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.

O Lord

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

Speaking of valuation...

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

Lk. 12.7

Good to know!

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.

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.

A Post-Halloween Reflection

Join Gregory Crofford and me, for a discussion of the meaning of Halloween.

A Post-Halloween Reflection

Open your eyes

Some of the most important religious and philosophical visions tell us that our eyes are closed, that we're sleeping, missing out or ignoring the most important elements of reality. What does it take to see what's really happening in our world? To break free, Moses-like, from accepting the enslavement of others? To see, Buddha-like, the interconnected energies of choice, action, and emotion that shape, and are, our world? To see, with a pure heart, the blessedness of God?

Church of the...

You perhaps have heard of the Church of the Assumption. There are a lot of them. They may--you can decide it--be outnumbered by the Church of the Presumption.

Church of the Assumption, Merkine, Lithuania
Image credit: Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

God's address

God may have created the world (starry heavens, etc),

but s/he lives in the city.

Humbug Variations

“My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins,” said (methinks) Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Leave aside that I have often cited John Locke as the author of this witticism; I am more interested in humbug variations. To wit:

As recently announced on Facebook, and this in response to my needing-a-diaper-change two year-old: your right to stink your stink ends where my nose begins.

Speaking of stinkers: your right to a perfect world ends where my imperfection begins.

And thus also: your right to a perfect world ends where your imperfection begins.

Your identification of a perfect religion ends well before it begins to convince many others

And thus also: your right to persuade others of the perfect religion ends where their resistance begins.

Your right to hand out pamphlets, knock on doors, and offer unrequested prayers is matched by others’ right to say ‘get lost,’ ‘the baby’s sleeping,’ and ‘tell-da big guy I say yo.’ Your right to persist ends when they say it ends.

Your right to be wrong (by denying evolution, for example) ends where the education of my child begins; your right to be right (by proclaiming your revealed truth, say) ends there also. So let’s offer a curriculum that gives students skills, knowledge, and power.

Your right to deny global warming ends when my morning cereal boils before it enters the microwave.

Your right to be mean-spirited begins with your acceptance of isolation and your inability to believe, and ends when your isolation and loss of faith confine others and construe them falsely.

So this is not 30 variations. Your right to write variations, so long as they do no harm, never ends. Add some in the comments….