.
This, in a nutshell, is why most of us do not experience continuous, nor even frequent, divine guidance in our lives - because the main thing in life is our individual taking of responsibility for our lives - grappling, making mistakes, then detecting and trying to correct them; then moving on (and up) to repeat the process in (never ending) cycles of ascent and progression.
The best way to learn, probably the only way truly to learn; is for the student to grapple with and solve problems for himself, including making mistakes - because that kind of learning is deep, it is primary; and it enables the student to take over and teach himself - and to become an autonomous agent.
The best way for Man to live his mortal life, probably the only way for Man to live as a Man; is for him to grapple with and solve problems for himself , including making mistakes. That is the path of theosis.
Some supernatural intervention is helpful, and sometimes it is essential - when someone is making the same mistake over and over again; or when someone is headed-off down a blind alley, or into disaster.
But, as with a piano pupil, all teaching must voluntarily be accepted and embraced by the student if it is to be effective. Teaching which is coercively-imposed is, indeed, an impossiblity - since Men just are by their nature autonomus agents with free will.
Since we are - at this stage - weak creatures; we nearly always want and ask for more help, more divine assistance, than is good for us. College students mostly want to get 'detailed feedback' on their essays, which amounts to telling them exactly 'how to get high marks' if they only obey the instructions, and copy-out the advice.
But what such students want is not what is good for them, nor is it effective in building ability. What they need is to work from genuine motivation (and if this is lacking, then nothing genuine can be done); to grapple with the problems, and evaluate the reasons for imperfections and failures of their own work; to understand what went wrong, and try again. Ideally, students may learn the skills, and may become self-teachers - and then potentially teachers of others.
This, I think, is why Christians do not receive very-frequent or obvious supernatural help; because if we are indeed living this life mostly for reasons of spiritual progression, then it would be bad for us (harmful) to be in a situation of merely doing what God (or the angels) told us to do at a minute and moment by moment level.
For then we would not be learning, we would indeed be learning not-to-learn.
We know (and this is faith, and explains why faith is essential) that God is Good and Loves us as individual persons and as Men - so the basic set-up of life must be for our benefit.
We have been given general rules of how to proceed; and we have the assurance that when help is really helpful - if we ask, it will certainly be given.
But if we ask for 'help' and it is not given; then there are Good and Loving reasons (which we probably will not understand exactly, at our stage in development - just as a junior apprentice may not understand why his Master forbids him some kind of superficially effective technique that will lead to trouble later) why this kind of help, at this time, would actually be harmful to us.
Thus, understanding our mortal life as primarily about spiritual development (rather than focused on salvation) may help us to clarify the nature of genuinely-hepful supernatural assistance that we can expect and will happen when requested; and that kind of pseudo-helpful but actually-harmful interference that we should not expect and will not happen.
It is a matter of the difference, familiar to all real teachers, of distinguishing between what the student wants versus what the student needs.
Note added: The above is a frame, by-which and through-which to understand life. It is, in other words, a metaphysical system. For a Christian, this metaphysical system is not arbitrary but a reasonable - not inevitable - consequence of the basic and essential Christian belief in the Goodness and personal love of God, and its implications for this life on the assumption that it was set up by our loving God and for our ultimate good. As such, it cannot be challenged by specific pieces of evidence - metaphysics just is not challenged by specific pieces of evidence, because it frames the evidence, and makes sense of, gives meaning, to evidence. If you do suppose that you are indeed judging a metaphysical system by specific pieces of evidence, then you are making a rational-error; and actually merely using a different metaphysical system but without being aware of it. A metaphysical system can only properly be judged by comparison with another metaphysical system; and to do this, you must become aware 1. that you have metaphysical beliefs, 2. what these are; and 3. that these beliefs are not inevitable but are a choice (although not necessarily, nor usually, a conscious choice).
Saturday, 28 November 2015
Friday, 27 November 2015
Probability/ Randomness doesn't *really* exist
Physicist David Deutsch explains why probability is an abstract model that may be useful for some practical purposes - but is not found in real life, and does not explain anything.
**
The awful secret at the heart of probability theory is that physical events either happen or they don’t: there’s no such thing in nature as probably happening. Probability statements aren’t factual assertions at all.
The theory of probability as a whole is irretrievably “normative”: it says what ought to happen in certain circumstances and then presents us with a set of instructions. It is normative because it commands that very high probabilities, such as “the probability of x is near 1″, should be treated almost as if they were “x will happen”. But such a normative rule has no place in a scientific theory, especially not in physics. “There was a 99 per cent chance of sunny weather yesterday” does not mean “It was sunny”.
… Probability and associated ideas such as randomness didn’t originally have any deep scientific purpose. They were invented in the 16th and 17th centuries by people who wanted to win money at games of chance. To discover the best strategies for playing such games, they modelled them mathematically. True games of chance are driven by chancy physical processes such as throwing dice or shuffling cards. These have to be unpredictable (having no known pattern) yet equitable (not favouring any player over another).
…Before game theory, mathematics could not yet accommodate an unpredictable, equitable sequence of numbers, so game theorists had to invent mathematical randomness and probability. They analysed games as if the chancy elements were generated by “randomisers”: abstract devices generating random sequences, with uniform probability.
[But...] no finite sequence can be truly random. To expect fairly tossed dice to be less likely to come up with a double after a long sequence of doubles is a falsehood known as the gambler’s fallacy. But if you know that a finite sequence is equitable – it has an equal number of 1s and 0s, say – then towards the end, knowing what came before does make it easier to predict what must come next.
A second objection is that because classical physics is deterministic, no classical mechanism can generate a truly random sequence. So why did game theory work?
…The key is that in all of these applications, randomness is a very large sledgehammer used to crack the egg of modelling fair dice, or Brownian jiggling with no particular pattern, or mutations with no intentional design. The conditions that are required to model these situations are awkward to express mathematically, whereas the condition of randomness is easy, given probability theory. It is unphysical and far too strong, but no matter.
[However…], you could conceive of Earth as being literally flat, as people once did, and that falsehood might never adversely affect you. But it would also be quite capable of destroying our entire species, because it is incompatible with developing technology to avert, say, asteroid strikes.
Similarly, conceiving of the world as being literally probabilistic may not prevent you from developing quantum technology. But because the world isn’t probabilistic, it could well prevent you from developing a successor to quantum theory…
It is easy to accept that probability is part of the world, just as it’s easy to imagine Earth as flat when in your garden. But this is no guide to what the world is really like, and what the laws of nature actually are.
From New Scientist September 2015
< A fuller version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc
**
This means that the old chestnut used to check understanding of probability theory - of asking whether having thrown twelve 'heads' with a coin, the next throw of the dice is therefore more likely to come-up heads - is therefore misleading in practice and only true axiomatically. The supposed answer is that even after twelve heads the next throw is equally likely to come-up tails is only correct in terms of a model that this is true-by-assumption.
In real life, a dice that came up heads twelve times in a row, should usually be assumed to be non-random - so (unless the dice is being controlled specifically in order to trick you!) it is wise to assume that the next throw is more likely to come up heads than tails...
In general terms, randomness is just (part of) a model - and whether that model is true-to-life is a question of science - not of mathematics.
Some models can reasonably be termed an 'explanation' of a phenomenon - but models containing probability statements cannot.
I think it is fair to say that many or most statisticians fail to understand this; and that it undercuts many of the assumptions governing modern 'evidence-based' policy.
**
The awful secret at the heart of probability theory is that physical events either happen or they don’t: there’s no such thing in nature as probably happening. Probability statements aren’t factual assertions at all.
The theory of probability as a whole is irretrievably “normative”: it says what ought to happen in certain circumstances and then presents us with a set of instructions. It is normative because it commands that very high probabilities, such as “the probability of x is near 1″, should be treated almost as if they were “x will happen”. But such a normative rule has no place in a scientific theory, especially not in physics. “There was a 99 per cent chance of sunny weather yesterday” does not mean “It was sunny”.
… Probability and associated ideas such as randomness didn’t originally have any deep scientific purpose. They were invented in the 16th and 17th centuries by people who wanted to win money at games of chance. To discover the best strategies for playing such games, they modelled them mathematically. True games of chance are driven by chancy physical processes such as throwing dice or shuffling cards. These have to be unpredictable (having no known pattern) yet equitable (not favouring any player over another).
…Before game theory, mathematics could not yet accommodate an unpredictable, equitable sequence of numbers, so game theorists had to invent mathematical randomness and probability. They analysed games as if the chancy elements were generated by “randomisers”: abstract devices generating random sequences, with uniform probability.
[But...] no finite sequence can be truly random. To expect fairly tossed dice to be less likely to come up with a double after a long sequence of doubles is a falsehood known as the gambler’s fallacy. But if you know that a finite sequence is equitable – it has an equal number of 1s and 0s, say – then towards the end, knowing what came before does make it easier to predict what must come next.
A second objection is that because classical physics is deterministic, no classical mechanism can generate a truly random sequence. So why did game theory work?
…The key is that in all of these applications, randomness is a very large sledgehammer used to crack the egg of modelling fair dice, or Brownian jiggling with no particular pattern, or mutations with no intentional design. The conditions that are required to model these situations are awkward to express mathematically, whereas the condition of randomness is easy, given probability theory. It is unphysical and far too strong, but no matter.
[However…], you could conceive of Earth as being literally flat, as people once did, and that falsehood might never adversely affect you. But it would also be quite capable of destroying our entire species, because it is incompatible with developing technology to avert, say, asteroid strikes.
Similarly, conceiving of the world as being literally probabilistic may not prevent you from developing quantum technology. But because the world isn’t probabilistic, it could well prevent you from developing a successor to quantum theory…
It is easy to accept that probability is part of the world, just as it’s easy to imagine Earth as flat when in your garden. But this is no guide to what the world is really like, and what the laws of nature actually are.
From New Scientist September 2015
< A fuller version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc
**
This means that the old chestnut used to check understanding of probability theory - of asking whether having thrown twelve 'heads' with a coin, the next throw of the dice is therefore more likely to come-up heads - is therefore misleading in practice and only true axiomatically. The supposed answer is that even after twelve heads the next throw is equally likely to come-up tails is only correct in terms of a model that this is true-by-assumption.
In real life, a dice that came up heads twelve times in a row, should usually be assumed to be non-random - so (unless the dice is being controlled specifically in order to trick you!) it is wise to assume that the next throw is more likely to come up heads than tails...
In general terms, randomness is just (part of) a model - and whether that model is true-to-life is a question of science - not of mathematics.
Some models can reasonably be termed an 'explanation' of a phenomenon - but models containing probability statements cannot.
I think it is fair to say that many or most statisticians fail to understand this; and that it undercuts many of the assumptions governing modern 'evidence-based' policy.
Sex, the Universe and Christianity - the weakness of mainstream, and a great strength of Mormon, theology
Mainstream Christianity has proved to be extremely vulnerable to the sexual revolution over the past century or so - indeed, the sexual revolution has all-but eliminated Christianity from public discourse in The West, reduced the main Christianity churches to servile impotence - and the destruction continues.
Why should this be? My guess is that many people cannot perceive see any solid link between the topic of sex and the necessities of Christian faith - and the mainstream churches have been unable to explain any link in a way that was comprehensible and convincing.
Traditional Christianity in The West was mostly organized around an attitude that was anti-sex - or was felt to be anti-sex by those who lived under it. The highest Christians were celibate monks and priests in Catholic countries; but everywhere sex was not so much a matter of there being lots of things forbidden (although they were) as that only a very few sexual expressions were permitted.
These rules were presented as divine laws: and not so much explained, as simply enforced.
The problem, I think, is that while people mostly obeyed these laws; they could not understand the link between sexual activities and the Universe as described by Christianity.
There just did not seem to be any comprehensible connection between the Big Picture of God's creation of the Universe and his plans for the salvation of Men on the one hand - and the minutiae of what individual humans did in their tiny minds and feeble bodies: and their sex organs specifically.
The feeling was: why on earth should God care about what I do 'in the privacy of my bedroom'? - or indeed anywhere else? The feeling: what possible difference could my 'doings' make to the Universe as a whole?
Once there was a possibility of sex without babies; sex seemed such a small and temporary thing that it was difficult to see any significant role for it within the scope of the Universe; and mainstream Christianity was only able to provide very indirect, unconvincing and indeed mostly incomprehensible explanations to link sex and God's universe.
This was because Christianity has generally been felt as a spiritual, not a bodily thing; and God Himself was a spiritual and disembodied creator. Men and women were created from nothing, sex was presumed to be absent for the eternity after death - and in general sex was just a temporary and non-vital expedient during the short period of (fallen, sin-full) life on earth
It is a strength of Mormon theology that the significance, the vital importance, the Goodness of sex in the universe is clear in terms of the underlying metaphysics; which is itself clearly expressible as a simple story: that men and women are literal children of an incarnate Heavenly Father and Mother; and our main task on earth is to marry, have children and lead Christian lives primarily organized around families; eternal life after death is organized according to families; and the highest human destiny includes (eventually...) for a man and woman in celestial marriage to become divine parents.
This means that the very fundamentals of Mormon Christianity have built-in sexual relationships, sexual difference and relationships go up to the highest level.
And the vital importance of sex to the Christian Universe is clear even to a child - and without the necessity for long, abstract and philosophical explanation.
Why should this be? My guess is that many people cannot perceive see any solid link between the topic of sex and the necessities of Christian faith - and the mainstream churches have been unable to explain any link in a way that was comprehensible and convincing.
Traditional Christianity in The West was mostly organized around an attitude that was anti-sex - or was felt to be anti-sex by those who lived under it. The highest Christians were celibate monks and priests in Catholic countries; but everywhere sex was not so much a matter of there being lots of things forbidden (although they were) as that only a very few sexual expressions were permitted.
These rules were presented as divine laws: and not so much explained, as simply enforced.
The problem, I think, is that while people mostly obeyed these laws; they could not understand the link between sexual activities and the Universe as described by Christianity.
There just did not seem to be any comprehensible connection between the Big Picture of God's creation of the Universe and his plans for the salvation of Men on the one hand - and the minutiae of what individual humans did in their tiny minds and feeble bodies: and their sex organs specifically.
The feeling was: why on earth should God care about what I do 'in the privacy of my bedroom'? - or indeed anywhere else? The feeling: what possible difference could my 'doings' make to the Universe as a whole?
Once there was a possibility of sex without babies; sex seemed such a small and temporary thing that it was difficult to see any significant role for it within the scope of the Universe; and mainstream Christianity was only able to provide very indirect, unconvincing and indeed mostly incomprehensible explanations to link sex and God's universe.
This was because Christianity has generally been felt as a spiritual, not a bodily thing; and God Himself was a spiritual and disembodied creator. Men and women were created from nothing, sex was presumed to be absent for the eternity after death - and in general sex was just a temporary and non-vital expedient during the short period of (fallen, sin-full) life on earth
It is a strength of Mormon theology that the significance, the vital importance, the Goodness of sex in the universe is clear in terms of the underlying metaphysics; which is itself clearly expressible as a simple story: that men and women are literal children of an incarnate Heavenly Father and Mother; and our main task on earth is to marry, have children and lead Christian lives primarily organized around families; eternal life after death is organized according to families; and the highest human destiny includes (eventually...) for a man and woman in celestial marriage to become divine parents.
This means that the very fundamentals of Mormon Christianity have built-in sexual relationships, sexual difference and relationships go up to the highest level.
And the vital importance of sex to the Christian Universe is clear even to a child - and without the necessity for long, abstract and philosophical explanation.
Thursday, 26 November 2015
A clerihew about me
Written by 'MC' of the Junior Ganymede blog:
Dr. Bruce Charlton
Refused to get snarled on
Metaphysical “maybes”
That don’t produce babies.
http://www.jrganymede.com/2015/11/25/as-the-prophet-nash-has-written/comment-page-1/#comment-466923
Note - http://www.verse.org.uk/what-is-a-clerihew.html
Dr. Bruce Charlton
Refused to get snarled on
Metaphysical “maybes”
That don’t produce babies.
http://www.jrganymede.com/2015/11/25/as-the-prophet-nash-has-written/comment-page-1/#comment-466923
Note - http://www.verse.org.uk/what-is-a-clerihew.html
"Predicting the future" in modern secular societies
There is, to put it mildly, considerable inconsistency about the way that those with power claim to predict - or 'predict the future' as the common pleonasm has it.
But perhaps adding 'the future' to the phrase is not redundant - considering that climate change 'predictions' are actually based wholly on the past.
When Global Warming advocates claim improved prediction, what they really mean is that they have a new (CO2 based) mathematical model that more precisely describes past data, what already has happened before the 'prediction' was made; and none of the climate claim predictions have actually been tested against what was supposed to happen after the prediction was made.
In other words, the climate change activists are using a specialist, technical and statistical definition of prediction in a general, public and media context where it will certainly be misunderstood.
Also, I know from experience as a professional epidemiologist, that there are plenty of statisticians who themselves do not understand the importance of this distinction between modelling what did happen, and hypothetical models that claim to predict what will happen.
Such gross errors are common and usually remain uncorrected in a world where scientists are ever more numerous and of ever lower ability and relevant experience; and where researchers are not even trying to tell the truth, and where all the significant incentives are in the direction of exaggerated claims. For several decades now, the mass of professional science just is, and is just, about funding, publishing, impact, peer status - and truthfulness is neither discussed nor evaluated.
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
The modern state and mainstream media opinion are, to put it mildly, inconsistent when it comes to prediction.
The discussions about claims of global climate change, and the common - and usually accepted - claims of groups to be able to predict future climate and to be able to control future climate, are instances where predictions are not just accepted, but enforced and acted-upon to the tune of trillions of dollars of international funding and regulations - despite the an almost complete lack of tested knowledge concerning a process of truly immense complexity.
In other words, mainstream opinion accepts some gigantic claims to predict the unknown and unpredictable - and does not just accept these massively-implausible claims of exact predictive knowledge, but regards those who do not accept these speculative knowledge claims as actively evil or grossly dumb.
Yet on the other hand, I have been on an inside participant in several political correctness witchhunts - either concerning myself or friends and colleagues - in which 'hate facts', or taboo knowledge, was the focus; and the standard of proof required was insane and impossible.
For example, back in 2008 I wrote a magazine article that accepted a century's worth of completely un-contradicted evidence of social class differences in intelligence to model the effect of university selectivity on the differential rate of social class acceptance (to show why it was that highly selective colleges with an assumed unbaised admissions system would be predicted to accept a much lower proportion of working class students than was present in the national population).
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/social-class-iq-differences-and.html
Yet the baseline claim of social class differences in intelligence being predictive of a mismatch in class acceptance rates at elite colleges - which is a very simple and straightforward claim compared to the morass of uncertainties and interactions involved in global climate, and which is supported by many hundreds of papers over many decades and refuted by not one single paper - was treated by university administrators, the mass media and politicians as an utterly outrageous, and therefore clearly malicious assertion.
When a politically correct taboo is broken, suddenly it becomes normal, acceptable and irrefutable to assert that this act of taboo-breaking will have catastrophic effects.
Suddenly, all the uncertainties of prediction are used first to allow wild speculation about what might or could happen... and then to treat such 'what if?' assertions as if they were true, plausible and indeed likely.
It is impossible to exaggerate the degree of exaggeration! One person saying one sentence - or even one word - is treated as if there was a strict knowledge of causal linkages that can and will lead to seismic social damage. And treated as if that seismic damage was the intent, and that the perpetrator would be 'to blame'.
In effect, the rulers of modern societies - i.e. mass media and the linked bureaucracies of major social systems - behave as if they are capable of making precise and valid predictions concerning the effect of specific words and phrases and events on the minds and actions of millions of people.
The implicit claim is that we have a highly precise predictive knowledge of how discrete and specific phenomena effect the emotions and cognitions of vast numbers of people. The claim is that we posses an exact-science of prediction of mass behaviour.
Why?
The reason for such absurd claims is simply that they are the basis of modern morality - which is utilitarian.
If moral goodness is supposed to be based on promotion of human happiness and the reduction of human suffering, and if such goals are assumed to be the basis of legitimate moral action by social rulers, then it must be possible to predict the effect of a word, phrase or image on the hearts and minds and behaviours of millions of people.
I am not saying that this type of prediction is possible - very clearly it is not possible, and there is zero reason to assume that it is possible - but I am saying that secular rulers must act as if it is possible: must act as if they understood what makes the mass of people (or those people they regard as important) happy or sad, angry or contented, motivated or despairing.
It is a lie, and it is a ridiculous lie - but since all legitimacy in the modern secular state, institution and corporation depends on this lie being true: then the ridiculous lie is treated as true; and enforced as true.
So prediction in modern secular societies has nothing at all to do with the ability to predict - but especially not the ability to 'predict the future'.
But perhaps adding 'the future' to the phrase is not redundant - considering that climate change 'predictions' are actually based wholly on the past.
When Global Warming advocates claim improved prediction, what they really mean is that they have a new (CO2 based) mathematical model that more precisely describes past data, what already has happened before the 'prediction' was made; and none of the climate claim predictions have actually been tested against what was supposed to happen after the prediction was made.
In other words, the climate change activists are using a specialist, technical and statistical definition of prediction in a general, public and media context where it will certainly be misunderstood.
Also, I know from experience as a professional epidemiologist, that there are plenty of statisticians who themselves do not understand the importance of this distinction between modelling what did happen, and hypothetical models that claim to predict what will happen.
Such gross errors are common and usually remain uncorrected in a world where scientists are ever more numerous and of ever lower ability and relevant experience; and where researchers are not even trying to tell the truth, and where all the significant incentives are in the direction of exaggerated claims. For several decades now, the mass of professional science just is, and is just, about funding, publishing, impact, peer status - and truthfulness is neither discussed nor evaluated.
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
The modern state and mainstream media opinion are, to put it mildly, inconsistent when it comes to prediction.
The discussions about claims of global climate change, and the common - and usually accepted - claims of groups to be able to predict future climate and to be able to control future climate, are instances where predictions are not just accepted, but enforced and acted-upon to the tune of trillions of dollars of international funding and regulations - despite the an almost complete lack of tested knowledge concerning a process of truly immense complexity.
In other words, mainstream opinion accepts some gigantic claims to predict the unknown and unpredictable - and does not just accept these massively-implausible claims of exact predictive knowledge, but regards those who do not accept these speculative knowledge claims as actively evil or grossly dumb.
Yet on the other hand, I have been on an inside participant in several political correctness witchhunts - either concerning myself or friends and colleagues - in which 'hate facts', or taboo knowledge, was the focus; and the standard of proof required was insane and impossible.
For example, back in 2008 I wrote a magazine article that accepted a century's worth of completely un-contradicted evidence of social class differences in intelligence to model the effect of university selectivity on the differential rate of social class acceptance (to show why it was that highly selective colleges with an assumed unbaised admissions system would be predicted to accept a much lower proportion of working class students than was present in the national population).
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/social-class-iq-differences-and.html
Yet the baseline claim of social class differences in intelligence being predictive of a mismatch in class acceptance rates at elite colleges - which is a very simple and straightforward claim compared to the morass of uncertainties and interactions involved in global climate, and which is supported by many hundreds of papers over many decades and refuted by not one single paper - was treated by university administrators, the mass media and politicians as an utterly outrageous, and therefore clearly malicious assertion.
When a politically correct taboo is broken, suddenly it becomes normal, acceptable and irrefutable to assert that this act of taboo-breaking will have catastrophic effects.
Suddenly, all the uncertainties of prediction are used first to allow wild speculation about what might or could happen... and then to treat such 'what if?' assertions as if they were true, plausible and indeed likely.
It is impossible to exaggerate the degree of exaggeration! One person saying one sentence - or even one word - is treated as if there was a strict knowledge of causal linkages that can and will lead to seismic social damage. And treated as if that seismic damage was the intent, and that the perpetrator would be 'to blame'.
In effect, the rulers of modern societies - i.e. mass media and the linked bureaucracies of major social systems - behave as if they are capable of making precise and valid predictions concerning the effect of specific words and phrases and events on the minds and actions of millions of people.
The implicit claim is that we have a highly precise predictive knowledge of how discrete and specific phenomena effect the emotions and cognitions of vast numbers of people. The claim is that we posses an exact-science of prediction of mass behaviour.
Why?
The reason for such absurd claims is simply that they are the basis of modern morality - which is utilitarian.
If moral goodness is supposed to be based on promotion of human happiness and the reduction of human suffering, and if such goals are assumed to be the basis of legitimate moral action by social rulers, then it must be possible to predict the effect of a word, phrase or image on the hearts and minds and behaviours of millions of people.
I am not saying that this type of prediction is possible - very clearly it is not possible, and there is zero reason to assume that it is possible - but I am saying that secular rulers must act as if it is possible: must act as if they understood what makes the mass of people (or those people they regard as important) happy or sad, angry or contented, motivated or despairing.
It is a lie, and it is a ridiculous lie - but since all legitimacy in the modern secular state, institution and corporation depends on this lie being true: then the ridiculous lie is treated as true; and enforced as true.
So prediction in modern secular societies has nothing at all to do with the ability to predict - but especially not the ability to 'predict the future'.
Wednesday, 25 November 2015
Owen Barfield on "the one thing needful"
Edited and adapted from several pages of the chapter "Religion" in Saving the Appearances - a study in idolatry by Owen Barfield, published 1957.
It is in the nature of the case that if, at any point in time, a new moral demand is made upon humanity, then moral judgements will grow for a time double and confused.
I spoke earlier of symptoms of 'iconoclasm', meaning a new willingness to apprehend life symbolically instead of literally; and I now maintain that these have a moral significance, and indeed a paramount moral significance for the present times.
Yet this does not correspond with the generally accepted scale of Christian moral values, but appears to cut right across it.
There are plenty of people with a natural taste for dream psychology, symbolical art and literature, sacramentalism in religion and other things whose meaning cannot be grasped without a movement of the imagination. And many of these people are arrogant, self-centred and in other way immoral.
Conversely, there are practical, humdrum, literal souls before whose courage and goodness we are abashed.
It is not a happy task to maintain that, from one point of view, and that an all-important one, the former must be accounted morally superior - because they posses the one thing needful which the other lack.
Because the 'needful' virtue is the one that combats the besetting sin. And the besetting sin today is the sin of literalness or idolatry - of experiencing the phenomena of the world as objects in their own right - independently of human consciousness.
The relationship between the mind and heart of man is a delicate mystery, and hardness is catching. I believe it will be found that there is a valid connection between literalness and a certain hardness of heart. This is rooted in avoidance of self-knowledge and a determination to adhere to existent idolatry.
On the positive side a certain humble, tender receptiveness of heart is nourished by a deep and deepening imagination and by the self knowledge which that inevitably involves.
In the sixty years since this passage was written I think its deep truth has become apparent. Literalism in Christianity has persisted and has been largely defeated by the literalism of secular mainstream culture.
Attempts to evolve a more 'symbolic' Christianity have been mostly insincere - typically a stalking horse behind-which liberalism was advanced, with a covert agenda of allowing conformity with secular morality (especially in relation to the sexual revolution).
In essence, we have had sixty years of Secular literalism slugging it out with Christian literalism. An ever more atheistic, and anti-Christian, public sphere has demanded a literalist response to its criticisms - then reacted with horror and disdain to the literalistic perspective that it elicited. Secularism sees Christianity as nothing more than a list of detached knowledge claims, rules, prohibitions and demands on human behaviour - and finds this version of Christianity to be absurd, dull, arbitrary and indeed appalling in its harshness.
And on the other side, those Christians who have resisted the mass trend into apostasy by a strict and stubborn adherence to legalistic definitions (e.g. Biblical inerrancy, an emphasis on obedience to priestly authority, rigid adherence to forms and rituals) have too often fallen victim to that hardness of heart that Barfield sees as a consequence of literalism.
There is indeed a beady-eyed and punitive fanaticism evident in the discourse of too many traditionalist and conservative Christians.
I think Barfield is correct in his overall diagnosis that literalism is a dead-end - and man must move forward to a new and more engaged relationship with the world: neither the immersive acceptance of the past, nor the manipulative nihilism of the present - but a view that feels each of us to be a participant in a web of family-like relationships that embrace not only God, and other people, but all things.
In sum - the way I interpret this passage is in terms of my musings on the deep metaphysical problem of modernity.
So long as we adhere to our nihilistic metaphysical assumptions - even Christianity will usually be neutralized; because Christianity will be distorted, drained, and sucked into an irresistible whirlpool of legalism, hard-heartedness and de facto hatred by the cold, dead-ly, meaning-and-purpose-destroying nature of its literalistic, idolatrous metaphysical underpinnings.
Because if our metaphysics presupposes that we are merely an isolated consciousness inhabiting a dead and indifferent universe the reality of any of which we cannot be sure-of - then doubt will feed on doubt until faith becomes merely a proud, indifferent and arbitrary zeal.
(At least, this is what I fear - that secularism will triumph because it has infected Christian thought so deeply that its presuppositions are undetected, or falsely taken to be logically necessary.)
It is in the nature of the case that if, at any point in time, a new moral demand is made upon humanity, then moral judgements will grow for a time double and confused.
I spoke earlier of symptoms of 'iconoclasm', meaning a new willingness to apprehend life symbolically instead of literally; and I now maintain that these have a moral significance, and indeed a paramount moral significance for the present times.
Yet this does not correspond with the generally accepted scale of Christian moral values, but appears to cut right across it.
There are plenty of people with a natural taste for dream psychology, symbolical art and literature, sacramentalism in religion and other things whose meaning cannot be grasped without a movement of the imagination. And many of these people are arrogant, self-centred and in other way immoral.
Conversely, there are practical, humdrum, literal souls before whose courage and goodness we are abashed.
It is not a happy task to maintain that, from one point of view, and that an all-important one, the former must be accounted morally superior - because they posses the one thing needful which the other lack.
Because the 'needful' virtue is the one that combats the besetting sin. And the besetting sin today is the sin of literalness or idolatry - of experiencing the phenomena of the world as objects in their own right - independently of human consciousness.
The relationship between the mind and heart of man is a delicate mystery, and hardness is catching. I believe it will be found that there is a valid connection between literalness and a certain hardness of heart. This is rooted in avoidance of self-knowledge and a determination to adhere to existent idolatry.
On the positive side a certain humble, tender receptiveness of heart is nourished by a deep and deepening imagination and by the self knowledge which that inevitably involves.
In the sixty years since this passage was written I think its deep truth has become apparent. Literalism in Christianity has persisted and has been largely defeated by the literalism of secular mainstream culture.
Attempts to evolve a more 'symbolic' Christianity have been mostly insincere - typically a stalking horse behind-which liberalism was advanced, with a covert agenda of allowing conformity with secular morality (especially in relation to the sexual revolution).
In essence, we have had sixty years of Secular literalism slugging it out with Christian literalism. An ever more atheistic, and anti-Christian, public sphere has demanded a literalist response to its criticisms - then reacted with horror and disdain to the literalistic perspective that it elicited. Secularism sees Christianity as nothing more than a list of detached knowledge claims, rules, prohibitions and demands on human behaviour - and finds this version of Christianity to be absurd, dull, arbitrary and indeed appalling in its harshness.
And on the other side, those Christians who have resisted the mass trend into apostasy by a strict and stubborn adherence to legalistic definitions (e.g. Biblical inerrancy, an emphasis on obedience to priestly authority, rigid adherence to forms and rituals) have too often fallen victim to that hardness of heart that Barfield sees as a consequence of literalism.
There is indeed a beady-eyed and punitive fanaticism evident in the discourse of too many traditionalist and conservative Christians.
I think Barfield is correct in his overall diagnosis that literalism is a dead-end - and man must move forward to a new and more engaged relationship with the world: neither the immersive acceptance of the past, nor the manipulative nihilism of the present - but a view that feels each of us to be a participant in a web of family-like relationships that embrace not only God, and other people, but all things.
In sum - the way I interpret this passage is in terms of my musings on the deep metaphysical problem of modernity.
So long as we adhere to our nihilistic metaphysical assumptions - even Christianity will usually be neutralized; because Christianity will be distorted, drained, and sucked into an irresistible whirlpool of legalism, hard-heartedness and de facto hatred by the cold, dead-ly, meaning-and-purpose-destroying nature of its literalistic, idolatrous metaphysical underpinnings.
Because if our metaphysics presupposes that we are merely an isolated consciousness inhabiting a dead and indifferent universe the reality of any of which we cannot be sure-of - then doubt will feed on doubt until faith becomes merely a proud, indifferent and arbitrary zeal.
(At least, this is what I fear - that secularism will triumph because it has infected Christian thought so deeply that its presuppositions are undetected, or falsely taken to be logically necessary.)
Tuesday, 24 November 2015
Building a highly successful modern career with High Honours by the Saruman Strategy
It is surprising to me how many highly successful UK careerists I have known within medicine, science and academia - and I know a lot more at one remove (i.e. via a friend who knows them).
By 'successful' I mean those who have been 'honoured' through the British Honours System of (in ascending order) medals (e.g. MBE, OBE, CBE), Knighthoods (Sirs and Dames) and Peerages (Lords and Ladys).
If this is the kind of success you wish for, and you are able and hard-working (and able to tolerate vast swathes of tedium) it is clear that the most successful plan is likely to be The Saruman Strategy.
This could equally be called the Fifth Column (i.e. the enemy already within the gates), the Quisling or the Vichy (Petain) strategy (the last two named for successful Nazi collaborationists in Norway and France).
The basic plan is simple - although not easy: become eminent in a social system such as medicine, science, education, law, the church, the police or military - and then subvert it to allow for managerial take-over with a politically correct agenda.
In sum it is the strategy of treason and betrayal for self-gain.
(Note: It used to be possible for British people to get honours by being good at their work - but that has become very difficult and rare - and is extremely slow compared with the Saruman Strategy. For example James D Watson was eventually knighted - honorary KBE - but more than half a century after he discovered the structure of DNA!)
So most modern honours are awarded for betrayal and treason.
But how do the honoured people justify this to themselves? By exactly the same rationale as drove Vidkun Quisling and Marshal Petain (not to mention Saruman) - that is to say by arguing:
1. Defeat is inevitable - therefore:.
2. Early capitulation will cause the least damage to 'our' nation/ institution/ profession (and I personally will undertake to manage it so as to cause the minimum of disruption).
Of course, defeat only becomes inevitable because of the multitude of Sarumans.
However, given the over-supply of Sarumans in the modern West, the canny strategy is: If you can't beat them, you might as well join them - and make the best of things.
And in a nihilistic post-Christian society, that argument is the ultimate conceivable bottom-line - hence utterly compelling.
By 'successful' I mean those who have been 'honoured' through the British Honours System of (in ascending order) medals (e.g. MBE, OBE, CBE), Knighthoods (Sirs and Dames) and Peerages (Lords and Ladys).
If this is the kind of success you wish for, and you are able and hard-working (and able to tolerate vast swathes of tedium) it is clear that the most successful plan is likely to be The Saruman Strategy.
This could equally be called the Fifth Column (i.e. the enemy already within the gates), the Quisling or the Vichy (Petain) strategy (the last two named for successful Nazi collaborationists in Norway and France).
The basic plan is simple - although not easy: become eminent in a social system such as medicine, science, education, law, the church, the police or military - and then subvert it to allow for managerial take-over with a politically correct agenda.
In sum it is the strategy of treason and betrayal for self-gain.
(Note: It used to be possible for British people to get honours by being good at their work - but that has become very difficult and rare - and is extremely slow compared with the Saruman Strategy. For example James D Watson was eventually knighted - honorary KBE - but more than half a century after he discovered the structure of DNA!)
So most modern honours are awarded for betrayal and treason.
But how do the honoured people justify this to themselves? By exactly the same rationale as drove Vidkun Quisling and Marshal Petain (not to mention Saruman) - that is to say by arguing:
1. Defeat is inevitable - therefore:.
2. Early capitulation will cause the least damage to 'our' nation/ institution/ profession (and I personally will undertake to manage it so as to cause the minimum of disruption).
Of course, defeat only becomes inevitable because of the multitude of Sarumans.
However, given the over-supply of Sarumans in the modern West, the canny strategy is: If you can't beat them, you might as well join them - and make the best of things.
And in a nihilistic post-Christian society, that argument is the ultimate conceivable bottom-line - hence utterly compelling.
Pain and suffering in mortal life just is NOT a challenge to the validity of Christianity - to suppose it is, is to mis-frame the question, and thereby render it unanswerable.
Different Christians have different (valid) answers to the 'problem of pain' or human suffering, or evil - and each sincere and knowledgeable answer captures or highlights something of the truth; but not all of it - since that is the nature of answers.
(After all, how could anybody capture the whole truth in just one short sentence? The idea is absurd. And having written or uttered a sentence, how would be be sure that everybody understood it correctly?)
And there does not need to be one single cause of evil and suffering in the world.
There is the free will of men; the purposive Good-destructive evil of Satan and his minions (which themselves need explaining); the limitations - some logical and practical, other perhaps fundamental - on God's power and influence; the indifference (or hostility) of the 'non-living' world (e.g. natural disasters). And so on.
But at the bottom of it all is the fact, that ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone who understands enough about Christianity to become one, that nobody who knew anything about Christianity ever claimed that Christianity was about producing perfect or even optimal happiness in this mortal life on earth.
Surely it is crystal clear? (even to an Archbishop) that Christianity is about our happiness in the eternity after death and resurrection?
(Our happiness is this world is indeed affected by Christianity - very much so. But the degree to which perfect happiness is created - measured, as it will be, by existant, labile, partly corrupt evaluations - is not a measure of the validity of Christianity; nor is the failure of Christian belief to create perfect earthly happiness a refutation of its validity!)
This world and our mortal life is extremely important - and it is not merely 'a means to an end' - but surely the voices of the New Testament are unamimous and unambiguous that the Christian importance of mortal life is not about God making mortal earthly life maximally happy and eliminating pain and suffering on condition of belief...
Where (on earth) did people get that idea? Not from the Bible! That idea just is not a part of the message.
The provenance of the made-up notion that Christainity, if it were valid, would eliminate pain and suffering from the world is surely demonic, not divine.
This idea of suffering being a threat to the validity of Christianity is a pseudo-problem, falsely framed.
Which is why, having accepted this frame, the question cannot ever satisfactorily be disposed-of - 'doubts' induced by the sufferings of mortal life lead, not to answers, but to to more-doubts - and to the erosion of faith.
Which is not an accident.
We do indeed often seek an explanation of pain and suffering - and we may or may not find it (the reason is likely being personal to the seeker and specific to the cause - typically, general reasons will not satisfy us) - however our failure to understand the reason or meaning or causes for specific sufferings has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity (it is 'orthogonal') - this just is not a reason for 'doubts'.
The valid domain of consideration that may (sometimes, for some people) be induced by the existence of extreme pain and suffering and evil in this mortal life, is an enquiry concerning the relationship between God's Goodness and His Power.
Christians have been told unambiguously that God is wholly Good; also that he is the creator and the most powerful of 'god's. To understand evil and suffering some people need a satisfying general explanation of how these divine attributes might fit-together.
And any explanation must start either with God's Goodness, or with his power. Which divine attribute you start-with (and this is a metaphysical assumption that probably should be based on interpretation of divine revelation) determines the range of possible answers you will end-up-with.
But none of this is to do with the validity of Christianity supposedly being challenged by the existence of suffering and evil. Our ancestors knew this - and their direct experience of suffering was, on average, far greater than our own.
However, our own experience of evil is greater than theirs. They knew, with considerable precision, what was Good. Yet we live in a world of moral inversion in the official arena of public discourse, a world of evil routinely and by high status persons propagandized as Good; and of Goodness depicted as evil - all this by communications (including everything from the arts and sciences to advertizing and public relations) whose reach and influence is (via the mass media) now almost all-pervading and universal.
And THAT fact of living inside an actively-evil world, is the reason why modern people have been duped into supposing it is valid to state that the sufferings of mortal life constitute as lethal challenge to Christianity.
The debate is itself a product of modern moral inversion.
Note: Thans to commenter Joel whose questioning provoked this very full response: I hope it satsifies him!
(After all, how could anybody capture the whole truth in just one short sentence? The idea is absurd. And having written or uttered a sentence, how would be be sure that everybody understood it correctly?)
And there does not need to be one single cause of evil and suffering in the world.
There is the free will of men; the purposive Good-destructive evil of Satan and his minions (which themselves need explaining); the limitations - some logical and practical, other perhaps fundamental - on God's power and influence; the indifference (or hostility) of the 'non-living' world (e.g. natural disasters). And so on.
But at the bottom of it all is the fact, that ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone who understands enough about Christianity to become one, that nobody who knew anything about Christianity ever claimed that Christianity was about producing perfect or even optimal happiness in this mortal life on earth.
Surely it is crystal clear? (even to an Archbishop) that Christianity is about our happiness in the eternity after death and resurrection?
(Our happiness is this world is indeed affected by Christianity - very much so. But the degree to which perfect happiness is created - measured, as it will be, by existant, labile, partly corrupt evaluations - is not a measure of the validity of Christianity; nor is the failure of Christian belief to create perfect earthly happiness a refutation of its validity!)
This world and our mortal life is extremely important - and it is not merely 'a means to an end' - but surely the voices of the New Testament are unamimous and unambiguous that the Christian importance of mortal life is not about God making mortal earthly life maximally happy and eliminating pain and suffering on condition of belief...
Where (on earth) did people get that idea? Not from the Bible! That idea just is not a part of the message.
The provenance of the made-up notion that Christainity, if it were valid, would eliminate pain and suffering from the world is surely demonic, not divine.
This idea of suffering being a threat to the validity of Christianity is a pseudo-problem, falsely framed.
Which is why, having accepted this frame, the question cannot ever satisfactorily be disposed-of - 'doubts' induced by the sufferings of mortal life lead, not to answers, but to to more-doubts - and to the erosion of faith.
Which is not an accident.
We do indeed often seek an explanation of pain and suffering - and we may or may not find it (the reason is likely being personal to the seeker and specific to the cause - typically, general reasons will not satisfy us) - however our failure to understand the reason or meaning or causes for specific sufferings has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity (it is 'orthogonal') - this just is not a reason for 'doubts'.
The valid domain of consideration that may (sometimes, for some people) be induced by the existence of extreme pain and suffering and evil in this mortal life, is an enquiry concerning the relationship between God's Goodness and His Power.
Christians have been told unambiguously that God is wholly Good; also that he is the creator and the most powerful of 'god's. To understand evil and suffering some people need a satisfying general explanation of how these divine attributes might fit-together.
And any explanation must start either with God's Goodness, or with his power. Which divine attribute you start-with (and this is a metaphysical assumption that probably should be based on interpretation of divine revelation) determines the range of possible answers you will end-up-with.
But none of this is to do with the validity of Christianity supposedly being challenged by the existence of suffering and evil. Our ancestors knew this - and their direct experience of suffering was, on average, far greater than our own.
However, our own experience of evil is greater than theirs. They knew, with considerable precision, what was Good. Yet we live in a world of moral inversion in the official arena of public discourse, a world of evil routinely and by high status persons propagandized as Good; and of Goodness depicted as evil - all this by communications (including everything from the arts and sciences to advertizing and public relations) whose reach and influence is (via the mass media) now almost all-pervading and universal.
And THAT fact of living inside an actively-evil world, is the reason why modern people have been duped into supposing it is valid to state that the sufferings of mortal life constitute as lethal challenge to Christianity.
The debate is itself a product of modern moral inversion.
Note: Thans to commenter Joel whose questioning provoked this very full response: I hope it satsifies him!
Monday, 23 November 2015
Welby Watch - Archbishop of Canterbury plumbs new depths
Aside from the fact that he is not a Christian (but merely a Christianized socialist) any doubts that any Christians may have had that Justin Welby is the most cognitively-mediocre man ever to head the Anglican communion (still the third largest Christian denomination in the world) have been dispelled by his latest musings communicated to the BBC (aka the UK Antichrist).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34893039
Quotes from the Daily Telegraph:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34893039
Quotes from the Daily Telegraph:
Justin Welby said he was left asking why the attacks happened, and where God was in the French victims' time of need. He said he reacted with "profound sadness" at the events, particularly because he and his wife had lived in Paris.
Asked if these attacks had caused him to doubt where God is, he said: "Oh gosh, yes," and admitted it put a "chink in his armour.
He told BBC Songs Of Praise: "Yes. Saturday morning - I was out and as I was walking I was praying and saying: 'God why - why is this happening? Where are you in all this?' and then engaging and talking to God. Yes, I doubt."
The depths of theological ignorance, the feebleness and superficiality of the man's supposed faith are staggering - is he really unaware that things like this have happened rather a lot over the past two thousand years? Has he really not thought through this matter before?
Or is he perhaps dishonestly pretending to doubt, perhaps in order to help atheists identify with him or so as to fit-in with the secular Leftist mainstream? (The man is a multi-documented and calculating liar, after all.)
All in all, this is yet more evidence that the mainstream Christian church leadership in the West are strongly anti-Christian in net-effect (whatever their ignorant and foolish intentions may be).
With so much apparently-authoritative misinformation and misrepresentation of Christianity in the public arena - we must assume that the mass majority of the Western populations are not just ignorant about the faith - but have an actively misleading pseudo-knowledge - something that is much harder to correct.
With so much apparently-authoritative misinformation and misrepresentation of Christianity in the public arena - we must assume that the mass majority of the Western populations are not just ignorant about the faith - but have an actively misleading pseudo-knowledge - something that is much harder to correct.
Where do true hypotheses come-from? Imagination and intuition as the basis of science
From reading, especially, Owen Barfield, and the selections-from and commentary of Goethe published by Jeremy Naydler, I have considerably enriched my understanding of the essence of science from the state it had reached when I published Not Even Trying: the corruption of real science.
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
THE big problem for those trying to understand science has been the question of: Where do correct hypotheses come-from - given that there are an unbounded number of incorrect hypotheses. This does not entail assuming that correct hypotheses are either certain or complete (any hypotheses is almost-inevitably a shortened and selective model of reality) - merely that there are so many more ways of being wrong than right; and science could never get going if vast numbers of wrong hypotheses had to be eliminated with every step.
Upon this matter hinges almost the whole of science; because once good hypotheses are available, science becomes more-or-less a matter of applied routine (research and development, as it is called). But if god hypotheses are lacking, hen we either have nothing at all; or, as nowadays, we have fake science, pseudo-science, science that is not-even-trying to be truthful: a species of bureaucratic careerism which apes the superficial appearances of science but actually does nothing towards enhancing human understanding; except to expend resources, generate publications, and mislead in a thousand ways.
(By the standards of modern research evaluations, the more resources expended - e.g. grant income; and the more words generated - e.g. publications; and the more people who are misled by such lying profligacy - e.g the 'impact; the better will be the research evaluations, the higher the status and power. In these evaluations, 'truth' is never a variable.)
The origin of true hypotheses is not a question which can be answered by science itself - it is a meta-scientific question: that is, a philosophical question.
The uncannily prescience insight of Goethe was that true hypotheses come from the imagination of an individual scientist - constrained by a direct apprehension of phenomena.
Thus, a real scientist gives himself over to a consideration of the phenomenon in question; and after achieving a correct orientation, by means of this honest devotion, he may be rewarded by a direct understanding of reality.
This primary understanding is 'present' in the scientists own imagination - and is initially utterly private. The point at which it becomes public is when it is formulated as a general statement such as a theory or an hypothesis concerning the nature of reality.
But the public statement of the scientist's inner imagination understanding is inevitably a partial and biased summary of what is in his own imagination - therefore he may need (typically will need) to modify, and re-modify, that public statement - in light of his experience of how it is being understood, and in light of linking it to other phenomena (i.e. the 'evidence') in order to make it more validly representative of what is in his imagination.
(Furthermore, any specific hypothesis lies in relationship to many other hypotheses, which me be of various validities - and further modifications are likely to be necessary as these adjacent, and gradually more distant, hypothesis are clarified - thus even real science is usually in a dynamic state - but one that is utterly different from the fashionable whims of modern mainstream pseudo-science.)
Once this point of a public statement has been reached, then normal, routine, R&D type science can commence.
But this begs the question of how it is that the science may be able directly to 'intuit' directly the nature of reality? How is it that the scientist can apprehend phenomena directly?
The answer to this can only be metaphysical - and is usually religious. It presupposes that direct communication is possible to at-least a significant extent - i.e. communication which is not-merely a consequence of the set-up of the scientist's own sensory apparatus, brain apparatus, and in general 'subjectivity'. A communication that comes from the phenomena as it really is, and not 'merely' from the way that phenomena are framed by the dominant explanatory mode of a particular time and place.
In sum, the above explanation relies upon the possibility of objective knowledge - not merely in the weak sense of objectivity as 'publicly-agreed knowledge'; but in a strong sense of objectivity as 'corresponding with reality'.
By this account, we get a very different understanding of the nature of science, and the way that the 'success' of science contributes to our understanding of reality. This is not to be understood in terms of the 'power' of science (e.g. to generate transformative technologies, such as Western medicine and engineering). The real evidence of science is in terms of confirming the possibility of direct knowledge of reality via the imagination.
Remarkably, science - real science - emerges as being primarily an imaginative apprehension of reality - and evidence that such imagination is potentially truthful: objective.
It brings us back to the individual scientist and his devotion to his subject as the basis of that vast (and, now, mainly corrupt) superstructure which is the public, measurable, appearance of science.
It aligns science with poetry, and the other creative arts; and it breaks down the barrier between our conceptualizations of these aspects of creativity.
It also provides indirect evidence of order, design and purpose in the universe - in reality itself. And, even more significant, a role for Man - that Man is enabled to know this reality, is in a sense is made to know reality.
The scientist - that is, the primary and real scientist - is a man of intuition and imagination whose love of that which he contemplates is (or may be - this is not an algorithm, not a manageable 'protocol'!) rewarded by a direct and true apprehension concerning its reality.
NOTE: It should be emphasized that my understanding of these matters came mainly via Barfield and Naydler - but that the origin of these ideas is with Goethe and especially Rudolf Steiner. I have read probably some hundreds of thousands of words of Steiner, and can confidently confirm that he is indeed the true originator and developer of this perspective, building upon a relatively brief and preliminary account in Goethe - but I have seldom been able to discover this from Steiner directly, but rather by intermediary scholarship.
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
THE big problem for those trying to understand science has been the question of: Where do correct hypotheses come-from - given that there are an unbounded number of incorrect hypotheses. This does not entail assuming that correct hypotheses are either certain or complete (any hypotheses is almost-inevitably a shortened and selective model of reality) - merely that there are so many more ways of being wrong than right; and science could never get going if vast numbers of wrong hypotheses had to be eliminated with every step.
Upon this matter hinges almost the whole of science; because once good hypotheses are available, science becomes more-or-less a matter of applied routine (research and development, as it is called). But if god hypotheses are lacking, hen we either have nothing at all; or, as nowadays, we have fake science, pseudo-science, science that is not-even-trying to be truthful: a species of bureaucratic careerism which apes the superficial appearances of science but actually does nothing towards enhancing human understanding; except to expend resources, generate publications, and mislead in a thousand ways.
(By the standards of modern research evaluations, the more resources expended - e.g. grant income; and the more words generated - e.g. publications; and the more people who are misled by such lying profligacy - e.g the 'impact; the better will be the research evaluations, the higher the status and power. In these evaluations, 'truth' is never a variable.)
The origin of true hypotheses is not a question which can be answered by science itself - it is a meta-scientific question: that is, a philosophical question.
The uncannily prescience insight of Goethe was that true hypotheses come from the imagination of an individual scientist - constrained by a direct apprehension of phenomena.
Thus, a real scientist gives himself over to a consideration of the phenomenon in question; and after achieving a correct orientation, by means of this honest devotion, he may be rewarded by a direct understanding of reality.
This primary understanding is 'present' in the scientists own imagination - and is initially utterly private. The point at which it becomes public is when it is formulated as a general statement such as a theory or an hypothesis concerning the nature of reality.
But the public statement of the scientist's inner imagination understanding is inevitably a partial and biased summary of what is in his own imagination - therefore he may need (typically will need) to modify, and re-modify, that public statement - in light of his experience of how it is being understood, and in light of linking it to other phenomena (i.e. the 'evidence') in order to make it more validly representative of what is in his imagination.
(Furthermore, any specific hypothesis lies in relationship to many other hypotheses, which me be of various validities - and further modifications are likely to be necessary as these adjacent, and gradually more distant, hypothesis are clarified - thus even real science is usually in a dynamic state - but one that is utterly different from the fashionable whims of modern mainstream pseudo-science.)
Once this point of a public statement has been reached, then normal, routine, R&D type science can commence.
But this begs the question of how it is that the science may be able directly to 'intuit' directly the nature of reality? How is it that the scientist can apprehend phenomena directly?
The answer to this can only be metaphysical - and is usually religious. It presupposes that direct communication is possible to at-least a significant extent - i.e. communication which is not-merely a consequence of the set-up of the scientist's own sensory apparatus, brain apparatus, and in general 'subjectivity'. A communication that comes from the phenomena as it really is, and not 'merely' from the way that phenomena are framed by the dominant explanatory mode of a particular time and place.
In sum, the above explanation relies upon the possibility of objective knowledge - not merely in the weak sense of objectivity as 'publicly-agreed knowledge'; but in a strong sense of objectivity as 'corresponding with reality'.
By this account, we get a very different understanding of the nature of science, and the way that the 'success' of science contributes to our understanding of reality. This is not to be understood in terms of the 'power' of science (e.g. to generate transformative technologies, such as Western medicine and engineering). The real evidence of science is in terms of confirming the possibility of direct knowledge of reality via the imagination.
Remarkably, science - real science - emerges as being primarily an imaginative apprehension of reality - and evidence that such imagination is potentially truthful: objective.
It brings us back to the individual scientist and his devotion to his subject as the basis of that vast (and, now, mainly corrupt) superstructure which is the public, measurable, appearance of science.
It aligns science with poetry, and the other creative arts; and it breaks down the barrier between our conceptualizations of these aspects of creativity.
It also provides indirect evidence of order, design and purpose in the universe - in reality itself. And, even more significant, a role for Man - that Man is enabled to know this reality, is in a sense is made to know reality.
The scientist - that is, the primary and real scientist - is a man of intuition and imagination whose love of that which he contemplates is (or may be - this is not an algorithm, not a manageable 'protocol'!) rewarded by a direct and true apprehension concerning its reality.
NOTE: It should be emphasized that my understanding of these matters came mainly via Barfield and Naydler - but that the origin of these ideas is with Goethe and especially Rudolf Steiner. I have read probably some hundreds of thousands of words of Steiner, and can confidently confirm that he is indeed the true originator and developer of this perspective, building upon a relatively brief and preliminary account in Goethe - but I have seldom been able to discover this from Steiner directly, but rather by intermediary scholarship.
Sunday, 22 November 2015
Personal reservations about the Arthurian legends
I have recently twice had the experience of commencing a modern retelling of the King Arthur legends with enjoyment, only to abandon the story before the end due to a kind of revulsion at the gross psychological implausibility of the narrative turn.
The problem in both instances was that well-established characters, characters I had got-to-know, suddenly began behaving unnaturally, unbelievably, by tortured-logic - due to their actions being artificially shoe-horned into a pre-exiting plot shape.
The fault, in both cases, was that the authors had tried to stick to the shape of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (middle 1400s) - which (for all its excellences) is merely a compendium of diverse and originally separate legends, cobbled-together into a semi-coherent set of loosely-linked stories.
As indeed is the Arthurian story itself - apparently consisting of two separate strands of ancient legend - one about the prophet and wizard Merlin, and the other about a noble war leader and exemplary character called Arthur - probably based on real people, probably from different times and places of post-Roman Britain (from the 400s AD onwards).
These strands were brought together mainly by the genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the middle 1100s to make the basis of the Arthurian story. And these are the Arthurian elements which I love - especially those concerned with Merlin.
These are the British elements of the King Arthur story - the true 'Matter of Britain'.
The later additional French stuff about knights, chivalry, round tables, courtly love, the Lancelot/ Guinevere adultery, and the Grail Quest I find more-or-less repellent - although I can tolerate them if they are subordinated within the narrative.
(I find the Grail Quest a particularly horrible intrusion. It's hard to put my finger on why; but for me it gathers and concentrates many of the very worst aspects of medieval Christianity - exactly the kind of corruption and pathology masquerading as health and purity that helped keep me away from Christianity for so many decades.)
Of these later elements, that of courtly love is, for me, the worst. The business of knights 'serving' their ladies, wearing their favours, the stupid stuff about 'honour', courtesy and being held bound by a casual and unconsidered word to do some ridiculous or wicked thing...
Bah! it is Frenchified, decadent and anti-Christian (as made clear by the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the late 1300s; in which these elements are a threat to the goodness and purity of Gawain, and his stubborn adherence to this courtly code is revealed as absurd and unworthy).
Consequently, from my perspective, all version of the Arthurian legends I have encountered (in movies, TV, novels and poems) are extremely imperfect and unsatisfactory works of art - through which something strong and important may shine.
In this my attitude seems to resemble that of JRR Tolkien - who, for all that he tried his hand at an extended Arthurian poem, had strong reservations about the thing as a whole, even as he responded powerfully to specific elements.
In sum, I wish that some more authors could put Malory behind them, and re-imagine the Merlin-Arthur aspects without the effete continental intrusions - to create a noble and psychologically plausible tale that taps into deep roots of British myth and the Christian impulse.
The problem in both instances was that well-established characters, characters I had got-to-know, suddenly began behaving unnaturally, unbelievably, by tortured-logic - due to their actions being artificially shoe-horned into a pre-exiting plot shape.
The fault, in both cases, was that the authors had tried to stick to the shape of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (middle 1400s) - which (for all its excellences) is merely a compendium of diverse and originally separate legends, cobbled-together into a semi-coherent set of loosely-linked stories.
As indeed is the Arthurian story itself - apparently consisting of two separate strands of ancient legend - one about the prophet and wizard Merlin, and the other about a noble war leader and exemplary character called Arthur - probably based on real people, probably from different times and places of post-Roman Britain (from the 400s AD onwards).
These strands were brought together mainly by the genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the middle 1100s to make the basis of the Arthurian story. And these are the Arthurian elements which I love - especially those concerned with Merlin.
These are the British elements of the King Arthur story - the true 'Matter of Britain'.
The later additional French stuff about knights, chivalry, round tables, courtly love, the Lancelot/ Guinevere adultery, and the Grail Quest I find more-or-less repellent - although I can tolerate them if they are subordinated within the narrative.
(I find the Grail Quest a particularly horrible intrusion. It's hard to put my finger on why; but for me it gathers and concentrates many of the very worst aspects of medieval Christianity - exactly the kind of corruption and pathology masquerading as health and purity that helped keep me away from Christianity for so many decades.)
Of these later elements, that of courtly love is, for me, the worst. The business of knights 'serving' their ladies, wearing their favours, the stupid stuff about 'honour', courtesy and being held bound by a casual and unconsidered word to do some ridiculous or wicked thing...
Bah! it is Frenchified, decadent and anti-Christian (as made clear by the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the late 1300s; in which these elements are a threat to the goodness and purity of Gawain, and his stubborn adherence to this courtly code is revealed as absurd and unworthy).
Consequently, from my perspective, all version of the Arthurian legends I have encountered (in movies, TV, novels and poems) are extremely imperfect and unsatisfactory works of art - through which something strong and important may shine.
In this my attitude seems to resemble that of JRR Tolkien - who, for all that he tried his hand at an extended Arthurian poem, had strong reservations about the thing as a whole, even as he responded powerfully to specific elements.
In sum, I wish that some more authors could put Malory behind them, and re-imagine the Merlin-Arthur aspects without the effete continental intrusions - to create a noble and psychologically plausible tale that taps into deep roots of British myth and the Christian impulse.
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