The wrong starting point in philosophy and for Christian faith

A Big Problem in philosophy, is picking (or rather assuming) the wrong starting point for enquiry, for analysis and reasoning; and there has been and is massive propaganda to encourage this fatal error...

In particular to ignore or reflexly reject a child's innate and spontaneous assumptions, and to start from... Somewhere else... Anywhere else!

It turns out that these alternative starting assumptions are always abstract, difficult, unintuitive, artificial.

This applies to all traditional philosophy, especially since Descartes, and to Christianity.

To be A Christian, according to nearly all churches, one must First accept as foundational dogmas several counter-intuitive assumptions (regarding the nature of creation, God, Jesus...) within-which the entirely of Christianity is Compelled to exist.

Alternatively we Could assume what is natural, spontaneous, innate...

Can God read minds?

Can God read minds, and if so - to what extent?

It seems clear that God can read minds or else prayer, for instance, would be meaningless... It seems absurd to assert that God would require thoughts to be spoken aloud, or written down. 

And if this was so, there would be the usual problem of uncertain interpretation of such indirect and symbolic media God might misunderstand!

Yet, if free will or agency is real (which, for Christians it must be), then there must be something inaccessible to God.

Yet again, it makes little sense to suppose that we could conceal our plans from God, and successfully lie to God. 

Did Satan do this, at first - did he conceal his real nature and plans from God?

My conclusion is that God knows our conscious thinking, but neither God nor our consciousness has direct knowledge of our ultimate selves. 

Thus God cannot read-off our ultimate nature, cannot know by observation and fully and for-sure - how we really are - and neither can we do so.

In other words, God can know our thinking, but our thinking is not our-self. 

Both God and our thinking only know ourselves by inference, by observing what our-self does, including what thoughts emerge from our-self.

God could only know Satan by observation and inference.. Albeit that  observation included Satan's thinking.

But this model can't be complete (no model can be complete!), especially because it has only one-way traffic from the self to consciousness, which would mean the self could not learn. 

Since the self can learn, the self can't be divided from consciousness... 

Indeed, this is another of those "polar logic" situations where self and thinking may be distinguished but not divided, since they are not separate in origin or nature... 

Both thinking and self are attributes of All Beings, but the self stands for that individual unknowability which enables agency...

That "bit" of us which God cannot read.

Thus it was that Satan deceived God as to his nature and plans. It was possible because Satan was also deceiving himself. 

Satan did not even Know himself, except by observation and inference.

And neither do we.

A civilization that has turned against itself

 I find very little awareness of the profundity of shift in our civilization. A civilization renews itself across generations, but ours seeks its own annihilation.

This is just a fact, and quite explicit in detail. In every field or domain, subversion and inversion are most valued. 

There was, in all civilizations, a handing on and preservation of the meaning and importance of symbols whether in poetry, or science, or anything. Symbols carried the civilization through time, and the symbols linked back though the middle ages to Roman, to Greek civilization and beyond - for good and for ill, but that was the way it worked.

At some point the symbols began losing their objective nature. We were no longer sustained by the objectivity of the symbol. The symbol did not impose itself upon us...

What then happened, which was an evil thing - motivated against the divine - was that symbol was replaced by bureaucracy. Instead of continuity by objective symbol, continuity became organizational - from the overlapping personnel and procedures of system.

Now, "objectivity" comes from bureaucracy, and the actual bureaucracy works to subvert/invert the symbolism linking us to the past - and thereby remove a rival to its power and domination.

This is why poetry, science, music, farming, law, crafts, patriotism, religion... have all declined or collapsed: they are all symbols actively being killed by bureaucracy.

We no longer inhabit a civilization but a bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy is primary; because it redefines and deletes symbols at will, in order to weaken and destroy them.

In order to destroy creation, and thereby deny and replace creation.

Reconsidering Robert Graves and Ludwig Wittgenstein

 I'm currently rereading George Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein, and (first read) a short biography of Graves by Bruce King. Graves was a very early craze of mine, beginning age 14; and I began on Wittgenstein about a decade later. 

This time I'm struck by similarities between them. Both ruling class, both in the avant garde (contemporary members of the same circles): and/also sexually Platonic by nature. Both capable of "superb" statement - charisma and/or self-righteous and aggressive arrogance. 

Both made insightful diagnoses of the civilizational problems, both on the wrong side when it came to answers - their ultimate affiliations were to their "class", hence (in the twentieth century West) on the side opposing God and divine creation.

Lack of positive life planning - A frustrating deficit, but in accord with destiny

I have always, both before and after being a Christian, found it easy to know that I was doing the wrong thing (and, to a lesser extent knowing what I shouldn't do) - but very bad at discerning my proper future path.

Although I have known plenty of people who mapped out their lives and stuck to, and sometimes accomplished, their plans - I always thought they were making a serious mistake.

Nowadays I regard my inability - my personal deficit - as (through no virtue of mine!) in accordance with the real nature of the human condition.

We are supposed to be committed to those we love (at least, within the inevitable constraints of mortal life), but beyond that we sin by living for our future planning - and this is indeed one of the cankers poisoning the heart of human civilization.

Something maybe inevitable but a necessity we ought to repent rather than praise.