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Post by mdonnall2002 on Apr 5, 2012 0:12:04 GMT -7
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Post by dan on Apr 5, 2012 5:19:15 GMT -7
Md02, Thanks for this link. I have forwarded it to Sam. Some in his email group were likely involved in this updated model. ------------- Here is maybe a more succinct statement of what I'm trying to point to, by way of an immaterialist version of direct perception...... Often I contrast the dead letters with the Living Word. Who breathes fire into those dead letters? I refer also to the Tetragrammaton. To what living truth does the Wiki point? The tree of life, the Sephirot? Signs of the times..... footprints.... fingerprints..... rainbows..... seeds..... numbers..... NASDAQ..... DNA.... atoms..... transistors.... ? Can any of the above exist in isolation, other than, perhaps, in our imaginations? To be is to relate. The most real is the most related. This is true for numbers, letters, the quantum, space-time....... How did we ever suppose otherwise? Homo faber? To what do our fabrications point? Or, perhaps, more accurately, of what do they partake? Recall that the Greek moving van is also a Metaphor. To where do our metaphors move us? Or is it the getting there that is the point? The message is in the medium. Was the J-man a metaphor? Hardly. Our bodies? Our temples? Where two or three are gathered together....... Our bodies are a microcosm. So are our minds. The macrocosm and microcosms are inseparable. Creator and creature. Each number and letter are also a microcosm..... in potentia, in their potency, which is their magnetic relatedness, especially as links between creature and Creator. Do we confuse the map for the territory? Do we confuse choirs of angels for heaven? Our minds are a map of the cosmos..... sometimes erroneous. What is the distinction between the present, the shining present, and the Presence? 10:30--------- Now look at the history of the concept of infinity...... Another angle on this is the question of whether there is anything new under the Sun, especially wrt the BPWH? In theory..... no.... In practice..... yes. Want me to explain that? Experiential novelty is pandemic. Don't you feel it? How easily we forget that..... " No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." But that is not the end of the story, as Wigner pointed out.... Who observes my observation, when I no longer exist? It is simply the problem of the tree in the forest, or the tree on the Quad. To observe is to relate. Someone has to watch the watchers. If the cosmos is not a (transcendentally) social phenomenon, it is no phenomenon. By extension, this says something about the existence of separate, isolated creations/Creators. But isn't God isolated, by definition? Splendid isolation? If something, then everything? We are God's everything. Which is scary. It is virtually too much. Can anything finite exist, unto itself? If God is infinite, then Creation must be infinite. Possible gods? Best possible God? Is God not self-transcending? Does God have no potentiality? Does God play dice? No, the real question is..... Can God play dice? Maybe that's why you and I are here..... to play dice, on God's behalf. And isn't God also one of us, and all of us, too? A particle and a wave? All for one, and one for all. Cassandra (BRC) wants to know how to recycle her audio cassette tapes. Now there's a quantum conundrum. What happens to those phenomenal records that are about to be recycled? Who's to say they existed? Where will Mozart be, when his last CD has be recycled? Where will be his Muse? Is she Sophia? Perhaps it is only at the brink of non-existence that existence comes into its own. It is on the lip of the recycle bin that existence becomes one. That is our at-one-ment. Potentiality is, ultimately, unitary. How many potential omnisciences can there be? Cannot God be self-limiting, without being a polytheist? God can be a trinitarian, but not a full-blown polytheist. But how could any god know that? Can gods be like ships, passing in the night? No telegraphy? No telepathy? That which is not forbidden is compulsory. Who is to forbid something, other than a greater god? Sub specie aeternitas, how could one god never catch the scent of another, unless there were some law, on the books? The ocean of potentiality would also serve as their jungle-drum. No? Where lies the burden of that one? By what fiat is potentiality inaccessible.... immovable? Where are the Bayesian statistics for that supposition? Are there two oceans? No waves? Quantum entanglement? Get real. Mad Max Tegmart will argue against us, for sure. Max is lost in Meinong's jungle, without a drum. (cont.) |
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Post by mdonnall2002 on Apr 5, 2012 13:42:53 GMT -7
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Post by dan on Apr 6, 2012 9:05:22 GMT -7
Md02, Thanks for this second link to the Club of Rome. I've not heard back from Sam about this 40th anniversary of Limits to Growth. ------------ The BPWH and the Young Earth Hypothesis (YEH) and the Old Earth Appearance (OEA)...... My principal claim is that OEA is partly aesthetic and partly cognitive, and that these are just two ways of viewing the same phenomenological data. The philosophical challenge is to explain how the OEA could have been implemented within the context of the BPWH. In particular, there appear to be problems of phenomenological continuity. Identifying the Alpha and Omega, within the Ouroboric ( CTC) cosmology, is the primary strategy for continuity. On this view, the OEA is the stage on which the YEH human drama is carried out. The residual phenomenological gap between the Alpha and Omega is bridged by a 'reset' and by a Noahic/ufo time link between the 144 million at the Omega and the 144 thousand at the Alpha. Is the OEA then merely an antiqued forgery? That seems like a lot of effort for an aesthetic/cognitive purpose. There is a more practical issue that I should have included, which is the ecologic or metabolic continuity required, if we were to live off the land. Also, there should be included the logical links between ontogeny and phylogeny. The OEA is just an extension or a renaming of the Jurassic Park hypothesis (JPH). Computer like simulations could have been used to generate a suitable ecosystem to sustain human life, up until Disclosure/Revelation. The 'simulation' would have entrained the 144,000 back at the Alpha. The 'computer' would be the substantial portion of the cosmic mind that is responsible for the OEA. It could simply be the total of our scientific knowledge at the Omega. Yes, this does seem to raise the chicken and egg problem, but that's what the CTC is all about. This is the coherence/continuity of materialism/physicalism at work Every time I chow-down on a steak, I'm ensuring the aesthetic and cognitive continuity of the BPWH. Beans work, too, while studying string theory. Once you get the basics of stellar dynamics, plate tectonics and cell theory worked out, all you need is some creative work with fractals to have the OEA up and running, ready for Noah's ark and the 144k. You and I are the quality assurance engineers. No? We are the ones who keep the roulette wheels running true. We are the anachronism vigilantes. We keep the ghosts and ufo's on the run, up until D-day. Coherence begins at home, with you and me. Have you done your coherence drills today? It has something to do with keeping our Cs and Ucs in alignment. Keeping sane? That helps, too. D-day comes when the sanity option just runs out. Suppose that Leeuwenhoek and Galileo had drawn blanks, when they first peered through their respective devices. How would that differ from waking up to the absence of the tree in the Quad? Or discovering a missing integer? But a red blood cell? Who ordered that?..... as II Rabi quipped, at the discovery of the muon. Well, suppose that neither cell, nor particle had made the scene...... We would have been up a long creek, without a conceptual paddle. D-day would have come a hundred years earlier. Who ordered the paddle? 9pm----------- In delving into Islamic theology, I was reminded of occasionalism. It had not occurred to me previously that Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley could be classed as occasionalists. Is it true that anyone who is not a mechanist is thereby an occasionalist? That seems a rather extreme contrast. It may be useful for me to examine the BPWH from this perspective. On the view of al-Ghazali, when you bring cotton in contact with fire, it is not the fire that makes the cotton burn, but rather God. This does seem bizarre, but no less so than the Cartesian view that my conscious sensation of the burning cotton is not cause by the light of the fire, but by God's pre-established harmony between mind and body. Same problem. In the BPWH, the appearance causal continuity has more to do with logic and the habituation of phenomena. If something is at rest, it will stay at rest unless something else causes it to move. But what keeps it at rest, or keeps it moving uniformly? According to strict occasionalism, God has to recreate the world, in its entirety, at each new instant. Now that is bizarre! (cont.) |
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Post by dan on Apr 7, 2012 6:55:02 GMT -7
I'm now reading the longer, SEP, article on Occasionalism...... It seems that al-Ghazali was merely trying to retain, contra the Aristotelians, etc., an opening in nature for miracles or divine activity. The problem seems to be to find any sort of coherent middle ground, as between materialism and immaterialism. In keeping with the spirit of the BPWH, there is none to be found. What a shame....! Or is it a sham? We'll just have to keep reading...... BTW, Hume was basically an occasionalist, perhaps the greatest, after a-G, IMHO. I'm arguing, as with the BPWH, that coherence and (cyclic) habituation are what make the world go 'round. Only love can make it stop!? Coherence finally brings the gravitational collapse, or knowledge implosion, that is our spiritual Apocalypse/Apokatastasis. The Absent becomes fully Present. Keep in mind, that coherentism is just another name for agape. Also, that habituation is just a temporal/cyclical form of coherentism. And that habituation may be, or usually is, retro-dictive. But then it turns out that a-G is also an anti-coherentist. On his view, cohererntism puts too much constraint on God. But, with the BPWH, miracles are to be used sparingly, and then only to inspire a larger coherence. This is why Peak Oil is just what the Doctor ordered. Are we going to cheat, with thorium? It will cushion the shock, and be a bargain with the devil. a-G was not only an occaisionalist, he was also an atomist or particularist, i.e. an extreme pluralist. How does that jibe with his monotheism? Well, he was strongly anti-pantheist, shall we say. His view of pantheism would be one of disgust. Mine is a love-hate relationship with them, bless their pagan hearts! Can there be a secondary, creaturely level, of causation, as the SEP author suggests? Where does freewill come in? The BPWH sees the existentialist view of freewill as being vastly overweening. To what extent can we be open to the spirit, to lift us out of our various ruts and comfort zones? That's what's gonna matter..... Ok, I'm beginning to see the problem....... Is love free?! What is love, if not free? Whoa....... 3:10---------- Malebranche is quoted as saying that..... conservation is but continuous creation. Yes. I certainly don't wish to grant an independent existence to any part of Creation. Habituation of cycles is secondary wrt the coherence. The Eschaton is, paradoxically, the essential element of the cosmic coherence. I need to elaborate that. It is all about the Telos. It should be no surprise that Leibniz' version of occasionalism comes closest to the BPWH. His preestablished harmony may be seen as a proxy for coherence. Oh, dear.... the SEP has many interesting articles about Causation, which I need to review. IMHO, this is part of the revival of interest in metaphysical issues. I would love to find a survey of this current trend, and how it might fit into a history of philosophy. Particularly consider the entry on Mental Causation. (cont.) |
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Post by dan on Apr 8, 2012 7:16:06 GMT -7
There appears to be something new under the philosophical sun.......
The philosophical blogosphere is 'erupting' with speculations relative to panpsychism, vitalism, among other notions. The internet turmoil is being fueled mainly by non-professionals, i.e. students, etc.
There are some marginal(?) professionals involved, eg Graham Harmon. These speculations come under the rubrics of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Philosophy, q.v. The realisms and objectivities, here, have a decided postmodern cast, although these youngsters would disavow any such reliquary language.
It is a frequent error to contrast realism with idealism. This is not what is going on here. These realisms are to be taken in a context, not always well specified.
One of their touchstones is to be anti-Kantian, who has been the mentor of continental philosophy. Bruno Latour, with his social critiques of science, is an earlier touchstone. How does this jibe with their 'realism'? Scientists love to hate the Sociology of Knowledge, much derided in recent years. How do these 'realists' work around that bugbear? Don't know.....
Anglophone philosophy, after positivism and analysis had taken a 'linguistic turn'. It now appears to be taking a 'metaphysical turn'. Could all of this be a prelude to the MoAPS?
Now, out to the ballpark.......
Where Throop made his first catch..... a foul ball off of Nick Markakis.... and we swept the Twins.
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8:10----------
It does seem that the philosophers are getting a bit restless, but they have a long way to go, to make it to the BPWH, unless they can get more assistance from upstairs than I've been able to. Mind you, not complaining.... just pointing to the facts of life.
(cont.)
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Post by dan on Apr 9, 2012 7:03:09 GMT -7
I'm just into the introduction of Graham Harman's Speculative Turn. It's an open access eBook. I'm only beginning to get a few clues about what's happening on the 'continent'...... On top of everything there is a militant atheism, but beyond that narrow defile, everything goes. One poor guy is being pilloried for maybe being soft on theism. What is this posturing about? Me thinks they protesteth too much! They must sense their vulnerability to being overshadowed. When the cat's away, the mice do play. The more they resist, the harder they'll fall, etc. Obviously, even on the 'continent', there must be an undercurrent of intellectual theism, to which these young Turks are responding, trying to head it off, with a preemptive strike. The sin of their elders is Kantianism, particularly with regard to its subjective anti-realism. They will not abide by the noumenon, the unknowable thing-in-itself. Thus do they open the Pandora's box of anti-reductionism. Their full-throated atheism seems intended to belie what might otherwise be viewed as their anti-scientism. Gosh, am I catching the scent of Ayn Rand's Objectivism? These folks would be the last to admit it. What I see going on here is an Occupy Philosophy movement, complete with twittering. Now it is the secularists who are on the ramparts, who command Tahrir square, but we of the 'Islamic Brotherhood' bide our time. Note, too, the turn to an anglophone interface. This is quite the linguistic turn, for the stuffy continentals. Now I need to start searching their docs for a few key words like.... panpsychism. Besides God, I'll bet one of the words they hate is holism. But what about vitalism? They follow Whitehead in his extreme pluralism, I believe. Alfie's extreme pluralism and concomitant anti-teleology was his stratagem to fend off the Brotherhood. Well, it's been working.... so far.... I hope they brought their machetes, because Meinong's Jungle is just around the corner. And, golly, where does the soul/self sit with these folks? It looks like I have my homework cut out for me........... One of my favorites to be found herein is 'transcendental materialism'. If this doesn't give away the game, what would? And, actually, 'transcendental' is an overworked term, herein. Ok, I think what we're dealing with here is simply Structural Realism. This is what one of the philosophy students, Mike A, was trying to clue me in about, last year, when he recommended James Ladyman's 'Everything Must Go'. Ontic SR, OSR, is the UK/US version of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Philosophy, SR/OOP. Are they talking to each other? Reviewing OSR, I see that it is stuck on mathematical structure. This is where I parted company with Mike and James. This hearkens back to Jack Sarfatti & co. My rejoinder to them is to show me a single word that can be reduced to a formula. My paradigmatic case is 'One'! Why do mathematical treatises continue to rely so heavily on the use of words? Whatever happened to Hence....Thence....Whence...? Ladyman's EMG does have a number of hits on transcendental. In particular, there is a reference to Kant's transcendental turn. Consider this, from TST...... Shades of Ladyman..... 1:10------- Before I forget, let me note that in these introductory materials of SR/OOP there was mention of the 'ecological crisis' as being a primary motivation for this return to 'realism'. Note the use of 'ecological' instead of 'environmental'. This has to do with its anti-anthropocentric bias. Good luck with that. Also, a must see is Giles Deleuze. He seems to be the pivotal figure between Kant and the Young Turks, along with Whitehead. Wow.... This is panpsychism with a vengeance....! 3:45--------- I'm listening to Graham's talk at a 2010 conference in Scotland. This includes especially his critique of James Ladyman. This talk may be downloaded as mp3...... xylem.aegean.gr/~modestos/mo.blog/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/09/02-graham-harman-audio-I-Am-Also-of-the-Opinion-that-Materialism-Must-be-Destroyed.mp3 4:35---------- Graham continues to pursue a very engaging critique of Ladyman/Ross...... Relationalism, after Cassirer. It's relationalism, all the way down. Turtles all the way down? No. The L/R view is closer to Occasionalism, in their effort to retain realism wrt the special sciences. Harman is a radical pluralist. L/R are monists. This is the bottom line, evidently. The BPWH is decidedly monist. Is Neptune an individual? Or is it a part of a whole? It all depends on geocentricity. Blending the continuous with the discrete.......? Paradox? Causation between inanimate things is the primary paradox being proposed by Graham. At 52:56 into the lecture..... 'the virtual God that will appear suddenly to redeem the world.' Hmmm....... How does Graham obtain even the slightest coherence out of his radical pluralism? I'm now listening to another of Graham's lectures...... boo.mi2.hr/~tom/Materialism/Materialism_Graham_Harman.mp3 Realism vs. Materialism. Graham prefers realism over materialism. (cont.) |
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gary
Full Member
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Post by gary on Apr 9, 2012 13:26:09 GMT -7
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Post by dan on Apr 9, 2012 16:00:20 GMT -7
Gary,
Yes, it is exciting to be on the brink of a global catastrophe.
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Post by dan on Apr 10, 2012 5:16:12 GMT -7
I'm continuing with the reading of Quentin Meillassoux' 'After Finitude'. I fell asleep last night, during the second of Harman's lectures.
I'm trying to figure out what objecthood has to do with modality. The problem is to find a non-materialist, non-theistic grounding for scientific realism. Kant took the grounding for realism to be in the transcendental subject. QM is taking a different tack. He is, like, Ladyman, attempting to absolutize mathematics. He is criticized for trying to smuggle God back into the equations. I'll have to see how that works.
I'm also struggling with Harman's introduction to his collection of essays, Speculative Realism, open access, from various authors in the SR movement.
I see no way to construe SR/OOP other than as a metaphysical turn, away from phenomenology and linguistics. Why has ontology suddenly become such a pressing issue?
Are they afraid to admit, outright, that existentialism, phenomenalism and nominalism are baseless? So are materialism and scientism baseless. How can we take micro-objects seriously, if we don't take ordinary objects seriously?
The only question before us then is monism or pluralism. Does every object have a soul, or is there only a cosmic soul? It is pantheism vs. theism. For how much longer can the philosophers deny their own tradition..... deny Sophia?
In his mathematicism, Quentin M makes a distinction between Cartesianism and Pythagoreanism. The later frame, he contends, verges toward the ideal, which he is trying to avoid. Back to Descartes....??
Quentin is explicating the implicit idealism of all of philosophy, which he is now going to reverse, by a non-Pythagorean appeal to mathematics. I can hardly wait...... Are we holding our breath for Quentin to delve into the Anthropic Principle...?! Lord, save me from my cattiness.....
There is no doubt that, in the name of Realism/Objectivism, Quentin is going to exhume the incoherent corpus of Cartesianism. How dare he?! Grave robber. And how is this going to help God and the Spirit of Truth, we'd then like to know?
Am I hallucinating, or is Quentin providing us with the reductio ad absurdum of the entire SR/OOP/OSR enterprise?
No wonder that all his SR buddies love to hate him. Where is the transcendental dimension, for which these neo-realists are in arrears? Promissory notes, long outstanding, as with perpetual progress, on the part of paleo- and neo-realists, alike. Whatever happened to the ecological crisis, which the SR crowd was promising to tackle?
10:45-----------
It's still not clear if QM is going to be Saving the Appearances a-la, or au-contraire, my old buddy, Owen Barfield.
OMG, Quentin is coming down very heavily on the side of Descartes. Everyone else is a closeted Creationist..... I kid you not! It's right there, at 13%, whatever page that is. Yes, this is the Reductio..... for Kantians and Cartesians, alike. Suck it up....
At 15%, it only gets better..... Quentin brings up the Husselian objections to 'naive' realism. In this case, it is the 'lacunary' response..... the absent is predisposed in the present/presence?
11:55---------
Uh, oh..... suddenly we arrive at the necessity of the Incarnation of the transcendental subject. Are the neo-reos beginning to squirm?
And it only gets worse, at 22%..... We're becoming vested in the Cartesian necessity of an absolute God.
(cont.)
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Post by dan on Apr 11, 2012 7:05:24 GMT -7
Quentin Meillassoux is a trip. I read his 200+ page book, After Finitude, with some care. I kept hoping he was going to say something provocative, which he did, but only in a negative sense. He abjures Kant's Copernican revolution, pointing out, correctly, that it actually was a Ptolemaic counter-revolution. His battle is against Kant's Correlationism, which is the view that only the relationship between us and the world can ever be known. The two terms of the relation remain inaccessible to thought and even to speculation. All of philosophy since Kant has been a more or less closeted idealism. Such admonitions are seldom heard in public. His is a prolonged attack on necessary being, in favor of the Facticity of the world. It is a weak form of Occasionalism. He makes a big ado about science's ability to posit a world before and after human existence, doing this strictly quantitatively/mathematically, all the while abjuring Pythagoreanism. I now wish to peruse the critiques of Quentin's After Finitude, as they appear in Harman's edited collection, Speculative Turn, a free access book. It seems that Quentin's only necessity is Chaos. By necessity, there could not have existed nothing. There is no explicit mention of Anthropics, but he does admit that the world could obviously not contravene our existence, and so the appearance of regularity. If we are to put a positive spin on Speculative Realism, it would be to view it as a clearing of the philosophical decks, making way for something new, that has not yet come into view. 12:20--------- OMG...... In the intro to his ST collection, Graham parenthetically remarks that continental philosophy, at some point in time, endured a 'forced passage' into university literature departments. Whoa! Doesn't that explain a few things..... What does a guy have to do to find out what is going on in the world of philosophy? Why has this startling contrast with the anglophone situation not been more widely remarked, we'd like to know? From ST's concluding interview, with Zizek....... Don't you love it, when philosophers talk dirty......? And get a load of this........ Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology ..... Zizek being one of the authors. Everyone knows that something's coming down. I know what's coming down..... I just don't know where or when. 3:30----------- This also from the ST interview of Zizek..... Not too shabby, IMHO...... But only now did I append/appreciate the continuation of this quote from the /next page/..... OMG..... There is something coming down.... To quote my dad's WWII pilot to the Azores..... I knew it had to be out there, somewhere. 6:10--------- I had a long catch up convo with my next oldest friend Palmer C. He alerted me to the Oversoul, but it was from someone more recent than Ralph W. Ralph was a fellow member of the Concord UUC. He enjoyed the quiet before the service. I also had a convo with Isaac H, of OM. 7:30--------- I'm now reading PNM/CPFCT...... not too shabby..... Tell me that Zizek is not the bleeding edge of continental philosophy. (cont.) |
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Post by dan on Apr 13, 2012 17:01:15 GMT -7
It's been a couple of days..... I've been catching up on my reading of continental philosophy (CP). It has been very educational. Nowhere in the intellectual world has there been more recent ferment than in CP. IMHO, it is all coming down to a single question....... communism vs. communalism, as the replacement for global capitalism. The person on the bleeding edge of this cutting edge is Slavoj Zizek. The book that I refer you to is Paul's New Moment, linked in the previous post. I'm continuing to read it with some care. It's is a dialog between the Marxist and Chrsitian philosophers, within the continental tradition. Both sides are lining up against the nihilism of postmodernism. (cont.) |
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Post by dan on Apr 14, 2012 7:55:54 GMT -7
I'm continuing to read PNM/CPFCT, which is a dialog between theists and atheists concerning the future of philosophy..... have not Christians won the day, more by default, than anything else? Everything else, outside of the Incarnation, leads to a nullity. Only the kenosis of the Incarnation can ever make sense of the world. This is the transcendental subtraction that fills or redeems the void. This redemption was always present in us, infinite beings that we are, but it had to be given an historical focus, in order to gain a purchase on the body politic. It had to point to a cosmic centering.... there had to be that fulcrum, if the world was to be moved.
The function of the SoT, of Chicken Little, is to rationalize that act of God's folly, in the light of the Eschaton. Only in the light of that ultimate disturbance can we hope to grasp the full measure of that kenosis. The J-man owns the End. We all know that, but we are sore afraid. We grasp at the remaining straws. We are so used to standing on solid ground, that we have forgotten how to swim.
(cont.)
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Post by dan on Apr 15, 2012 13:04:20 GMT -7
It does appear that we are progressing toward a potential breakthrough at SfA, which I did explain to Sam. If this putative breakthrough can be combined with the breakthrough that is ongoing in continental philosophy, then, sports fans, we may finally be onto something. It was Bill S of SfA who, this morning, pointed out to me an aspect of the Anthropic Principle that I have I had not previously noticed or noted...... This is referred to as the Anthropic inequality, or, I think, more accurately as the Anthropic window....... This quote comes from the Reasons to Believe (RTB) organization, which is a prime source for the SfA. Another point is the connection between the AP and the Rare Earth Hypothesis (REH). This leads us into the Fermi Paradox and the ETH vs. the UTH. All of these points are touched upon by the RTB, but they don't synthesize them, at all, nor into anything like the BPWH, which ought to be the logical conclusion. (cont.) |
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Post by dan on Apr 16, 2012 8:12:05 GMT -7
Sam and I are involved in last minute tax preparations. Actually, we find out they're not due until tomorrow night, for some strange reason. But, in the meantime, I think we may be seeing just a speck of light at the end of our eschatological tunnel, and this, for the first time, is without requiring any further direct divine intervention, other than what may have already transpired, along the lines of the Core story and MJ12, etc. IOW, there need be no further disclosure on the part of the government, or any new phenomena, in order for the revelation to move forward. Where does this leave Chicken Little? May he now ride into the sunset, leaving nary a chicken track in the sand? Yes, quite possibly. What about the SoT? I still think there will be, and should be, a singular, prophetic visionary, of the human kind. Will I continue to pursue that target? Probably, unless something intervenes, or otherwise garners my attention. I would hope that the visionary kudos would go to an initiative coming out of an evangelical organization, as opposed, say, to an academic based initiative. That would only be fair. Or it might come out of left field, as, say, from the Sufi or Islamic tradition, but that would be stretching the odds, it would seem, especially considering that the J-man was in on the ground floor, and that is putting it very mildly. My bigger, immediate problem is with the Green forum (BGF). Can Sam step up his support for the BPWH, without alienating the four or five others in our affinity group? A big test will be for the meeting on the 22nd, when Lore and BH will be presenting...... Varying Spiritual Responses to "2012" and "The Great Turning". This should be right up my alley, one might think, but, nonetheless, my participation has been.... ummm.... avoided, for perfectly understandable reasons. This will present me with a political challenge on several fronts. We are being presented with the stark contrast between the theist and pantheist views of the times we are in...... Lore will be presenting the New Age perspective, being championed particularly by Barabara Marx Hubbard. Br. Henry will be presenting a Quantum Theology. Here's the vision, as far as I can make it out...... Leveraging itself off of the ending of the cyclical Mayan calendar in 2012, this remnant of the New Age Aquarian movement, is looking toward a spiritual turning point that will lead us into a sustainable human presence on Earth. And this is about the full extent of any sort of common vision that I can discern amongst the various spokespersons who are involved, along with Barbara. But even this, may be almost enough. The BPWH would love to be part of that spiritual awakening. I see no reason why it cannot be. The BMH vision seems to be a reasonable compromise between the contrasting cancer vs. chrysalis views of humanity. 6pm----------- But I seriously doubt that there can be any sort of useful compromise between these diametrical, cancer vs. chrysalis, views. It is only going to muddy the water and/or provide a temporary, feel-good expedient for those who otherwise remain in a state of denial. The same can be said for the evangelicals who use their belief in the Armageddon as a means of absolving themselves of any personal concern about the impending crisis. Listening to Chicken Little is only going to rob them of a good night's sleep, or two. And, basically, I have to agree..... Who am I to tell the Lord how to orchestrate the Endtimes?! Chutzpah must be my middle name. Nonetheless, there remains the ghost of Sophia..... And will the Lord take offense at my minuscule rantings, here, at Compass M, and in Baltimore? Surely, she's got bigger fish to fry. I told Sam that I would invite Bill S to have lunch with us, and possibly to attend this Sunday's meeting of the BGF, on the topic of spirituality. (cont.) |
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