Heresy

Time, as a formal structure does not exist. So let us first set out by understand future and past without relation to time. We first become aware of our present – that which we experience currently. As those current experiences vanish we arrive at some understanding of the past. Using this understanding of the past we come to understand that our current present will eventually be past and hence we talk about what will eventually be present (and then past) as future.

Hence Future is: All that has not happened yet that will.

Past is: All that was that is no longer.

It is important to realize that the future then, by definition, doesn’t exist. EVER. ANYWHERE. TO ANYONE. Hence, even God doesn’t know future.

Likewise, past too no longer exists – though it clearly has an effect on the present and in that way its indent exists.

All that exists is the present. This present is under the pressure of past causes and our ability to perceive the future. Just because the future doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that jumping off a cliff won’t necessarily leave dismember at the bottom – it merely means that the dismemberment will exist in the present and the present alone.

So much is evident from experience alone. Then why when confronted by the idea of God do we throw out this easily understood observation. Why do we thrust future into the realm of his “all-knowing” when it causes clear contradictions and confusion around our everyday experience. The answer is prophecy.

The only problem with prophecy is that it only ever happens in the future. If I tell you that I will give you five dollars tomorrow – then I do – have I committed an act of prophecy? No, because it was in my power to do that. Now make me infinitely powerful and infinitely good – any promise I make will be made (because I am all good) and I will be able to keep it (because I am all powerful) and hence any promise is as good as true but does not become true until acted out in the present.

Why is this a big deal? Because Christian Theology is losing – or has lost. It is detached from its Christian root and fails to pass the vigor of modern philosophy. Science has become the new idol in its place and in light of all its trouble it still fails to make sense of common experiences like time. Why? Because they hang on to an aspect of God that is not as it seems. God cannot know that which doesn’t exist – hence he cannot know what will happen (from His, or our perspective). Instead they convulute things by hiding behind his omnipresence as a product of his all-powerfulness. To say God is everywhere throughout time makes no sense to any laymen or philosopher and hence only a scant few theologians can ever agree on its precise being.

Much Ado About Nothing III

Evil is the product of duality being introduced to freedom. It is understood afterward as a negative being (defined by a lack) but is definitely the product of an actuality.

A duality is the product of a schism, a disjointed whole, and hence is separated by a something composed of nothing. It is a negative being as we understand though when viewed in the whole this schism is part of a actuality.

Freedom is a quality only understood internally. An outside observer can never know if any given action was free. Freedom is understood by external forces by the absence of external pressures on a subject. It is in actuality a useless term. One invented to express an inward feeling that cannot be understood externally. It is, in fact, completely unknown to a subject whether or not it is free.

Nothing is that which stands between two distinct somethings. It is only understood with material analogues to frame such nothingness in somethingness. It is, however, possible that such a void could exist in an immaterial way. Evil, freedom, and duality are signs of this.

A Forest Through the Trees

It’s about time for another crazy rant. Here we go.

I hate supporters of the ancient astronaut theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts). I also hate supporters of panspermia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia), but that is for another post. For now let us concentrate on the Ancient Astronaut Theory (here forth known as AA).

AA claims that at some point in prehistory aliens came to earth and gifted us with knowledge and technology. This gifting accounts for our culture, our tools, and our religions. Most support for this theory comes from cave paintings, ancient architecture, and early written accounts. The theory is that such massive creations, such pointless creations, would not be created without another purpose.

AA’s absurdity is more offensive than its illogical leaps. How does one look at religious centers and doubt man’s ability to create something for no reason other than worship. We still do it today. It is, of course, unscientific to assume we do it for God, but are aliens any better? Why do people find it more comforting to assume aliens over a benevolent God? This is what I talk about when I say ‘modernity’. We’ve got our heads jammed so far up our scientific assholes that we assume just because technology is involved that it must be more true. But isn’t this the same argument as the world resting on a tortoises back? When does the ‘seeding’ end? When does man \ alien get credited for doing something on its own? Something creative and without purpose? Or something spiritual? I assume the answer is never, for a believer in AA, one would speculate that the same thing happened to those aliens and so on.

There are other problems, other than its fanatical modernism. It bases its theory on ancient depictions of aliens. It then says “See! It looks just like how we picture aliens?” Ok, genius, and how many people that draw aliens have actually seen one? How many worship them? Of course they look similar! We do the same things to aliens that they did to Gods…we make them look human. So of course they all look similar because they all look like us! So they have a dome on their head? Cyclopes had one eye, maybe they were relatives of Mike Wazowski. AA basically rapes man’s ability to be creative and discounts it as merely experiential but fails to realize that the real cause of this is our imagination being too similar to those of our ancestors. We simply can’t picture things not being like us.

Then, worst of all, AA discredits what could be their only allies. In many cases they simply contradict or deny the accounts given to them by archeologist (hence the closest we get to firsthand accounts). Why were the pyramids built? To house the dead. Not to position some space mother ship. Firsthand accounts tell us of a love for astronomy, not because of visitors from another realm, but because it was so huge! Sure a sky God might be a plausible (though ridiculous) alien, but what of Hades lord of the underworld. I suppose we have mole people too.

To add to this most ancient deities were cruel. They killed, tortured, and sometimes raped people. If these aliens are like that, why didn’t they conquer our globe. AA likes to say aliens helped us along and that this caused our ideas of a benevolent God, but let us ask the Indians about what happens when aliens visit their shores with other intent. The ancients did believe that Gods did such things as well… or are those stories magically made up while the other stories are inspired by historical fact (alien visitation)?

How screwed up is our society? We have become so modern that a belief in God is nearing impossible so to indulge our spiritual side we comfort ourselves with aliens? We have to give it a material cause, don’t we? It can’t be something greater, something more than matter, it must be something we can eventually find and study and conquer. It must be something we can ‘figure out’. How can AA look for clues in the pyramids, the bible, and cave paintings and not see the God that is so clearly in them? Like not seeing a forest through the trees.

The Wisdom of the One Percent

Disclaimer: This post contains RAGE – if taken seriously or personally then you should not read. The only people this is aimed at in any personal way are Richard Dawkins and Jerry Farwell. Also, please note, I may be one of the 99% – but I still think this needs to be said even if it is contradictory to the premise of the post. I hope you appreciate the irony.

So much could be learned about the metaphysical nature of the universe, its inhabitants, and its causes if 99% of Atheist and 99% of Theists just shut up and went about their lives while the rest of us talked like civilized people about the matter. Too often the 99% of each side are so busy arguing with each other that they fail to listen to the wisdom of the one percent. Even worse is that both sides use such unsophisticated, assumptive, incomplete, and trite arguments that so easily become a caricature of their beliefs in the eyes of the other side.

Some facts to set straight:

Reason cannot know itself and hence is insufficient for understanding the universe on its own.

There ARE contradiction in the Bible. There are, however, contradiction in our everyday life. This is not a sign of non-existence but merely a complication.

The problem of evil is not a problem for any sophisticated mind. Even if God allows evil this makes us only further question his “all-goodness” not his existence.

Disproving one presumed quality of God does not disprove his existence. It instead should drive one to study more.

No argumentation is complete – leave room for change.

Humans cannot know the truest meaning of being and hence nobody is going to prove anything exists or doesn’t.

If you are not interested in changing your mind DON’T go about changing others. Discussion is a tool not a weapon. Likewise, if you already have answers for a question then don’t ask it just to piss people off. Atheist can be saved and there are many Theists smarter than Richard Dawkins.

Lastly, if you are under the age of 35 or do not have a doctorate in Philosophy, Theology, Science, AND Psychology then don’t pretend to be an expert. Stop lifting arguments from actual thinkers and re-arranging them for your convenience. Nothing pisses me off more than a 21 year old who thinks they have everything figured out.

Religion is complicated and complex – if you don’t believe this you are wrong. This is the same fundamental problem for both sets of the 99%. God is difficult, complex, hidden, and probably nothing like we imagine. Aristotle and Plato had a concept of such without at all succumbing to a religion (or science as we know it).  If such a being doesn’t exist it isn’t going to be due to some good \ evil paradox or some logical fallacy. If it doesn’t exist, it simply doesn’t exist and there can be no proof that a hidden God doesn’t exist, it is merely felt and understood. Thus the one percent of Atheists. Atheism should be complex if it aims to be at all serious. People like Dawkins do a great disservice to modern atheists by being their most vocal thinker when indeed Sartre and Nietzsche still hold much more convincing problems.

Any other type of atheism will ultimately be a chosen ignorance based solely on rational propaganda – a chosen way of belief that, for no other reason except the force of their will, has excepted principles that they then deem, again according to their will, to be inconsistent with theism. So long as an Atheist realizes this, I have no problem with the movement; it is much like fundamentalist Christianity. It is when either of these forces pretends to be an authority on the topic of metaphysical being that I become slightly agitated. Stop proselytizing each other, shut the hell up, and let the one percent of genuinely curious metaphysicians duke it out in meaningful conversations rather than pre-arranged diatribe.

A Call For Philosophic Responsibility

Deconstructionists are just the thinkers who didn’t take the last step of post-modernism. We deconstruct to construct – not to simply leave everything a mess once we have found it. The brilliant mind of the deconstructionist is wasted the moment they fail to describe common every day experiences (which they all fail to). They are philosophic vacuum cleaners who simply suck. Worst of all they claim to be the ultimate Socratic thinkers (so proud of their questioning ability) but these folks probably haven’t read any of Socrates’ works.

Why the sudden attack you ask. Why target these people over any other philosophic disaster in the past 100 years? Because they have become the group most associated with philosophy and they have made people hate it. It is the deconstructionist who isolates the philosopher with his own language (jargon) to make philosophy exclusive and to push others out. Then, once he is on the outside, to validate his own mental superiority he casts stones at the common man trying to deconstruct his house. Meanwhile he validates his vicious action with self-supporting pseudo philosophic arguments on “seeking truth” and “not being ignorant” while he, all the while, never devotes himself to any meaning, truth, or wisdom.

Thus people yell at me, having a degree in philosophy, and say that I am one of these arrogant pricks who can’t even relate to the common man. I’m Aristotelian for Christ’s sake! My philosophy is so routed in common day phenomena that it is mostly useless in any theoretical sense. I enjoy active and lively debate with people – not tearing their world asunder. So why do I get this label? Because questions have become weapons and it’s the fault of the deconstructionist; every 16 year old who saw the Matrix and decided to become a philosophy major. Questions, rather than being a useful tool for self discovery, have become a weapon aimed outward to cause doubt and the only purpose of philosophy becomes to ask these questions while dodging others. The easiest and simplest of all ways to achieve this is to become a man without a philosophy, believing in nothing except whatever you choose and then tearing down other people’s universal dogma’s because you’re so wise as to simply create your own dogmas rather than accept others.

I have no problem with people believing what they want – including deconstructionists – but do they have to be so aggressive and in other people’s faces. Some of my close friends have been deconstructionists – but quiet ones. This is no longer fashionable however, because it means a life of pain, searching, and inward questioning – not exactly what most people like to sign themselves up for. Deconstructionists, for the most part, become these self-righteous assholes who go around destroying people’s philosophic, religious, and political beliefs for fun and amusements as well as to make themselves feel better.

So I have a point… believe it or not. It has nothing to do with deconstructionists because I have lost all hope in reasoning with them. It has everything to do with other people interested in philosophy. Don’t listen to them. Have beliefs, strong ones, ones about truth and beauty, ones that are above reason and logic but rooted in everyday life. Hold those beliefs and defend those beliefs on your own terms. Don’t let people define the meaning of reason and logic to pin you into an argument you weren’t even trying to have. Be firm under stupid questioning and most of all believe in philosophy the LOVE of WISDOM. If philosophers have to hide behind jargon to win an argument they aren’t worth having conversations with. These are not Socratic thinkers despite their masks. These are misologists – the haters of reason. Go forth and construct something new. If you must deconstruct then do so but only as a transition – only to build something new. And eventually together we will build a new hopeful philosophy.

Give Thy Thoughts No Tongue

A question was recently brought to me by the mind of HollyMatrin on the nature of public and private property and the nature of thought. Most importantly, and at the heart of his comments, where do these two notions meet? The answer to which must remain far from our minds until we pin down what exactly the phenomenon of public property entails and what our concept of ‘ideas’ entail. First let us begin with the less mundane… the world of ideas.

Ideas are solely private phenomena. You can never share, give, or even steal an idea from anyone unless it is committed to an external media: speech, writing, etc. Unlike some other forms of property ideas are completely invisible and undetectable outside of your mind unless you will it to become external from you. The question is whether or not this choice to externalize thoughts makes the thoughts public.

On the other end of things you also have this question: Is it possible to NOT steal an idea? Once the idea or thought is committed to an external source and you obtain it from that external source is their anyway you can opt not to steal it. If the idea is a good one you would want to keep it and make it part of your own philosophy and if the idea is bad then you would want to use it as an especially poor example of those things that you do not believe in. Once you internalize the external media into your mind is the idea yours or not? If not, then aren’t we demanding our ideas be stolen… asking for them to be stolen… by putting them on external media. We cannot logically expect that after we say something it won’t be repeated, changed, or amended after our saying it by the ears that hear it. Can such be considered stealing? Or is it merely the nature of man?

So we have two extremes: The first is the thinker who comes up with the idea who willingly reveals that internal phenomena to external listeners (through speech in this example). On the other we have the listener who, if he is functioning in accordance with human nature, will internalize that external media and bring it into himself in some way. Yet, unlike in most cases of theft, the idea remains also within the original thinkers head. Can you even steal what somebody still owns after your done? We shall throw this thought aside as a mistake of language rather than an actual aid in our discussion. What we call ‘stealing’ cannot at all be used to describe this phenomenon but perhaps plagiarism or some other word could. So we remove this criticism even as it leaves my mind onto this page.

What plagiarism and stealing have in common is the idea of property. Property relies on a concept of ownership which is derived by some method of taking something to be one’s own and nobody else’s. When a person owns a thing they decide its destiny by matter of law not by nature necessarily. So hence we step away from nature while keeping it in mind. Our investigation so far has shown that ideas are naturally internal and their external manifestation is natural and perhaps even the impulse to take those ideas and make them our own is natural but such does not necessarily determine law. With that thought permanently etched into the internet, I will retire and leave whatever readers to ponder our procession thus far, but I advise anyone who questions, contemplates, or even discusses this post outside of this forum to realize what their reaction may say about the nature of this post. Even as your eyes travel across this field of letters can you be thought of as a thief?

How Bitter A Thing It Is To Look Into Happiness Through Another Man’s Eyes

I am angry and not thinking clearly. Please forgive the following rant if it offends. I have decided to let the dogs of Eros off their chains for a bit.

Literature, in particular fiction, in particular the novel, particularly in its characters creates envy within us, no? Isn’t that why we love the hero? He is, as it turns out, everything we want to be but we cannot due to lack of training, natural talent, or motivation. Likewise with the anti-hero. Don’t we all enjoy a good bastard every now and then? Someone who can do all the things that our bodies desire but our minds oppose, someone who can transcend ethics for a good time or for simple desires, someone without that nagging voice, someone truly free like some Nietzchean Ubermench. Hence can literature ever be fulfilling, can it ever really make us happy? (Trust me, this is a dreadful question for me as well). Any emotion we pull from a book is really seeing happiness through another man’s eye, it is hollow, it is shallow and it is keeping us from achieving things in the real world.

Before we get too radical let me reflect for a second. I am not calling for a Fahrenheit 451 here. Books are good, reading them can be good, but they are also bad. I find too many people hide behind books and couple it with faux intellectualism, or they feign multiculturalism because they read some book on Zaire, or more shockingly they pretend to be pretentious while they read garbage modern novels using hackneyed story lines lifted from classics. (Insert here Dean Koontz, Danielle Steele, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Terry Prachett, and Stephen King, Note: I am not saying these authors are ‘bad’ but they are no Shakespeare and you shouldn’t be acting like a scholar just because you picked up a book for once). The above authors wrote for fun, their books should be read for fun, not for intellectual pursuit so don’t put on some pseudo elitist look of disgust when I say I don’t read any of these authors on a regular basis.

That being said I have wasted much of my life reading. Well, I guess the term ‘wasted’ is really at the heart of the entire question. What makes a book worth reading (outside of pure fun because people find all sorts of weird things fun)? Personally it shocks me why people read modern novels over classics. Yet, I am not stupid and I understand I am the minority in that equation. Yet, being as pompous as I am, I would defend my position as the correct one, and yet do I not have guilty pleasures that I cannot explain? And yet, if all you have are guilty pleasures without substance isn’t that a vice? And yet I don’t know, and yet another yet.

Shouldn’t it shock us that J.K. Rowling’s book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows sold more than: To Kill A Mockingbird, Night, Catch-22, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Complete Works of Plato, The Confessions, The Summa Theologica, The Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights, the Bell Jar, etc. The only thing more shocking to me is that Dan Brown’s Divinci Code sold even more than that. I assure you Harry Potter didn’t beat Crime and Punishment based on intellectual merits, writing style, advanced imagery and symbolism, social relevance, or even timelessness – it sold because it made us FEEL things. Don’t get me wrong, I FELT things when I read Crime and Punishment but I also THOUGHT things. FEELINGS are nothing but looking at happiness (or even sorrow because we are a sadistic society) through another man’s eyes. It is pointless, absurd, and probably a waste of our time. Then again what isn’t? We have to have fun, right? Not everything can be work or education, right? Can I truly condemn someone for living the life of quiet pleasure in reading? If they don’t hurt a fly, nor commit any vice, but simply slowly waste away reading? Its a tough call. For all I know, I am doing precisely that. Or perhaps I am the one wasting away and I am really only angry at myself.

Who the hell knows. I am confused but at least I am not angry anymore.

A Friendly Eye Could Never See Such Faults

Brief moments of clarity often lead to a lifetime of insanity. The vision of truth unscathed can do nothing but make a man hungry for a food he cannot gather or hunt. He must deliberately harvest and wait for the fortunes of the weather. How can one avoid getting mad at oneself for such a short coming of the human race? Then again, what is the point of anger? Inspiration comes not from anger but from madness – letting your mind go into the wilderness of impossibilities. But what good is such wanderings if you do not return home? That is the question we face, for we are an all or nothing tribe. It is either madness or sanity – you are either one or the other – this or that – black or white. I reject such a notion and say that the mean between the two is the path of virtue. Be neither a slave to reason nor the master of absurdity. Such seems to be the truth – at least for now.

Thoughts on Elections

(This is a rant – not a philosophic argument. This is not to say that they lack truth, but to say they are emotionally driven from the mind of a very frustrated human being. Please forgive the lack of intellectual content) 

Democracy is the rule of the people.

A great majority of people are not fit to rule.

Why do we assume that those who cannot rule would be able to see leadership properly in others? Furthermore, why does voting make a candidate valid? What about being popular makes someone fit for leadership? More importantly, why does EVERYONE complain that the president is incompetent when we have DESIGNED a system to do precisely that – elect incompetence. Of course Hillary cries, of course Obama is inexperienced, of course Romney is an idiot, of course Giuliani is a one hit wonder – if somebody actually came along that knows what they were doing they would be feared and hated.

The problem is that people do not understand a democracy. A democracy is INEFFICIENT – it is the anti-tyranny. We are a government of self contradiction and endless changing – of course we have flip-floppers. Winston Churchill flip-flopped, Abraham Lincoln flip-flopped, heck even Abraham (a.k.a. the father of the Jewish people, perhaps the foremost leader of humanity in history) flip-flopped. Sometimes we make wrong decisions, and the best things we can do, the only thing we can do, is to contradict our previous decision. Get over it!

We are never going to have a perfect leader. We might never have another good leader. All we can hope for, the pride and joy of democracy, is that we cannot have a horrible leader, and just to set the record straight: Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao, Pol Pot, etc are horrible leaders. George Bush is not. George Bush made poor decisions that, at the moment, were popularly endorsed. If anything, that is precisely what a president SHOULD do; whatever is popular. Not saying I would put him among the great leaders of American history (if any can be called “great”), but lay off the guy – he did as Democracy demands – we can ask no more of our president than that.

Both sides of the isle need to stop pretending like they have a moral or ethical advantage in a system that regards such as unimportant – let me remind everyone – we don’t elect the most ethical person, we don’t have an ethics measuring system, we have popular vote, and a constitution which is extremely outdated. There is no anti-Christ is the race, there is no devil, we just like to demonize what we don’t understand. All the candidates running are average or sub par (but no worse than electing me or you) and for all those anarchist assholes out there this DOES NOT mean Democracy (or government for that fact) is inherently flawed. It means people are inherently flawed, and I would rather be run by average or sub par politicians who has SOME idea of SERVICE toward the community than be run by my neighbors who care about little other than himself. Politics is tough, politics is dirty, and when it comes to electing your officials – this cannot be avoided.