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henry quirk
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Re: Christianity

Post by henry quirk »

Harry Baird wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 3:31 am
'In the first: we are broken from the start. In the second: we are whole and under attack.'

"Though they have different imports for human nature, both options have the same ultimate import with respect to the reality of evil."

I can't agree (which is to say, I've come down on a side). The unchecked outcome of the first is simply smart ape or meat preying on smart ape or meat. It's not Evil or evil: it just 'is'. The unchecked outcome of the second is the eradication of the free will and that which is the embodied moral aspect. The first is machinery consuming or supplanting machinery; the second is the elimination of everything not machinery. The first is sterility from start to finish; the second is sterilizing.

"FWIW, the second makes more sense to me."

Yes, me too.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

henry quirk wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 2:40 pm
Harry Baird wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 3:31 am
'In the first: we are broken from the start. In the second: we are whole and under attack.'

"Though they have different imports for human nature, both options have the same ultimate import with respect to the reality of evil."

I can't agree (which is to say, I've come down on a side). The unchecked outcome of the first is simply smart ape or meat preying on smart ape or meat. It's not Evil or evil: it just 'is'. The unchecked outcome of the second is the eradication of the free will and that which is the embodied moral aspect. The first is machinery consuming or supplanting machinery; the second is the elimination of everything not machinery. The first is sterility from start to finish; the second is sterilizing.

"FWIW, the second makes more sense to me."

Yes, me too.
What if we don't accept superficial, second-stage answers, such as "evil is already in us," or "evil is something outside of us that attacks us"? That is, what if we don't assume the existence of, and justification for the attribution of, the concept "evil" in the answer we take, and ask the speaker or evil-attributing-person to justify the whole concept of evil instead?

Then the question of whether or not evil means we are "broken from the start" or "under attack" becomes second-level, and we have a prior problem to resolve first: that problem is, what is evil -- meaning not "what things do people think are evil," but more fundamentally, "what IS this thing that people have chosen to term 'evil,' what quality, property and origin does this attribution possess that make that attribution warranted by objective reality?

If we are " broken," then we can ask why and how we are. If we are "whole but under attack," we can ask what sort of logic there is in this universe for the universe attacking us, and then for us calling it "evil."

Either way, the problem becomes speaking coherently of some things as "good" and others as "evil." And clearly, we have to do so in a non-relativized, non-merely-subjective, non-arbitrary way, if we are going to say that "evil" is an actual, objective, not-merely-perspectival problem or property, rather than, say, a delusion the human race totally unjustifiably places on some events and not on others.

And we're certainly going to have to do that if we want to say that the existence of "evil" is any argument relevant to the question of God's nature and existence: for if we only mean, "I think there's no God because the universe doesn't give us what we all happen to want," then our complaint becomes trivial and self-centered in the highest degree, and the whole alleged theodicy problem associated with it evaporates. For why should we indict any alleged "god" for not giving us, in every minute, merely the petulant demands of our childish, subjective inclinations? If evil is not real and objective, then there's nothing for Him to answer for.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

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“A drum, a drum
Immanuel Can doth come!”
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Henry said: “In the first: we are broken from the start. In the second: we are whole and under attack.”
Harry said: "Though they have different imports for human nature, both options have the same ultimate import with respect to the reality of evil."
The first is asserted through a Story, an allegory, a guilty memory, but it could also be explained as a memory of some other, prior, state of existence from which one fell. Perhaps only personally, but then to be here we all must have similarly fallen. To what? What is the fundamental problem? I’d say it is being incarnated in a delicate, flesh and blood vehicle prone to disasters and mortal. A great deal of Christian psychology involves assertion after assertion of death 💀 having been overcome by the ultimate sacrifice, a final vicarious death-event, by God in the form of a man.

We all know — this is my view — that we are “broken from the start” in the specific sense that life always breaks us, in one way or another. It is inevitable.

But what of those who choose to tske full advantage and liberty of their time here, seeking & getting, without bothering to be concerned that others are displaced or eliminated? We call that lack of concern and these outcomes “evil”, right?

But the fact is that it is always a question of degree. Life feeds on life, life displaces other lives. There is no way around this. Thus: there is no solution. The realm is as it is, unstable, unpredictable: determined by mutability.

We long for resolution. We imagine a “perfect world”.

To say “We are under attack” is also true. A perfectly “good” man (Job) may have everything reversed in a mere moment. What “attacks” us? Malign entity? Or nothing particularly just a random event that means nothing because meaning and intention are not behind it.

What can alleviate all tense concern about these existential circumstances? That is, conquer the various “stings” all linked to mortality?
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 4:21 pm
“A drum, a drum
Immanuel Can doth come!”
I don't ordinarily command a drumroll or fanfare upon my entry, however I appreciate the sentiment.
We all know — this is my view — that we are “broken from the start” in the specific sense that life always breaks us, in one way or another. It is inevitable.
Let's accept that, for the present discussion's sake.

We are "broken," you say? And "we all know" it. Let's try to rationalize that claim, to spell out what it would have to imply.

It would imply that we have reference to a conception of "non-brokenness" or "wholeness." For a "broken" pot or a "fragmented" statue are known by the fact of their missing some feature or part that we recognize as rightly belonging to a "whole" or "unbroken" pot or statue: one side is missing, or the lady's arms have been removed. So we thus recognize the result as a "broken" and "fractured" item.

"Human beings are broken," you say. With reference to what conception of wholeness do you make this claim?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Immanuel Can wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 5:21 pm I don't ordinarily command a drumroll or fanfare upon my entry, however I appreciate the sentiment.
These are non-ordinary times, brother.

My view, in answer to you question about our sense of brokenness, impending damage, inaptitude, our core fragility and weakness (many other words are needed to fill out what brokenness refers to), and from whence comes our sense of wholeness, well-being, safety, and other sentiments of that order, I believe that we have the power to conceive of a very different world — a perfected world, and one not subject to death, and indeed with imperishable bodies, or in any case not mortal flesh and blood bodies.
"Human beings are broken," you say. With reference to what conception of wholeness do you make this claim?
An imagined sense, a wished for and longed for sense, a sense that we can conceive of and dream about. A visualized sense, a sought after sense that arises in us from some depth.

We are idealistic beings we can also hone our idealism.

I think that Christianity is infused with many layers of idealism, some of it “unhealthy” perhaps, but a great deal that seems innate in the soul.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 7:16 pm
"Human beings are broken," you say. With reference to what conception of wholeness do you make this claim?
An imagined sense, a wished for and longed for sense, a sense that we can conceive of and dream about.
So a world that does not exist, has never existed, and is not anything like the world we experience empirically, but is purely imagined?

If so, on what basis would we ever think we were entitled to expect that world, or to complain against God if we fail to have it? We are surely not cheated if what is "missing" is only a world of lofty, unreal imagination, right?

But even the fact that we can "imagine" such a thing is a surprise, if it fails to correspond to any reality at all...for why would the real world, the one we actually live in, "give" us this faculty of imagining and then expecting things that we cannot possibly have, things that fail to correspond to anything in reality?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Immanuel Can wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 7:29 pmSo a world that does not exist, has never existed, and is not anything like the world we experience empirically, but is purely imagined?
If you are asking me, li’l ole me, I’d say that all possible worlds have existed, do exist, could exist. I imagine there are as many universes and cosmoses as numbers permit. If this, our universe and world exists, and is totally outlandish and utterly strange, it has seemed possible that an infinite number of discrete worlds might exist. And worlds much more perfected than ours. As well far more “fallen” and deadly.

What is this, my imagination? What faculty is it?

We who read you, who get that you are here exclusively to “preach the Gospel” know that your questions are a set-up. I reckon you have an end in mind that amounts to a recapitulation of the specific model you work with.

Therefore I do not think you’d allow yourself to imagine what I’ve proposed as being possible or probable.

But you must know that when I am confronted by a mind like yours that I tend to react against what I sense as confinement and limitation.
If so, on what basis would we ever think we were entitled to expect that world, or to complain against God if we fail to have it?
I don’t know. You’ll have to find someone who “complains” to a god they don’t believe exists anyway.

It might be useful to mention that there are schools within the yoga (Vedic) metaphysical tradition that base their religious/spiritual practice on a “science of de-incarnation”. The idea being that we souls incarnated here through desire, or some necessary choice, and to get out of this “material entanglement” we have to put the process in reverse. This place where we are is just one among an infinite number of such “places”. And souls migrate on ….

Is this mere fantasy? Is it unrestrained imagination?

My view is that even your system — totally closed and defined — is nevertheless an “imagined world”. You visualize it. You imagine it as real. You inhabit it so to speak.
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Harbal
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Re: Christianity

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 7:16 pm
My view, in answer to you question about our sense of brokenness, impending damage, inaptitude, our core fragility and weakness (many other words are needed to fill out what brokenness refers to), and from whence comes our sense of wholeness,
Make me whole, Jesus, make me whole. :(
Dubious
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Re: Christianity

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 1:38 pm
Dubious wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 4:28 am "The bleeding truth", so-called are the predicates one chooses and lives with until or if another comes along to replace the previous one. That's how it's always been and never ceased to be. Everything follows from there into the future. The metaphysical denotes a psyche of variable values and meanings applied based as much on a host of external factors as internal ones and the human response which objectifies it.
The Gospel Truth. Finally! Amen!
What I think about when I read such a declaration, and I agree with it insofar as I too have thought similarly when confronting the wide variability of “metaphysical assertion”, is that for one who holds this idea, and really internalizes it, is like a boat without a rudder or keel. The sense of definite, believable knowledge dissolves. The individual feels resolute in the decision taken by the inevitable perception (“it is all made up”) and as a result can have no foundation and no anchor. What would and what could an individual build when there is no metaphysical structure? No “metaphysical dream of the world”?

The other problem, in my view, is that without a foundation and without an anchor one is powerless to judge the trajectory that our modernism is leading to. I refer, for example, to the discourse of Jonathan Pageau on the imminency of impinging events of tremendous consequence. On what basis (foundation) could one judge and adjudicate these tremendous, accelerating occurrences?

I grant that we — that man — realizes his sense of powerlessness. And in reaction he reaches out for solidities — objective metaphysical principles not random and invented but real and believable: communicable. I refer to that as “the act of desperation”. But isn’t that where the core of the problem lies? Man in his world exists within sheer mutability. His condition is as a victim of circumstances. The notion — or is it hallucination? — that metaphysical solidities can be defined and realized is linked to the longing for Being as opposed to existing on ever-shifting sands of mutable Becoming.
The human psyche is not unlike a ship at sea. It can be moored for a long time before it travels outward again on a surface equal to its horizon where the unknown, the unseen prevails. Until that journey everything seems solid and fixed, dry docked certainties where fixed perspectives prevail. Yet we float in the universe where nothing is fixed everything being in a state of continuous fusion, separation and reaction. It's common to believe for a long time as if some final truth were encountered, a destiny arranged, but that's an illusion based on the fact that the psyche autonomously continues to process other possibilities when the current ruling predicates turn into worn shoes which require re-soling.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Harbal wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 8:37 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 7:16 pm
My view, in answer to you question about our sense of brokenness, impending damage, inaptitude, our core fragility and weakness (many other words are needed to fill out what brokenness refers to), and from whence comes our sense of wholeness,
Make me whole, Jesus, make me whole. :(
In your case: “Make me capable of thought!”
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 8:37 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 7:29 pmSo a world that does not exist, has never existed, and is not anything like the world we experience empirically, but is purely imagined?
If you are asking me, li’l ole me, I’d say that all possible worlds have existed, do exist, could exist.
Not really an important concession. It doesn't solve the problem. What one would need is something to make the concept "evil" plausible, rational and defensible in THIS universe, not in mere speculation. For if we cannot do that, then we cannot argue that we are owed any "evil-free" or "evil-reduced" kind of existence, or that it's in any sense "wrong" that what we call "evil" happens in this universe.

And we still can't even show that "evil" is a coherent concept, since it only refers to an imagining, not to any feature of reality that we have been able to associate it with.
If so, on what basis would we ever think we were entitled to expect that world, or to complain against God if we fail to have it?
I don’t know. You’ll have to find someone who “complains” to a god they don’t believe exists anyway.
Not hard to do, actually. Plenty of cynics will float the old argument, "If God exists, then how come there's evil?"

But what I'm pointing out is there's no way to make sense out of such an objection, since in the world the skeptic posits as really existing, he would have to also insist that there is no objective property that corresponds to "evil." That is, unless the skeptic has some new argument we have not seen yet.
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Harbal
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Re: Christianity

Post by Harbal »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 9:16 pm
Harbal wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 8:37 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 7:16 pm
My view, in answer to you question about our sense of brokenness, impending damage, inaptitude, our core fragility and weakness (many other words are needed to fill out what brokenness refers to), and from whence comes our sense of wholeness,
Make me whole, Jesus, make me whole. :(
In your case: “Make me capable of thought!”
Ouch! That went right through to my core fragility. :shock:
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Harbal wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 10:28 pmOuch! That went right through to my core fragility. :shock:
And I was being gentle and held back.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Immanuel Can wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 9:50 pmNot really an important concession. It doesn't solve the problem. What one would need is something to make the concept "evil" plausible, rational and defensible in THIS universe, not in mere speculation. For if we cannot do that, then we cannot argue that we are owed any "evil-free" or "evil-reduced" kind of existence, or that it's in any sense "wrong" that what we call "evil" happens in this universe.
Like many moderns, I'd guess, I suppose I have become inured to what you are referring to as *evil*.

The New Testament concept is, unless I have somehow got it wrong, that this Earth, and I think they mean our social and cultural world primarily, is 'the Devil's domain'. Lucifer has been set loose here and in concert with all his lieutenants, influences people to get involved with projects that lead them into psychological and spiritual mire. Whether one is devoutly Christian and committed to specific Christian metaphysical categories, or whether (as I think is the case with me) one sees things in less specific ways and more generally, nevertheless I think most of us look at our world through a paradigm established by Christianity.

Myself, I have more or less come to accept that *this is the way things are here*. Harry and I have talked at some length on this theme and, in contrast to him, I accept what he would call *evil* almost as a matter of course. To refer again to Vedic thought, and to repeat what I have already mentioned on other occasions, the Vedic seers refer to "the rule of the fishes" which corresponds to "the law of the jungle". It is a perspective gained through clear-headed observation. The natural world is a "dog eat dog" reality. It is that way now and it will always remain so.

Man is obviously a part of that world. But man establishes social and cultural systems to mitigate open and overt evil. In the Vedic concept, the Empire requires maintenance. The frontiers must be protected and, from time to time, expanded. Military power (the power to kill, to displace, etc.) requires obvious 'evils' (bad actions resulting in harm done to others). But those who create the cultural and civilizational structures allow for the creation of an *inner world* of cultivation, trade, social life, and religious life. You cannot have one without the other. Those who engage in evil actions (harm, conquest, expansion onto other people's lands, etc.) incur the guilt of 'sin'. But this sin is, shall we say, understandable. It is necessary for the greater good. So in that system a priesthood knows how to wash those incurred sins away. How to liberate those who engage in it from their guilt. They see themselves as doing this before the gods.

In my own case, and in respect to our present, I have the sense of an increase in the intensity of power-struggles. And the rise of technologies that, in the hands of 'bad actors', will be (are being) used for purposes I would say are *genuinely bad*. But would I go so far as to use the word 'evil'? I very well might. But these things would have to be talked through slowly and thoroughly.
And we still can't even show that "evil" is a coherent concept, since it only refers to an imagining, not to any feature of reality that we have been able to associate it with.
I did not say that I understand *evil* to be imagined. I said that other, different, ideal *worlds* can be and are imagined. The Christian 'heaven' is an example.

(And if there are 'many mansions' in the heaven Jesus Christ referred to, this could correspond to my 'any number of different worlds' (or lokas) each with differing rules, and each with a different density level.)
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