Christianity

[Nick_A]

I actually agreed with you thus far. Nietzsche's not speaking of any fact there: he's using a metaphor for "Modern people tend not to even have a relevant place for the God concept anymore."

He is speaking of facts in certain senses. One is that 'the modern view' undermined, in numerous senses, the 'story' through which Christianity had been normally communicated. One metaphysical system (a means of explanation) overturned the previous one in certain important, relevant, crucial and also somewhat irrefutable ways. For example: the notion of the Red Sea parting, the notion of a primordial garden in which two God-created beings existed in deathlessness.

Really there are a whole range of things that cannot any longer be believed by people who have been raised up in the new metaphysics (which is sort of a non-metaphysics) unless they make a deliberate choice to believe what cannot be believed.

Oddly, the will must enter in here to *patch up* the belief-fabric that had been rent.

The way I see it is that the Christian Story operates in much the way that the former Epics did. They are stories which have been concretized in absoluteness. They are *set in stone* so to speak and cannot be altered. If they are altered, and to push on my metaphor of fabric, they unravel in weird ways. And then (it seems to me) people exist within a semi-unbelievable story that is hard to defend. In fact they might try (as you seem to try by referring to Adam & Eve as some original mating pair) in a willed act of reconciliation, an attempt to bridge or reconcile two distinct epistemes.

But we can only deal with Christianity, and the elements of belief, as in a Novel. And the Novel is still being written. (If you catch my drift).

To say 'God has died . . . and we killed Him' is to express a series of ironical truths. The first Christ was nailed to the cross, but the undermining of the Story of Christianity is a murder in another sense.

As you know my view is that the Christian Story requires a special exegesis, but that exegesis is necessarily gnostic. However, I also tend to believe that most people either find a way to hold together, intact, a Story that they can believe in and do not have the energy, or perhaps the mental agility (?) to penetrate the many seeming metaphors that Christianity deals in.

It is also true that the more that one sees how the World really functions (I refer to ecological and natural systems and the reality of *will-to-power* as an accurate description of how power actually functions in this world) the more that one must internalize this understanding, and that means seeing that we are all profoundly complicit within *systems* that cannot but operate according to these principles.

I think that is what Nietzsche *saw* is just this:

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”

In my view this is a description, an overpowering one that must have come on him quite strongly, that has to do with the 'world outside of ourselves'. That is to say the natural and the ecological world of 'life' within a material biological system.

What 'God' is, and how God enters this world, only occurs in human persons. I do not see the Christian God as being present in the natural world, because that world is really cruel and amoral. If mankind were subtracted from the picture, there would be no Christian God operating in this material-biological world. Whatever God is there, in that world, would carry life on as it now exists in the jungles and forests. It is a world that feeds on itself. Life and death in a horrifying, yet beautiful (in an utterly strange sense), system.

God in this sense comes through men (through people). God 'imposes' in men through the invisible world of metaphysics. How could metaphysics apply in the natural world (that is through a transcendental metaphysics?) What need as *the world* (the natural world) for transcendentals? None at all that I can discern.

So it seems to me that with Nietzsche (and I suppose many others) the order of focus shifts. That is, if one has seen what Nietzsche saw. I almost feel bad in pointing some of these things out but even Sartre, in a way, got it ironically right.

At a certain point the realization dawns: It is just you & me and here we are stuck in this strangely decorated room, no longer really fitted to us, where we have no choice but to work it out here.

Nietzsche describes the earth as a machine transforming substances through the interaction of lawful forces. Life within it takes part in this same function through the transformation of its life forces. There is no need for God in this machine.

However, can Man be other than an animal serving this machine? Can Man evolve from a mechanical being into a conscious being? I believe that the purpose for the essence of Christianity is to produce this potential.

[Immanuel Can]

My view is that science, materialism, the overturning of the Scholastic view of reality (here I use the term *interpretation*), provided a clearer picture of the 'real world'.

Hold on, though. "Scholasticism" as history traces it, ended in the Medieval Period. And according to Britannica, "From the time of the Renaissance until at least the beginning of the 19th century, the term Scholasticism, not unlike the name Middle Ages, was used as an expression of blame and contempt."

So "the Scholastic view of reality" was long dead before "science" as a paradigm of thought, appeared, with Francis Bacon, in the 17th Century. It didn't survive even the Renaissance, apparently.

Something's seriously missing in this account, I think you have to agree.

I respond by saying if he speculates then any view, and all views, are speculations in the same or similar degree.

That's the thing that needs proving. Why would you say that "if Nietzsche speculates, then any view and all views are speculations"? That's like saying, if Tom is hallucinating, then so is Mary, and Bill, Jeff and Frank are also hallucinating, and everybody else is, as well...isn't it?

He seers, as it were, *the terrible world* that I also attempt to present: the real world of cruel biological and physical/material process.

Wait.

If "real world" means exactly the same as "cruel biological and physical/material necessities," then you have to be a strict Materialist (and Determinist) as well. But that doesn't seem right to me, in view of what you've said earlier: you seem to believe that some metaphysical things are real and important. So you can't mean that.

You're going to have to help me understand that claim, then.

The Real World is the world going on around us. Or put another way, a stronger way, it is the world that would go on around us if we were not here. The material/physical world of circulating phenomena and the biological world of lower-order beings without the capacity to visualize themselves, the world they exist in.

Nobody doubts that physical phenomena are part of the real world -- except the pure Idealists, of which there are relatively few, of course. The question is, are they the totality of the real? And as you continue, it looks like you've coverted to Materialism...

That world is completely devoid of metaphysics.

Really?

Then you deny the real existence of metaphysical entities? You don't believe in mind, or identity, or reason, or consciousness, or values, or science itself (which after all, is not itself anything but a framework for organizing knowledge in a human mind)?

That does not seem to me to be what you have been saying about yourself. So again, I need help figuring out how you have both an open view of metaphysics and this complete closedness, as expressed above, to considering any of it "real."

Only man conceives of metaphysics and *sees* metaphysical principles or ideas operating in that world.

That begs the most important question, though: is what he "sees" real or not? If it's not, then is he merely deluding himself? Is he merely believing in entities that are not really there?

My effort is to establish that this is so. That this is *the world* that is seen, defined and explained by science, but moreover it is the world that many many people live in. Insofar as we do indeed live in our *conceived worlds*. Our imagined worlds. (The worlds that we see and entertain within our imagined sphere: our interpreted worlds. Here I reference *our metaphysical dreams of the world* as did Weaver. And I think the science-view IS a metaphysics, because all views are like that: seeing the world from above, but it is a much more limited metaphysics.)

You've got Weaver wrong on that, I would say.

Weaver does indeed think that science is a case of metaphysics, and a way of organizing the world in a human mind. But you're misled by the word "dream," (his fault for choosing the metaphor, perhaps). What he means is that when science is applied to a situation, it is not the case that the situation under examination physically reorders or reorganizes itself. It remains stable, and is what it is. But when a human being applies science to the situation, it reorganizes itself inside human cognition. We perceive it differently, but it has become no different in itself.

That's an important clarification. Weaver is not encouraging us to wild speculations of imagination, but to the recombinative activity of viewing phenomena in a new light. The "givens" are still all "there": it's only our understanding of those "givens" that gets shuffled into a new form.

In fact, if you read Weaver thoughtfully, you realize that he sees all that as having a very bad side effect on human beings: the scientific revolution, as Weaver said, induced in modern man what Weaver calls "hysterical optimism," (see page 10, the 1984 edition) namely, the belief you articulated above -- that all is Materials, and all is within the manipulative power of modern man. But Weaver deplores this turn. He writes,

"...to establish the fact of decadence [Weaver means that this Modernist attitude has produced a moral and existental "decay"] is the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that historical decline is a historical fact -- which can be established -- and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism."

In other words, Weaver is saying that Modernism is not a historical advance, but on the moral and imaginative scales, a decline, a "squandering of the estate" of humanity. It produces what Weaver calls "a moral crisis."

In other words, Weaver is quite the opposite of Nietzsche. Nietzsche sees the death of morals as a good and inevitable thing; Weaver sees that same "death" as a decay, decline and a case of gross human stupidity.

I seriously don't know how one could claim admiration for both Nietzsche and Weaver at the same time. They don't agree at all. So I'm honestly totally baffled as to how you read Weaver. But I have him right here, on hand, if you can point out what Weaver says that you find compatible with Nietzsche.

So two things loom large for me: one is man's imagination. Not reality, but what he imagines. The other element here is what man interprets.

No, that's wrong...at least, that's not Weaver's view.

I understand the mistake. Our current milieu makes a stark difference between "real" and "constructed," and makes the latter out to be utterly undisciplined, imaginative in the worst sense, and without rules -- irrational, in other words. And then Postmodernism, in particular, opts for the latter with idiotic enthusiasm, to the exclusion entirely of the former. And it's hard not to think in the Postmodern categories when one hears those words first invoked. But that's not Weaver.

You've drawn a stark difference between the words "imagine" and "real" that Weaver never would. What Weaver means by "imagine" is really more like a "paradigm shift," and not at all like a fantasy or unreal thing. Weaver's interested in interpretations OF REALITY, not interpretations ALTERNATE TO REALITY. In other words, Weaver keeps our thinking about "interpretation" grounded within the realm of those things reality can rationally suggest to us; he does not free it up for wild, undisciplined human imagining.

To put it another way, Weaver sees that science constructs knowledge; but it does not construct reality. The ontological is stable; it's only the epistemological that shifts. And all the shifts in the epistemological are only good so long as they still remain disciplined by the ontology. There are sensible and rational, on the one hand, and totally irrational or merely speculative, on the other, ways of "reconstructing" reality; Weaver's not for the latter at all.

So imagination and interpretation are *things* or areas that I focus un.

What about reality?

Christianity is, in this sense, an interpretive system and it stands in relation to other interpretive systems.

That is true, of course. But like all interpretive systems, it can be judged. They are not all equal. Some interpret well, and some badly.

I assume you know that, as an interpretive system, science is better than witchcraft, no? And I assume you know as well that as an interpretive system, logic is better than wild speculating, no? And I assume you believe that an interpretation grounded in reality -- supported by facts and experience, or even by data -- is much better than any interpretive system that has no hold on facts, experience or data, no?

So interpretives systems are not all equal alternatives to each other. Some are better, some are worse, and some just do a different job than others. But by no means is it a level playing field, with all interpretations equally valid.

This is how I see things. I do not think you can see things in this way, and perhaps in no similar way, because you define Absolute Truths that are, well, absolute. The way you see, and what you see, is absolute. It can't be argued against.

You make an error of amphiboly here, using the word "absolute." For ironically, "absolute" is capable of more than one meaning.

An "absolute truth" is not one that cannot be argued against -- it's one that can be argued both for and against, because an absolute truth will have evidence and reasons associated with it. To say it's "absolute" is not to say that it must be believed in an undiscussable way, but rather that when we discuss it, something will turn out to be absolutely true, regardless of whether or not we decide it is.

In this sense I can entertain, and have no alternative but to entertain, degrees of relativism. That is, relativism of speculative, metaphysical systems that are imposed through man on *the world*. These are relative to one another.

The term "relative" doesn't help us here. Relationships are different, not the same. Some interpretations "relate" to reality, and some "relate" more poorly; and some, perhaps, don't really "relate" at all to reality.

Possibly the only thing, the only stuff, the only 'reality' that can be defined as solid and undoubted is . . . the world that science defines. This is just a fact for me. I can't see a way around it.

Then it's true -- you haven't really understood Weaver at all. That's the very point he's trying to make: that science "defines" for us a world that looks so neat, so manageable, so understandable, precisely because it is utterly closed off to the existence of anything that does not render itself neat, manageable and understandable...or even manipulable.

This is why science, for all its boasting, is getting shipwrecked on questions of morality, of identity, and above all, of mind, as Nagel points out so astutely. Weaver would agree: but he would point out that our error was to mistake science for the ONLY way of knowing reality, a naive belief that was achieved not by evidence or reasons, but rather by naive and hysterical optimism that science, as a paradigm, can "do anything" -- and hence to the silly belief that what science cannot name, pin down, identify, manage, manipulate, put in a beaker or pinch in Vernier calipers, simply must not be real.

It does not mean that I myself abandon metaphysics!

I don't know why you don't, if you don't think metaphysics is relevant to the world of the real. I suspect you should, then. But I agree with you that that would be a presumptuous error, rather than a rational move.

Does this make any more sense?

Not so much, I have to confess. I'm now caught between understanding you to be advocating for a kind of strict Materialism and still pushing for us to retain metaphysics...and honestly, I don't see how both are possible. And I have no idea at all how you're "reading" Weaver and "seeing" Nietzsche in him.

But please help me out, here, if you can.

P.S. -- Here's a short essay on Weaver, one that I think you'll like and find informative. It should help us get a common understanding of where he's coming from, at the very least. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/ ... piety.html I hope you like it.

[Immanuel Can]

There is no need for God in this machine.

What a remarkable irony, though: we are talking about a "machine," and marvelling at its workings and denying the exitence of any "Machinist."

However, can Man be other than an animal serving this machine? Can Man evolve from a mechanical being into a conscious being? I believe that the purpose for the essence of Christianity is to produce this potential.

But if we are in a strictly Materialistic "machine," man would have no such "potential."

Once again, the thing we are noting and talking about gives us compelling reason to consider the Creator. Why should lumps of clay manipulated by mechanistic forces within a great "machine" have any "potential" beyond being lumpy and manipulated? What interest has the indifferent, mechanistic universe, in creating creatures with such "potential"? And even if we swallow all that, what makes us so convinced that that "potential" has even the potential to be actualized at any time in the future? It might well lay fallow forever, in a mechanistic machine that has no interest in its realization.

Very odd language for us to use.

[Nick_A]

There is no need for God in this machine.

What a remarkable irony, though: we are talking about a "machine," and marvelling at its workings and denying the exitence of any "Machinist."

However, can Man be other than an animal serving this machine? Can Man evolve from a mechanical being into a conscious being? I believe that the purpose for the essence of Christianity is to produce this potential.

But if we are in a strictly Materialistic "machine," man would have no such "potential."

Once again, the thing we are noting and talking about gives us compelling reason to consider the Creator. Why should lumps of clay manipulated by mechanistic forces within a great "machine" have any "potential" beyond being lumpy and manipulated? What interest has the indifferent, mechanistic universe, in creating creatures with such "potential"? And even if we swallow all that, what makes us so convinced that that "potential" has even the potential to be actualized at any time in the future? It might well lay fallow forever, in a mechanistic machine that has no interest in its realization.

Very odd language for us to use.

Remember Plato's chariot analogy. It represents the tripartite soul. The dark horse on the left is mortal and has become corrupt. Where it should serve the higher it now rules the higher. Man on earth is ruled by appetites The white horse on the right is immortal and serves its natural purpose attracted to higher realities. The driver which is reason has the obligation to reconcile the attractions to the earth with its evolutionary potential from above. Being out of balance it cannot do so. This is the human condition

Man rejects the potential to heal a sick horse. It needs the help of spiritual energy. So what you see in the world is a natural result of the rejection of the spirit necessary for animal Man to become conscious Man.

[Immanuel Can]

There is no need for God in this machine.

What a remarkable irony, though: we are talking about a "machine," and marvelling at its workings and denying the exitence of any "Machinist."

However, can Man be other than an animal serving this machine? Can Man evolve from a mechanical being into a conscious being? I believe that the purpose for the essence of Christianity is to produce this potential.

But if we are in a strictly Materialistic "machine," man would have no such "potential."

Once again, the thing we are noting and talking about gives us compelling reason to consider the Creator. Why should lumps of clay manipulated by mechanistic forces within a great "machine" have any "potential" beyond being lumpy and manipulated? What interest has the indifferent, mechanistic universe, in creating creatures with such "potential"? And even if we swallow all that, what makes us so convinced that that "potential" has even the potential to be actualized at any time in the future? It might well lay fallow forever, in a mechanistic machine that has no interest in its realization.

Very odd language for us to use.

Remember Plato's chariot analogy.

Why? That has nothing at all to do with a mechanistic universe.

...what you see in the world is a natural result of the rejection of the spirit necessary for animal Man to become conscious Man.

Back the truck up.

What you're describing is not "mechanistic" at all. If man has a latent potential to be "conscious man" or "spirit man," where does that come from? It's certainly not from some strict "mechanism." The universe (assuming it's an indifferent, mechanistic one, of course) has no "interest" in making such a creature, and no ability to "foresee" and hence to "install" such a potential in any being.

If the universe is merely mechanistic, then its dynamics are all impersonal and mechanistic, too. It doesn't sort of "plan" or "lay away" some potential for future dates, and it certainly has no teleological goal in it's "mind" when things happen.

So I don't see any application of Plato to that. One would have to have some belief in Plato's worldview...which was certainly not the mechanistic one.

[Nick_A]

What a remarkable irony, though: we are talking about a "machine," and marvelling at its workings and denying the exitence of any "Machinist."


But if we are in a strictly Materialistic "machine," man would have no such "potential."

Once again, the thing we are noting and talking about gives us compelling reason to consider the Creator. Why should lumps of clay manipulated by mechanistic forces within a great "machine" have any "potential" beyond being lumpy and manipulated? What interest has the indifferent, mechanistic universe, in creating creatures with such "potential"? And even if we swallow all that, what makes us so convinced that that "potential" has even the potential to be actualized at any time in the future? It might well lay fallow forever, in a mechanistic machine that has no interest in its realization.

Very odd language for us to use.

Remember Plato's chariot analogy.

Why? That has nothing at all to do with a mechanistic universe.

...what you see in the world is a natural result of the rejection of the spirit necessary for animal Man to become conscious Man.

Back the truck up.

What you're describing is not "mechanistic" at all. If man has a latent potential to be "conscious man" or "spirit man," where does that come from? It's certainly not from some strict "mechanism." The universe (assuming it's an indifferent, mechanistic one, of course) has no "interest" in making such a creature, and no ability to "foresee" and hence to "install" such a potential in any being.

If the universe is merely mechanistic, then its dynamics are all impersonal and mechanistic, too. It doesn't sort of "plan" or "lay away" some potential for future dates, and it certainly has no teleological goal in it's "mind" when things happen.

So I don't see any application of Plato to that. One would have to have some belief in Plato's worldview...which was certainly not the mechanistic one.

I begin with the premise that Man is in the image of God: three in one but at a much lower scale. It is like high C on a piano being the same pitch as low C but lower in scale or vibratory frequency.

The horse on our left is our animal. It is meaningless as describe in Ecclesiastes 1.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

The lower part of the collective tripartite soul like any machine is meaningless. Its meaning is a property of its creator. The meaning of a car is determined by its maker and driver. Everything under the sun or what is available to our senses is meaningless. Man is a creature of reaction obeying universal and cosmic laws

However Man has the potential in his higher parts for consciousness of its creator. Man can then serve nature through its REACTIONS and the universal purpose of our Source through its conscious ACTIONS uniting above and below: the levels of reality we know of as heaven and earth.

Man on earth is incapable of this unification. Our negative emotions prevent it and it is only through justifying imagination that life becomes tolerable. Man needs the help of the Spirit to enable the collective soul to turn to the light instead of remaining attached to the shadows on the wall in Plato's Cave. Simone Weil wrote

"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves."
"In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void (the poor in spirit). In no matter what circumstances... imagination can fill the void. This is why the average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes, and pass thru no matter what suffering without being purified."

Grace enables one to be free of imagination long enough to sense his conscious purpose of serving a universal purpose and grow inwardly rather than serving only nature's needs through its bodily transformation of substances.

Jesus Crucifixion made it possible for the energy of the Spirit to enter the world and provide the inner path we now know as Christianity

[Immanuel Can]

Simone Weil wrote...

Oh, that.

Forget I asked.

[Age]

WHY do you say "IF the material world is subject to cause-effect relations?

Wow. You're pretty simple if you don't understand what a hypothetical is.

And some say that 'I' am ACTUALLY the MOST SIMPLEST One there IS. But so what?

What some also say is that 'you' come up with the MOST RIDICULOUS ASSUMPTIONS, and then laugh when they consider WHY you would even begin to ASSUME some thing SO Wrong as this, and then even 'try to' be SO CONDESCENDING as you OBVIOUSLY ARE here. But because this ATTEMPT at condescension of "another" was based on some thing SO OUTRAGEOUSLY STUPID we ACTUALLY like to SEE MORE of this 'behavior' from 'you'.

But I'm really not interested at all, Age. I've said so before, and it's still true. Your "conversations" are so devoid of thought and content that they offer nothing to anybody.

LOL

Coming from the one who can NOT even SEE that what IS an ACTUALITY is OBVIOUSLY NOT even a hypothetical.

Some could, and did, come to the VERY QUICK CONCLUSION that 'you', "immanuel can" does NOT YET even understand what a 'hypothetical' IS. So, what does that then make 'you', "immanuel can"?

Oh, and by the way, I have NOT been having 'conversations' here with, as evidenced and PROVEN above. And, this is because you are NOT capable of sustaining them, with me.

I have just been POINTING OUT and SHOWING what is False, Wrong, and/or Incorrect in the words that you have been saying and writing here. I do NOT necessarily NEED to be 'conversing' with you for the readers to SEE that what I have said and SHOWN here is True, Right, and Correct.

I also note that you STILL appear to NOT RECOGNIZE that the so-called 'material world' can be NOTHING other than cause AND effect. So, there is NO 'if' about this. Are you now ABLE to understand this Fact? Or, do you STILL NOT YET UNDERSTAND?

Considering the Fact that you did NOT even answer the following question posed to you

Is there absolutely ANY ACTUAL thing that would even suggest otherwise?

there is MORE EVIDENCE building up and supporting the VIEW that we readers have of you that you REALLY STILL do NOT have clue about what is ACTUALITY or REAL and thus what is NOT a 'hypothetical' AT ALL. See, a 'hypothetical', contrary to what you see or believe is true, has to be based on some thing which is a POSSIBILITY. But, what you wrote being with an "If" is what ACTUALLY ALREADY HAPPENS, and can ONLY HAPPEN.

[Janoah]

To experiment, you would have to live forever. I don’t advise you, you will die of boredom.

This is an idea, perhaps one would call it a *concern*, about an eternal life in a hereafter.

I think it is fair to say that all notions and ideas about an eternal after-life are completely speculative.

In my opinion, the idea of bliss in the afterlife with a good appetite is morally flawed.

[Alexis Jacobi]

You've got Weaver wrong on that, I would say.

Weaver does indeed think that science is a case of metaphysics, and a way of organizing the world in a human mind. But you're misled by the word "dream," (his fault for choosing the metaphor, perhaps). What he means is that when science is applied to a situation, it is not the case that the situation under examination physically reorders or reorganizes itself. It remains stable, and is what it is. But when a human being applies science to the situation, it reorganizes itself inside human cognition. We perceive it differently, but it has become no different in itself.

However, I did not intend to present myself as, say, a disciple of Weaver. I have absorbed Weaver, or entertained Weaver, to some degree I suppose, and I understand him as a Platonist struggling with a world that swamps the type of metaphysical dream that he values.

I find him most valuable in his Rx about culture out-of-control. Ideas Have Consequences.

I see metaphysical dreams as multi-possible. For example Christianity offers (if this is the right word) a metaphysical dream -- a way to see reality, a way to interpret reality. But so does Buddhism, or Shinto, or Taoism. You may say *These are completely wrong!" and you will hold up an interpretive scheme that competes, and perhaps surpasses. Yet my point is that what each person, each man, holds inside himself as his 'perceptual lens' is what I take Weaver to mean by 'metaphysical dream'.

Another aspect to my grasp of this phrase is to refer to poets and the images and terms they use.

But for an average person I think that such a person also operates with a metaphysical dream. On one hand it is something one does not think about, and it is like software or an app. That is why I always refer to *imagination* and *imagined world* because the poets, when they describe things whimsically, or poetically, refer to *real things* but not necessarily tangible things. They allude to *meanings* that the reader may or may not be capable of grasping, and in the case of those poets I refer to they are involved in *metaphysical view*.

You say that because I describe a world that is free of metaphysics that I am tending toward materialism as a view. Perhaps that is true. I do not say that the intelligence behind all manifestations did not originate, as we have been exploring, in the Originator of all things. But the world and the way it functions is grossly material. Is the material-scientists way of seeing the Systems I refer to the best way? It is not the only way that much is certain. But it appears to be 'solid' and also universally appreciated.

You are right to press on my, perhaps not so well-developed, notion of metaphysics. So be it. I suppose metaphysics is a wide wide territory. But I see man's mind as 'metaphysical' and I see material phenomena and biological entity as just what they seem to be: mechanical I guess one might say. The Earth-systems have no need of metaphysical notions. Whatever rules and laws operate in this world are simply what they are, neither more nor less.

Metaphysics enters the world through man. Do spirits exist? Do angels exist? Do non-physical beings exist? Perhaps. But if you fell asleep in the Amazon jungle and an army ant swarm happened by I do not think that you could call on 'metaphysical beings' to manifest and lift you up and float you away to safety. I think you'd be eaten up within a process, pertinent to life within an ecological system, that could not be judged except in relation to itself. They ate you because it was necessary that you be eaten. And *you* would circulate now within that jungle-system in a material/biological sense.

Am I insane for seeing things in this way? (Please, let me stay within my illusions if so ...)

No matter what *metaphysical dream* one has, one lives in this world.

[Immanuel Can]

...Am I insane for seeing things in this way? (Please, let me stay within my illusions if so ...)

No matter what *metaphysical dream* one has, one lives in this world.

I've just included the end of your full explanation, in order to save the space. But I intend what is in the ensuing meditations to reflect all of it, of course. I'm not ignoring anything. Fair enough?

Is the distinction between the physical world and the metaphysical world as clear as you represent it to be? I have to wonder. And the answer is going to depend on the extent to which we recognize metaphysical phenomena as having actual impact on the real world.

Of course, if the two are entirely separate, then physicality is reality, and metaphysics is delusion. It's that simple, really. But I think you sense (and maybe this is your holdback on metaphysics) that what goes on in the human head is far more than physical processes, and these things can indeed have an impact on what happens in the real world. Human volition is one obvious case: what people choose to do has a great impact on what happens. Everybody thinks so -- even if some refuse to admit it, and opt for Hard Determinism, they're still going to do a whole lot of things that show they really think cognition changes things, such as making their own decisions, or trying to change people's minds by arguing, or believing that what their loved ones do expresses some metaphysical quality called "love." So metaphysics come roaring back in, even in the lifestyle of the most ideologically-convinced Determinists.

Another metaphysical property that has a lot of impact on the world is identity. One thing or person is not another thing or person: and all sorts of metaphysical baggage such as ethics attach specifically to the point at which identity meets reality. Then there's ethics itself: what actions take place in the social world are deeply influenced by ethics. Why else did Nietzsche bid us to get beyond good and evil, if he thought that having or not having a particular conception of good and evil floated no boats? And then there's rationality itself, that thing upon which all science is so dependent. Rationality is not a physical property. But what great effects it has in the real world.

Another such metaphysical entity is mental paradigms, or worldviews, or models of interpretation -- the thing you call "dreams," but I would not. These structures for sorting information and experience, the "grids" or "matrix" into which our perceptions, knowledge and experiences get slotted: because these are capable of restructuring interpretation, they can influence things like attribution or explanation, and thus alter our interactions with the real world, changing what happens. The fact of the rise of the Scientific Method, followed as it was by the Industrial Revolution, certainly illustrates this principle.

But here's the important caveat: such interpretive frameworks are not all equal. Not at all. To say that some people believe in cycles of reincarnation and some believe in linear time is only to say that the former are deceived and the latter are correct. It is not to say that both views are equal, or either is substitutable, or that the believing in the former won't result in very bad real-world mistakes (like the caste system) and the latter will prove to produce scientific advances that would never even be attempted under a more "circular" or fatalistic worldview.

Look at your own current thought project. You're asking yourself (perhaps induced by Weaver), what happened when the Christian worldview got dropped in the West? You're wondering what was lost, and how we can reclaim some of the goods it afforded, if we can. That's a project that deeply implicates metaphysics...and not as if such belief systems were equal. You seem settled in your own mind that a civilization like Europe needed a "christianeque" paradigm, and the very least, in order to exist in the first place. And you even look to some sort of reclamation of that to re-establish civilization now.

That's not the kind of hope a strict Materialist could ever hold. Nor is it the kind of hope that a person who strictly bifurcates the metaphysical from the physical could hope for, either. For then, what difference to the physical world could changing the metaphysics possibly make?

But, as you say, (pace Weaver) "Ideas Have Consequences." That is to say, the metaphysical (ideas) change things in the real world (consequences). That starting point is actually something that undermines your earlier claim that real simply means physical or mechanical. Apparently, matters are not so easily extricated from each other. Metaphysics matter. And when they matter, they matter in the real world, not only in a "dream" scenario.

[Immanuel Can]

And some say that 'I' am ACTUALLY the MOST SIMPLEST One there IS. But so what?

So you should consider a bit more humility. (And by the way, it's "simplest" or more awkwardly, "most simple," but not "most simplest"). Humble people do not adopt the tone of a toddler trying to lecture his parents.

I'd like to think you're capable of more...of a less petulant, irritable, simplistic tone, something less adolescent and more thoughtful. So far, I'm not seeing it.

Maybe it's time to age a little faster, eh?

[Belinda]

I actually agreed with you thus far. Nietzsche's not speaking of any fact there: he's using a metaphor for "Modern people tend not to even have a relevant place for the God concept anymore."

He is speaking of facts in certain senses. One is that 'the modern view' undermined, in numerous senses, the 'story' through which Christianity had been normally communicated. One metaphysical system (a means of explanation) overturned the previous one in certain important, relevant, crucial and also somewhat irrefutable ways. For example: the notion of the Red Sea parting, the notion of a primordial garden in which two God-created beings existed in deathlessness.

Really there are a whole range of things that cannot any longer be believed by people who have been raised up in the new metaphysics (which is sort of a non-metaphysics) unless they make a deliberate choice to believe what cannot be believed.

Oddly, the will must enter in here to *patch up* the belief-fabric that had been rent.

The way I see it is that the Christian Story operates in much the way that the former Epics did. They are stories which have been concretized in absoluteness. They are *set in stone* so to speak and cannot be altered. If they are altered, and to push on my metaphor of fabric, they unravel in weird ways. And then (it seems to me) people exist within a semi-unbelievable story that is hard to defend. In fact they might try (as you seem to try by referring to Adam & Eve as some original mating pair) in a willed act of reconciliation, an attempt to bridge or reconcile two distinct epistemes.

But we can only deal with Christianity, and the elements of belief, as in a Novel. And the Novel is still being written. (If you catch my drift).

To say 'God has died . . . and we killed Him' is to express a series of ironical truths. The first Christ was nailed to the cross, but the undermining of the Story of Christianity is a murder in another sense.

As you know my view is that the Christian Story requires a special exegesis, but that exegesis is necessarily gnostic. However, I also tend to believe that most people either find a way to hold together, intact, a Story that they can believe in and do not have the energy, or perhaps the mental agility (?) to penetrate the many seeming metaphors that Christianity deals in.

It is also true that the more that one sees how the World really functions (I refer to ecological and natural systems and the reality of *will-to-power* as an accurate description of how power actually functions in this world) the more that one must internalize this understanding, and that means seeing that we are all profoundly complicit within *systems* that cannot but operate according to these principles.

I think that is what Nietzsche *saw* is just this:

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”

In my view this is a description, an overpowering one that must have come on him quite strongly, that has to do with the 'world outside of ourselves'. That is to say the natural and the ecological world of 'life' within a material biological system.

What 'God' is, and how God enters this world, only occurs in human persons. I do not see the Christian God as being present in the natural world, because that world is really cruel and amoral. If mankind were subtracted from the picture, there would be no Christian God operating in this material-biological world. Whatever God is there, in that world, would carry life on as it now exists in the jungles and forests. It is a world that feeds on itself. Life and death in a horrifying, yet beautiful (in an utterly strange sense), system.

God in this sense comes through men (through people). God 'imposes' in men through the invisible world of metaphysics. How could metaphysics apply in the natural world (that is through a transcendental metaphysics?) What need as *the world* (the natural world) for transcendentals? None at all that I can discern.

So it seems to me that with Nietzsche (and I suppose many others) the order of focus shifts. That is, if one has seen what Nietzsche saw. I almost feel bad in pointing some of these things out but even Sartre, in a way, got it ironically right.

At a certain point the realization dawns: It is just you & me and here we are stuck in this strangely decorated room, no longer really fitted to us, where we have no choice but to work it out here.

Nietzsche describes the earth as a machine transforming substances through the interaction of lawful forces. Life within it takes part in this same function through the transformation of its life forces. There is no need for God in this machine.

However, can Man be other than an animal serving this machine? Can Man evolve from a mechanical being into a conscious being? I believe that the purpose for the essence of Christianity is to produce this potential.

Mainly I want to discuss Alexis Jacobi's gnostic stance , as I was troubled by the split between the God of Nature and the God of goodness, beauty, and truth.

The latter emerges from the former, and is mainly a matter of stories and codified morality. Stories and codified morality pertain to man's facility with language. There is no division of kind, but only one of degrees, between men and other animals. Indeed in many respects the other animals are more good, more true, and more beautiful than man.

[Age]

Yes, there is. And I gave you a very straightfoward experiment to prove to yourself that there is.

To experiment, you would have to live forever. I don’t advise you, you will die of boredom.

Correct. That experiment would last forever, because the infinite regress would never start.

QED

And, just like thee Universe, Itself, It NEVER did start. Contrary to "christianity" BELIEF.

[Age]

To experiment, you would have to live forever. I don’t advise you, you will die of boredom.

This is an idea, perhaps one would call it a *concern*, about an eternal life in a hereafter.

When you say, 'hereafter', what are you referring to, EXACTLY?

I think it is fair to say that all notions and ideas about an eternal after-life are completely speculative.

As well as being obviously completely and utterly False and Wrong.

Who can or who does provide a description of such a *world* except those who deal in tremendous fancifulness -- and here I will mention the Vaishnavas (essentially the Hare Krishnas) who have the wildest, most fantastic, most colorful, most outrageous imaginings as I have ever come across.

Imagining or talking about an "after-life", as in after this Life there is some other Life is just ABSURD and RIDICULOUS, to the EXTREME.

If you have created, intelligent beings who shall live eternally in a world-beyond-this-world, you will have to provide them with endless occupations -- tasks, projects, undertakings, adventures -- or, as on Earth, people would go crazy.

Since when have 'you', human beings, started going 'crazy' without these things?

The problem is solvable however if, as the story goes, one will be in some degree or other in the presence of God. (I say some degree or other because there simply must be hierarchies even in the heavenly world.

WHY do some of 'you', human beings, think or BELIEVE that there is some "other" world, other than this One and ONLY 'world'?

There would have to be many many different levels to heaven and a degree of proximity to God*). I know all this speculation makes it all sound absurd but really when the prospect of heaven is proposed, one has no choice but to run through what that *world* would be like.

What that world is like is just where EVERY one is always living happily in Peace, and in Harmony, with EVERY one else, as One. Or, just where EVERY one lives, literally, just like 'God', Itself.

So God would have to provide the soul with a sense of ever-renewed wonder.

There is ALWAYS a sense of wonderment existing within EVERY one, especially considering that this 'world', or thee Universe, Itself, is infinite AND eternal, in Nature. There is ALWAYS MORE to wonder, and learn, about. That is; to those who keep that sense ALIVE, by NOT BLOCKING it with DISTORTED ASSUMPTIONS and BELIEFS

As if touched by magic. Why not? At that point anything is possible. Since the world of heaven must be a world of imagined possibilities (like the Holodeck in Star Trek). Perhaps like what it was like as a child when, waking up in the morning on a weekend, you imagined the possibilities of the day that lay ahead and felt pure inspiration to go out into the world and enjoy to the maximum.

Which is more or less the EXACT OPPOSITE of how most of 'you', adult human beings, lived, in the days when this was being written. That is; 'you' felt like 'you' had endless jobs/occupations, tasks, projects, and undertakings. Although these were just self-made MISCONCEPTIONS.

By the way, considering that thee One and ONLY Universe is OBVIOUSLY infinite AND eternal, there is ALSO always endless 'adventure' to explore AND enjoy.