From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2015 7:47 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Democracy
On 03 Jan 2015, at 09:28, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
On 30 Dec 2014, at 01:38, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]>
>>The Soviet union can be formally considered a "democracy". There is nothing
>>external or formal that may distinguish a democracy from any other regime.
>>Since every modern state has the same elements. All of them use the
>>momenclature of the age. The word democracy is the most overused world in
>>this century togeter with "scientific".
No word comes close to matching the overuse of the word "god" however.
Yes, ... and no.
For the greeks "God" was just a pointer to the truth we are searching, through
theories and observation. It led to math and physics, + inquiry about which one
is more fundamental, and what might still be beyond math and physics. That use
of God remains in some language expression, like when we say "only God knows",
which means "I don't know".
But that is how the word was used in the Hellenistic period; I was referring to
modern usage that has associated it with a monotheistic value system.
I think monotheism is only the "personal" view of the monism of the parmenides
one.
I think that the theology of the christians and jews reflect the monism of
those who believe in an unifying truth. The fairy tales is a pedagogical
popularization, who get wrong when the religion is (too much) mixed with
politics.
>>Which comes from the ONE of the greeks, mixed with the Jewish legend. Well,
>>if you forget the superstition, it has some important relation. Monotheism is
>>a reflexion of parmenides or Plotinus monism.
Perhaps you are referring to the Jewish mystic concept of the sephiroth kether
(kether means crown in Hebrew) it is that which is manifest yet cannot be
named; the first divine emanation out of pure abstract space… that is without
form or definition yet which fills and animates all things…. The divine spark
so to speak.
I think so.
A few examples “a God fearing” man (or woman) is upstanding, moral and
considered (by other god-fearers at least) to be superior to those who do not
fear god;
But this "fearing of God" is a mystery to me. God should be good. Only the
devil should be feared. (between us). Obviously that are open problem in
machine theology.
>>With some definition, fearing God is a nonsense.
I find those definitions of God far more palatable than I do the Manichean
dystopic vision, of a universe divided between the opposing forces of good and
evil.
In the theology of the machine, the devil is well played by the notion of
false. In a sense, like in Plotinus, it simply does not exist, but its
influence is incarnated in the []f, and [][]f, or even []<>t, which implies
logically f, at the star level (in G*), which we cannot see, but can intuit.
That makes the frontier between good and bad into a fractal similar to the
Mandelbrot set. But it relates also the "bad" to the harm. The opposing force
is nature manicheism, needed to make us believe that eating is good and being
eaten is bad, which is locally useful to live and develop.
>>We should fear the devil, but not God.
Or as some spiritual traditions maintain the devil is merely a manifestation of
our own ignorance and impoverished state of being cutoff form our spiritual
being.
>>That follows from what I say aboven but not withot some technical
>>difficulties. Plotinus get similar difficulties. Pain and suffering remains
>>quite complex to analyse. there are still many difficulties.
Pain and suffering will never be easy to explain, especially the pain and
suffering of innocents.
The devil is a paper tiger… not to say that evil does not exist, but evil is
ultimately a manifestation of profound spiritual ignorance – at least amongst
some spiritual traditions.
So perhaps if I could re-phrase the phrase above to say that we should be
mindful of our ignorance, for inner ignorance is what cuts us off from the
infinite eternal divine infusion of being.
I will think about this. I am not entirely sure. It is more the ignorance of
our ignorance which is evil, but that might correspond to what you say, because
it is the ignorance of ignorance which cut of frm the "divine source". Our
ignorance itself, when living on the terrestrial plane, is our knowledge of
God/Truth. To see God is a sort of way to see the abyssal and intrinsic
ignorance when we are living in a (finite) body. That ignorance is a friend,
and the evil exploit the ignorance of that ignorance. Hope I make sense.
Agreed.. and an important distinction as well. The ignorance (or perhaps
willful ignoring) of our ignorance is maybe the tap root of evil within and by
willfully choosing to ignore that something is rooted in ignorance is the
inception of the overlaying layered sedimentary superstructure of evil.
A similar double level statement can and famously has been said about fear… it
is the fear of fear that is a negative harmful soul sickness. Fear itself is
often good and can sometimes be a real life saver. But when the mind constructs
an edifice of *fear about some fear* it is a mental trap and will tend to drag
the individual down with it to the extent that this fear of fear plays out
within that persons psychology/mind.
>>But of course this aspect of the thing is not yet retrieved from arithmetic.
>>I hipe it will, but I am not 100% sure. Open problem. How much can e say that
>>god is good, like Plato thought? We don't know yet.
Perhaps God evolved..
Not sure. Keep in mind that I have machine's god in mind, which is not
distinguishable by us (the finite machine) with the arithmetical truth/reality.
If by god we intend a potential lying outside of emergent existence then
getting it to “evolve” seems problematic.
If God is a kind of dynamic summation of all equations and math manifesting and
consciousness in the multiverse then it could be possible for this dynamic
entity to also be evolving – like a kind of moving average of everything –
according to the emergent evolution of all being. But that it seems is a
different kind of god from the one you are describing.
perhaps the version of reality we exist in evolved from earlier renditions and
over infinite recursion into previous renditions in this hypothesized behind
the scenes reality configuration space the holistic principle gradually
evolved. Why not a Darwinian type process perfecting God itself so that our God
is the result of a long line of preceding Godheads.
>>God is out of time, simple, and the roots of everything. It is the truth we
>>search, but can never assert we know. We are the evolving gods. If God itself
>>evolves, we will need another invariant God to make sense of this, I think.
I agree with this kind of view of the concept God -- sans, the baggage of
dogma – as an ineffable essence that can be subtly sensed perhaps though not
defined and which also maybe animates emergent reality in some way. This god
would exist outside of all that emerges and exists, including arguably
time/causality itself. However notwithstanding being outside of spacetime, it
sometimes seems to me, that perhaps this hypothetical god may somehow itself be
continuously re-created in some way as a result of every inter-action and dream
dreamt in the multiverse.. that though outside of time and temporality g-d
itself is in some way the result of that which we experience. I am not all that
sure about this or how it could be made to work… or if there is any closed loop
at all.
I am not sure about this or any God, but can see your POV that it is a useful
concept to describe the ineffable nothingness and the un-name-able first
emergence from nothing.
Everything I see both outside myself and when I look within is an evolving
maelstrom of barely ordered chaos, balancing on that creative knife edge
between static order and total incoherent chaos. The galaxies, the stars in
them, the sponge-like riverine mega structures of dark matter upon which
galaxies ride. The quantum leaps of electrons between electron shells but never
between. Everything seems a swirl of evolving forms. And so it is within our
own selves; we are far from static beings (even the dullest amongst us)
>>Everything ... physical. But that is an illusory aspect, when considered from
>>the absolute. I think you might be talking of the third Plotinian God: the
>>soul or inner God. Then what you make sense. but it is not the outer god (the
>>ONE), nor the second God (the Noùs, or worlds of ideas, computations,
>>arithmetical relations, ...).
When speaking of things so very abstract it is hard to know exactly what one is
trying to describe as the levels of abstraction grow ever deeper. I sometimes
feel that external form and patterns are a manifestation of internal forms and
patterns. To go back to that Jewish mysticism well once again, as is so with
the tenth sephiroth, malkuth – the end physically manifested realm of matter.
Ultimately it remains a manifestation of the divine spark the ultimate
condensed material end result perhaps but yet still influenced and in a sense
determined by the vibrations filtering through (if I can use such a metaphor)
the other nine sephirah.
Taking this view isn’t the physical the emergent end result of some original
divine inception, and so though outside and material also itself a
manifestation of the same original ineffable spark.
whilst by comparison describing a person as being godless is usually a form of
ad hominem insult. A Godless person is assumed to be (by the God-fearing
sheeple) of lower moral caliber and someone who cannot be trusted.
OK.
>>I can make sense. No one is Godless. Godless people confuse God and some hero
>>of fairy tale.
God is used possessively by most people who use the word to describe some
special supernatural entity that they know about and will be good to them but
whom is going to damn everyone else (all those who does not believe as they do)
to eternal damnation and torture… sadistically punishing them in often
shockingly rendered and detailed accounts of these divine torture chambers
(sub-contracted out to the devil… or as they say Mr. D)
>>OK, we are back here to the concept in their most misused form. I saw a movie
>>(on youtube) made for young christians, on hell, by south Corean catholics,
>>which looks exactly like very hard porn!
I can believe that J My neighborhood has a fair number of evangelical Koreans
living here and those Korean evangelical churches are surprisingly hard core
fundamentalist.
God is a word that may have meant something to the people of Hellenistic
Mediterranean basin, but the word symbol has become highly loaded with value
judgment during the era of the prevalence of the three Abrahamic cults of
monotheism (and perhaps earlier even with Persian Zoroastrianism the mother
monotheist religion that gave birth to the later usurper Abrahamic faiths that
violently supplanted it for the most part.)
It is the monism (which I take as a progress). Then it abuses by people wanting
to manipulate others. But not everything is negative, and the jewish extracted
the idea of social laws from there, without mixing it with a feeling of
universal enforcement.
>>Like the star were Gods, but we know better, and adapt the vocabulary. If not
>>we sustain the dogma in the field, and, as we can see in my case, we stop the
>>progress.
It is hard to change the common usage of a word as deeply embedded in a given
matrix of meaning as the word God (with a capital ‘G’) has become in the three
Abrahamic monotheistic cultures.
Wouldn’t it be better to invent a new word – unsaddled by all that Abrahamic
baggage – to describe that which ancient Greek philosophers were describing
when they used this word?
It does not work, and gave the feeling that the name is important. "God" is
simpler, and is already the best term in comparative theology. But call it the
ONE, if you prefer. But then people will tought that you defend only the
Neoplatonists.
I am probably less annoyed than you about the current monotheism, which I take
as a progress, despite the abuse and dead alleys. The problem is that after a
platonic staring impetus, they came back to Aristotle metaphysics. That is the
problem, for a theologian scientist.
Not sure I follow what you mean by “platonic staring impetus”; Do agree that
the Aristotelian dogma certainly was oppressive when wed to the power of the
Church.
>>Why?
Because of the endless useless and most often moronic arguments the word causes
amongst people who use it.
OK. But that is the reason to use the word. If you change, you will miss those
reactions, and people will not learn.
It has become loaded with Judeo-Christian-Islamic overtones that have polluted
its meaning and poisoned its usage to be a word of hatred, death, punishment,
damnation and all manner of intensely negative emotions and experiences.
All words leads to that, when they point on the notion. It is part of the
process. Changing a word will add cinfusion only, and deprive the believer to
evolve. It will give rise to another pseudo-religion. Imo.
Okay, that is a valid argument. But then to do this one must be very clear what
is intended by the use of the symbolic entity God (or if you prefer G*d)
>>They use it before, and the main attribute of God is that it has no name,
Sounds a lot like the descriptions given for kether (the crown or godhead
perhaps) it is formless potential, nameless and without definable attributes
Yes.
so it is good to use the substantive instead. Creating a new name automatically
will make us believe that the name is important, and so would be gravely
misleading. It would make more complex the comparison. During a period, I use
"One" in the place of "God". This led people to believe that I was advertising
for Plotinus in a misleading way. God is the very general term. Just look at
"God" in the wikis, you will see that the same term "god" is used in quite
different meaning, which is useful when doing science, as we must be neutral
since the start.
I understand your hesitance to use an inferior word that describes one facet of
what the word God describes – such a say the word “One”, but God is not neutral
for by far most people who use it and therein is the rub.
>>When I presented my thesis in France, I suppress all "religious" name, but
>>the atheists were still saying the same bs on it.
Dogmatists will be dogmatic whatever the colors they may be wearing.
Yes, that's my point. And that is why I have came back with the most usual
terms in the domain. Then only the dogmatic are shocked. The others can
appreciate (and then be shocked by the technical aspects of it, like the many
worlds, the loss of personal identity, the idealist or immaterialist aspects,
...)
I respect your journey and the reasons you give for why you have returned to
using this word/symbol – as highly loaded with other connotations and meanings
as it has – over the ages – become. Hard materialists can be as dogmatic about
material reality being made of real particles, as medieval monks wearing hair
shirts.
Let us just keep the scientific attitude, and let us try to go beyond the
vocabulary issue. The monotheistic theologians are, in general, less wrong than
the atheists on even the God of the machine. (That is what makes some
strong-atheists nervous, but it is just because they cannot say "I was wrong").
I agree with that… with a scientific attitude towards theology; after all – at
least IMO -- exploring the mind of God is the most interesting pursuit in the
universe…
yes, even outside the universe :)
Nice J
if by God, we understand a deep mystic re-binding thread of some unfathomable
un-nameable essential something (or other).
Religion (truth sharing) is the only goal.
Science (modesty sharing) is the only tool.
I like that statement; there is a nice symmetry to it and sentiment/meaning
contained within it.
-Chris
Bruno
-Chris
Bruno
-Chris
Then, when the science "theology" has been recuperated by politics, and when
religion get institutionalized, the term God has become the name of some hero
in some fairy tale, and the science behind has been put under the rug, and is
still taboo today (which I can understand for the Church's employee, but not
for the atheists, which should on the contrary be open to the coming back to
reason in that field. Eventually I conclude that atheism is *really* the
religious mirror of christianity. They have the same notion of God (even if it
is used only to be denied) and they have the same notion of primary matter
(modulo some details).
So God is both not enough used (it means the unknown fundamental reality,
simply) and overused (idolatry, blasphems, argument by terror (like with hell),
etc.).
Bruno
-Chris
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