Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Prayer

Prayer is the mind's work at becoming un-insane, to see self and world, and mind, apart from apparitional conjurings and aspirational projections.

'God' is, perhaps, the mind's most powerful tool for creating true consciousness, 'God' being an artifact excavated from the mind's hidden regions.

Ramblings on Weakness and Liberalism

A thread connecting Moses and Paul is that weakness serves as a foundation for strength--or manifestation of divine power. Moses' inability to speak positions him to speak for the Delivering One. Paul glories in weakness and foolishness through which divine power and wisdom are made known.

Nietzsche diagnosed and rejected this thread more clearly than anyone else. On his interpretation, this weakness derived from the debased and lowly, and served as the foundation for 'transvaluation,' that the values of nobles would be rendered diabolical. The elegance of Nietzsche's rejection is faith in its purest form, save that it is inverted and rejected. His anti-Christ is a mirror-wide avatar of Christ.

The (seeming) Pauline influence on the Gospel of Mark, and thus also Matthew and Luke, is such that power is rendered questionable, unless it is given in service of others. Here, too, Nietzsche was clear sighted, for he saw that latent within Christianity was proto-liberalism, which was coming to flower in his lifetime, along with a countercurrent of hideous fascism.

Arguably Nietzsche articulates (and rejects) the deepest element of the cultural genome on which we continue to rely. The ideas contained in these genes simultaneously question power (hence commending, albeit indirectly, liberalism) and also urge protection of the vulnerable (hence commending, also indirectly, the welfare state). These ideas also press forward a powerful, and often forgotten, existential element: that possessing power intensifies the likelihood that we will live enslaved to our false ideations of the world. This is the spirit (in Weber's sense) of political liberalism.

On awakening

I was roused from dogmatic slumber by Kant, much as he had been by Hume. I was jostled to consciousness by the Buddha: awake, awake, he said. I was nagged to alertness by my seven year old son, abetted in this by the two year old.

To the philosopher, the enlightened sage, and my boys, I have one thing to say: I need coffee.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

O Lord

The people just wanna know,
why are you so brooding and silent
inclined to speak through loons
if you speak at all?

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Speaking of valuation...

ἀλλὰ καὶ αἱ τρίχες τῆς κεφαλῆς ὑμῶν πᾶσαι ἠρίθμηνται. μὴ φοβεῖσθε: πολλῶν στρουθίων διαφέρετε

Lk. 12.7

Good to know!

Friday, November 5, 2010

Really Intelligent Design

image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Earlier on Theo. Prescripts, I opined that intelligent design makes no sense. ID is residual creationism, a view which is neither scientifically nor theologically satisfactory.  But if evidence can be supplied for really intelligent design (RID), I'll go for it.

Here are a few items that will convince me:

1. a planet (anywhere will do) where grass outgrows weeds.
2. humans with four lungs, two of which have cancer-resistant qualities and can tolerate cigarette smoke for 99 years.
3. an immune system that doesn't take its cues from being initially subdued by critters.
4. a jungle where the animals can actually sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
5. a planet (again, anywhere will do) where everyone named Heisenberg designs GPS systems.
6. a planet where there is no death, nothing ever runs out, and happiness prevails.
7. a planet where oil is in tanks under the ground, simply waiting to be uncorked.
8. a planet in which weekend days are five hours longer than weekday days.
9. a planet that requires no eating, nothing of anything else.
10. a planet without advertisements and commercials.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

The divine telescope

To further a theme of opening one's eyes as per a previous post: we use a microscope to see very small objects; we use a telescope to see very distant objects; we use concepts to grasp large or complexly organized patterns: world, cosmos, self. Immanuel Kant called these regulative ideas.

It may be that without some concepts our vision is impeded, just as we cannot see very small or very distant objects without a microscope or telescope. The concept of God commends the largest possible perspective to us, at least ideally. It's surely true that some concepts of God limit and restrict vision; that's the essential notion of an idol. A task, and perhaps the task, of theology is to develop a concept of God that enhances our seeing of self, neighbor, world, and cosmos.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

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