One hundred percent of pk theology is human theology. Some may be divinely inspired, some may be naturally inspired, some may be human inspired, but it's still human theology, thought by me, counter-thought by me (and maybe others). As far as I can tell the same is true of all the theology I've ever heard or heard of; though some claim otherwise. For example, the Jews say they get their idea that they, the Jews, are God's Chosen People from God. That is, the Jews make this claim based on their oral and written tradition. But does that really pass muster as being from God? Aren't' alternate explanations possible? Couldn't they, or anyone, be deluding themselves?
I don't say it's not true: I say we haven't heard it from God. It's not beyond challenge.
Never mind, I've made points like this all my life, to no avail. Let me skip straight to what's galling me today:
Last night I watched Alien 3, squirming and retching. Ripley and her perennial alien visit a prison planet run by fundamentalist Christian convicts, men who claim to be soldiers of Christ. Of course we have only their claim. Christ remains unheard from, at least on that subject, at least in the two hour confines of that bit of meretricious tripe. Same with all Christianity, isn't it? When do we get to hear the Christian accepted as Christian by God? by Christ? by Jesus?
Will it be at the same time we get to hear that the Jews are God's Chosen People from God?
Similarly, I hear the government claim to be of the people, for the people; but I don't hear it from the people. Oh, I hear it from the schooled, from the brain washed. I'd like to hear it from a couple of hundred million plus individuals, any one of which could pass my Turing Test!
Theology: human sentience speculating on a-human sentience (as well as cause-and-effect): pre-human sentience, pre-universe sentience, pre-cosmos sentience (are these nonsense categories?) ... meta-sentience ...
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Judge Not
Judge not, lest ye be judged, says the Bible. But we judge all the time!
So do I, and I don't apologize for it; but I don't practice it while pretending that I don't believe in it.
I've meant to say the following at Knatz.com for many years now. I'll just slap it here, then gather more around the seed pebble later:
The French have pretended to be Christian on more than one occasion throughout more than one millennium. Christians: aren't they known for believing, or at least pretending to believe, that God is the judge? that Christians believe that God should be the judge? not the French? not humans? Then how come the French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime?
The French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime so that de Sade couldn't resurrect! The French didn't want to allow God a chance to judge him: the French had already judged him, so God couldn't be allowed to judge him. (No body, no resurrection; no resurrection, no judgment: according to older superstitions.)
So do I, and I don't apologize for it; but I don't practice it while pretending that I don't believe in it.
I've meant to say the following at Knatz.com for many years now. I'll just slap it here, then gather more around the seed pebble later:
The French have pretended to be Christian on more than one occasion throughout more than one millennium. Christians: aren't they known for believing, or at least pretending to believe, that God is the judge? that Christians believe that God should be the judge? not the French? not humans? Then how come the French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime?
The French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime so that de Sade couldn't resurrect! The French didn't want to allow God a chance to judge him: the French had already judged him, so God couldn't be allowed to judge him. (No body, no resurrection; no resurrection, no judgment: according to older superstitions.)
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Either — Or
Humans talk about intelligence, communication, awareness ... as though they were black and white, either / or. Is the glass that has some water in it full? If it isn't empty is full the only other possibility?
I see intelligence, communication, awareness ... as spectra (as my Thinking Tools said) (see pkTools blog). At the same time I see that my fellows see things, "think" things, in either/or absolutes. God isn't intelligent, he's perfectly intelligent; God isn't aware, he's infallibly aware: can't be wrong, not in one shade of one point.
I see intelligence as evolving. It's development is related to microbial interactions with environment, as it is to the brain stem of tyrannosaurus. Lewis Thomas argued that only those capable of making mistakes, the fallible, can learn: only mistakes can be learned from. Thus any giraffe that falls short of the leaves but that then grows a longer neck, stochastically, over time, the species if not the individual, is potentially more intelligent than any infallible God palmed off (by a very fallible Church). But that's Lewis Thomas, and Darwin, and Gregory Bateson, and me. I don't think Thomas or Darwin or Bateson number among my readers, if indeed my readers have any number at all, other than zero. Thus I revert to the fundamentalism I grew up with, writing for readers that do exist: in absolute, either/or terms.
Either God exists or he doesn't. Don't tell me that there are more choices than two, that the duality is a false one, my readers won't understand it. Either, or. Either God is perfect, or he's not. If God is aware of the fall of a sparrow then God must also be aware of every possible position of every possible electron, positron, photon, neutrino ... Thus God knows every single good thing I've ever done, and every good thing I've tried to do, what I said, and what I meant, and what was done by the society, by my family, by my wife, by my teachers, by my friends, to misunderstand what I said, so that that part of my speaking that tried to convey messages from God, from Jesus, from inspired geniuses such as Bucky Fuller and Ivan Illich will be understood by God, understood perfectly, and so, no matter what God will do to me because of all the bad things I've said, or done, or meant, he'll also know how his messages were sabotaged by the society and its members, its families and its churches and its universities, its media, its governments ...
And therefore, since God can do anything, even make the stones understand Judgment at Judgment, it can only be true that everyone, every stone, every giraffe, every tyrannosaur, every teacher, priest, and moron will, at Judgment, understand what I did and said that they didn't understand in life.
And, finally, I will have succeeded in communication: God doing the heavy lifting, succeeding in the impossible part, in making human intellects understand.
Or not.
Yeah. What if there is no Judgment? What if there will be no understanding? no communication? only the false communications of the priests, the authorities?
What if the slaves, the conquered, the women, the wogs ... finally get "their day in court" only to get steamrolled? What if even in heaven Sutter never gets a dime for the gold and family and cattle and land we stole from him? What if even in heaven Ivan Illich and I get no credit for the internet we invented, trying to save the people from coercion?
Will there be Justice? Or not!
You know, it's like asking whether or not sentience will succeed in evolving in this universe! What the hell. I'm not sure I even care any more.
pk translates: Look at it this way:
It's possible that this universe is the only one, that the beer commercial has it right. There is no karma, no meta-view, no god: just us. We're not a lab experiment, certainly not a lab experiment gone awry; we're the cats pajamas. OK. Then being or trying to be Genghis or Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon makes sense. Achilleus makes sense, Agammemnon makes sense. Jesus and Oedipus and St. Francis are just wacko.
But say on the other hand that this universe might be a petri dish in some god's lab somewhere. The god is running an experiment to see how many petri dishes of the several hundred, or million, he starts with, fifty seeded with one kind of life, fifty with another, fifty left alone, fifty plugged into the god, fifty not plugged in ... will develop sentience: and of those, how many produce kleptocracies, and of those how many produce a Jesus, of those how many listen to Jesus and how many crucify Jesus without learning a thing ... Only a human could be stupid enough to believe that he, the human, is running the experiment! Only a church could be vain enough to believe that once the Jesus is crucified, that then they're the pipeline about the experiment.
pk translates further: only a church, or a government, or a university ... could be stupid enough to believe that they're anything but kleptocratic careerists: unless: their supposed pipeline to the god is entirely open to rational examination by any subject of the kleptocracy! pk translates still further: in other words, the kid who says The Emperor has no clothes by saying The Emperor has no clothes "should" instantly cancel the legitimacy of the kleptocracy. It's not that the kid should become emperor: the kleptocracy should see that there should be no emperor: not the old one, not a new one either.
Or: let the god do whatever he wants, however he wants: it's none of our business. We, I, are not competent even to think about it.
That won't stop us from "thinking"; but does thinking, even by an Einstein, have much more significance than a fly buzzing?
The first draft of this, posted a few days ago, began very differently. I hope this version is better, but the other had some funny devices: so I keep both up.
Obviously what I mean is that being aware somewhere along a spectrum of awareness doesn't prove that you're aware of everything, and certainly not the most important thing. It doesn't even prove that you can know what the most important things are. In Catch-22 Yossarian bandages Snowden's wound aboard the bomber only to discover that 90% of Snowden's guts have meantime been spilling out a huge wound in Snowden's back that Yossarian had no suspicion of. It would be very helpful to human sanity if humans could have charts for other species as well as for whole pantheons of gods in a wide sampling of civilizations or other sentiences on a wide sampling of planets. It's dandy that we find ourselves more aware than a stone or a newt or an orangutan; it's dandy to say that Yahweh is more aware than Baal or that Christ is more aware than Yahweh; but it would be better yet if we could assess awareness of the smart mushrooms on Beta Dingle in the Coal Sack and the awareness of their god, Lacy Spoor, as well: assess it that is without being totally inept in the assessment.
I realize that my obsessions are vanities. The Japanese soldier was raised to believe that the emperor was a sun god (and that the sun was a big deal; not a minor star in a galactic backwater). Stick him on a Pacific Island, and the idiot is still fighting for his immortan emperor in 1950, 1955, 1960 ... No one's fed him, no one's paid him ... He's still fighting.
Or Jesus preaches human messages to a Third World Israel, gobbled down by Imperial Rome: the biggest baddest colonizing kleptocracy in the "ancient" world. Jesus gets arrested, gets convicted, tortured, murdered, the Jews and other Third Worlders standing with their thumb in their ass, pretending not to know him. Next thing you know, other Third Worlders get demoted and swallowed by Napoleon, by Wellington, by Washington, by Stalin ...
Jesus writhes on the cross, his corpse spins in the tomb, there's an ache in heaven ... But is it his fault? Is the emperor's mortality, the abandoned soldier's fault? Maybe: but only a very little: a little nothing compared to the sins of Rome swallowing Jerusalem, or the US swallowing the Pacific ...
I tried to help helpless Jesus to save the "world." I made mistakes, sure. I wasn't always dedicated 24/7. But I was denied resources, cheated, blackballed ... stripped, arrested, tortured, censored ... How is our failure my fault?
I agree that it is my fault: the least part my fault; and the greatest part everyone else's fault.
I see intelligence, communication, awareness ... as spectra (as my Thinking Tools said) (see pkTools blog). At the same time I see that my fellows see things, "think" things, in either/or absolutes. God isn't intelligent, he's perfectly intelligent; God isn't aware, he's infallibly aware: can't be wrong, not in one shade of one point.
I see intelligence as evolving. It's development is related to microbial interactions with environment, as it is to the brain stem of tyrannosaurus. Lewis Thomas argued that only those capable of making mistakes, the fallible, can learn: only mistakes can be learned from. Thus any giraffe that falls short of the leaves but that then grows a longer neck, stochastically, over time, the species if not the individual, is potentially more intelligent than any infallible God palmed off (by a very fallible Church). But that's Lewis Thomas, and Darwin, and Gregory Bateson, and me. I don't think Thomas or Darwin or Bateson number among my readers, if indeed my readers have any number at all, other than zero. Thus I revert to the fundamentalism I grew up with, writing for readers that do exist: in absolute, either/or terms.
Either God exists or he doesn't. Don't tell me that there are more choices than two, that the duality is a false one, my readers won't understand it. Either, or. Either God is perfect, or he's not. If God is aware of the fall of a sparrow then God must also be aware of every possible position of every possible electron, positron, photon, neutrino ... Thus God knows every single good thing I've ever done, and every good thing I've tried to do, what I said, and what I meant, and what was done by the society, by my family, by my wife, by my teachers, by my friends, to misunderstand what I said, so that that part of my speaking that tried to convey messages from God, from Jesus, from inspired geniuses such as Bucky Fuller and Ivan Illich will be understood by God, understood perfectly, and so, no matter what God will do to me because of all the bad things I've said, or done, or meant, he'll also know how his messages were sabotaged by the society and its members, its families and its churches and its universities, its media, its governments ...
And therefore, since God can do anything, even make the stones understand Judgment at Judgment, it can only be true that everyone, every stone, every giraffe, every tyrannosaur, every teacher, priest, and moron will, at Judgment, understand what I did and said that they didn't understand in life.
And, finally, I will have succeeded in communication: God doing the heavy lifting, succeeding in the impossible part, in making human intellects understand.
Or not.
Yeah. What if there is no Judgment? What if there will be no understanding? no communication? only the false communications of the priests, the authorities?
What if the slaves, the conquered, the women, the wogs ... finally get "their day in court" only to get steamrolled? What if even in heaven Sutter never gets a dime for the gold and family and cattle and land we stole from him? What if even in heaven Ivan Illich and I get no credit for the internet we invented, trying to save the people from coercion?
Will there be Justice? Or not!
You know, it's like asking whether or not sentience will succeed in evolving in this universe! What the hell. I'm not sure I even care any more.
pk translates: Look at it this way:
It's possible that this universe is the only one, that the beer commercial has it right. There is no karma, no meta-view, no god: just us. We're not a lab experiment, certainly not a lab experiment gone awry; we're the cats pajamas. OK. Then being or trying to be Genghis or Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon makes sense. Achilleus makes sense, Agammemnon makes sense. Jesus and Oedipus and St. Francis are just wacko.
But say on the other hand that this universe might be a petri dish in some god's lab somewhere. The god is running an experiment to see how many petri dishes of the several hundred, or million, he starts with, fifty seeded with one kind of life, fifty with another, fifty left alone, fifty plugged into the god, fifty not plugged in ... will develop sentience: and of those, how many produce kleptocracies, and of those how many produce a Jesus, of those how many listen to Jesus and how many crucify Jesus without learning a thing ... Only a human could be stupid enough to believe that he, the human, is running the experiment! Only a church could be vain enough to believe that once the Jesus is crucified, that then they're the pipeline about the experiment.
pk translates further: only a church, or a government, or a university ... could be stupid enough to believe that they're anything but kleptocratic careerists: unless: their supposed pipeline to the god is entirely open to rational examination by any subject of the kleptocracy! pk translates still further: in other words, the kid who says The Emperor has no clothes by saying The Emperor has no clothes "should" instantly cancel the legitimacy of the kleptocracy. It's not that the kid should become emperor: the kleptocracy should see that there should be no emperor: not the old one, not a new one either.
Or: let the god do whatever he wants, however he wants: it's none of our business. We, I, are not competent even to think about it.
That won't stop us from "thinking"; but does thinking, even by an Einstein, have much more significance than a fly buzzing?
The first draft of this, posted a few days ago, began very differently. I hope this version is better, but the other had some funny devices: so I keep both up.
Obviously what I mean is that being aware somewhere along a spectrum of awareness doesn't prove that you're aware of everything, and certainly not the most important thing. It doesn't even prove that you can know what the most important things are. In Catch-22 Yossarian bandages Snowden's wound aboard the bomber only to discover that 90% of Snowden's guts have meantime been spilling out a huge wound in Snowden's back that Yossarian had no suspicion of. It would be very helpful to human sanity if humans could have charts for other species as well as for whole pantheons of gods in a wide sampling of civilizations or other sentiences on a wide sampling of planets. It's dandy that we find ourselves more aware than a stone or a newt or an orangutan; it's dandy to say that Yahweh is more aware than Baal or that Christ is more aware than Yahweh; but it would be better yet if we could assess awareness of the smart mushrooms on Beta Dingle in the Coal Sack and the awareness of their god, Lacy Spoor, as well: assess it that is without being totally inept in the assessment.
I realize that my obsessions are vanities. The Japanese soldier was raised to believe that the emperor was a sun god (and that the sun was a big deal; not a minor star in a galactic backwater). Stick him on a Pacific Island, and the idiot is still fighting for his immortan emperor in 1950, 1955, 1960 ... No one's fed him, no one's paid him ... He's still fighting.
Or Jesus preaches human messages to a Third World Israel, gobbled down by Imperial Rome: the biggest baddest colonizing kleptocracy in the "ancient" world. Jesus gets arrested, gets convicted, tortured, murdered, the Jews and other Third Worlders standing with their thumb in their ass, pretending not to know him. Next thing you know, other Third Worlders get demoted and swallowed by Napoleon, by Wellington, by Washington, by Stalin ...
Jesus writhes on the cross, his corpse spins in the tomb, there's an ache in heaven ... But is it his fault? Is the emperor's mortality, the abandoned soldier's fault? Maybe: but only a very little: a little nothing compared to the sins of Rome swallowing Jerusalem, or the US swallowing the Pacific ...
I tried to help helpless Jesus to save the "world." I made mistakes, sure. I wasn't always dedicated 24/7. But I was denied resources, cheated, blackballed ... stripped, arrested, tortured, censored ... How is our failure my fault?
I agree that it is my fault: the least part my fault; and the greatest part everyone else's fault.
Companion Intelligences
You know how two stars can get close enough to have a special relationship? wobble each other, wobble planets, confuse astronomers. Think of other possible pairings:
How many companion intelligences would a god have to have to be truly intelligent? Two stars can light a planet round the clock. Three satellites can cover the earth: 24/7. Two gods could watch each others' back: three might watch heads and tails as well. But would it be enough? What meta-dimensions apply? Time, for sure.
Is that why there's a Trinity? How the hell would a human know?
Or a god?
How many companion intelligences would a god have to have to be truly intelligent? Two stars can light a planet round the clock. Three satellites can cover the earth: 24/7. Two gods could watch each others' back: three might watch heads and tails as well. But would it be enough? What meta-dimensions apply? Time, for sure.
Is that why there's a Trinity? How the hell would a human know?
Or a god?
Who Pulls the Strings?
The important question to ask in any religion is Who Pulls the Strings? The Jews say God controls everything but the Jews keep that god in a box: and they, the Jews, control the box. The Christians say that God controls everything, but all the evidence is controlled by priests: the Bible is gathered by priests, edited by priests, published by people connected to priests ... What independent verification do any of the claims have?
When the Chinese of a couple of millennia ago wondered if their emperor had lost his mandate of heaven, they broke some pots to read the shards; but the shards were read by priests: and the priests said, you guessed it, that the emperor was no longer divine. The priests controlled who was or wasn't a god. Some island people once were convinced by priests to sacrifice all their wealth to pray for some boon. The people gathered all their treasure and dumped it in the sea: convinced that their god would return all to them tenfold. Their fortunes didn't improve. But it turned out that the spot in the ocean the priests had chosen to dump the treasure was shallow and calm, so all their treasure was easily recovered: so much for the people's or the priests' trust in their god.
When physicists wanted to test Einstein's god's behavior they measured light passing by a star. Classical physics said the light would come straight, at c; Einstein said the light would bend around the star, and bending, arrive a little later than classical physics predicted. They measured the light, the evidence wasn't 100% clear, but they decided that it had bent: Einstein had god more clearly than the classicists. Now that test I see as objective. The Scientists, priests of a sort, really were trying to determine the truth. They were letting nature pull the strings, without interfering themselves. At least they were trying to the best they could. Very unusual, for humans.
My favorite illustration comes from fiction: Kipling, not surprisingly (who dealt with gods and tests and evidence marvelously). In The Man Who Would Be King a couple of soldiers of fortune, Peachy and Danny, play on superstition and luck to control the people and the priests of Kafiristan. First they parley themselves into kings, then Danny gets named a god. The priests have been amassing treasure for Alexander, the Macedonia warlord who'd passed that way twenty-four hundred years earlier. The priests had hailed Alexander as a god, and the treasure belonged to him. Convinced that Danny is Alexander returned, the priests actually turn all of the gold and jewels over to him!
Fiction! You see? Can you imagine the priests of the Roman Catholic Church turning the treasures of the Vatican over to a resurrected Jesus?
Priests control the gods by controlling the evidence which is allowed to reach them.
These days universities do the same: funded by the same forces that have always controlled the evidence which reaches anyone.
Jesus' halo ought to be enough; except the priests would take his halo away from him. With mirrors.
When the Chinese of a couple of millennia ago wondered if their emperor had lost his mandate of heaven, they broke some pots to read the shards; but the shards were read by priests: and the priests said, you guessed it, that the emperor was no longer divine. The priests controlled who was or wasn't a god. Some island people once were convinced by priests to sacrifice all their wealth to pray for some boon. The people gathered all their treasure and dumped it in the sea: convinced that their god would return all to them tenfold. Their fortunes didn't improve. But it turned out that the spot in the ocean the priests had chosen to dump the treasure was shallow and calm, so all their treasure was easily recovered: so much for the people's or the priests' trust in their god.
When physicists wanted to test Einstein's god's behavior they measured light passing by a star. Classical physics said the light would come straight, at c; Einstein said the light would bend around the star, and bending, arrive a little later than classical physics predicted. They measured the light, the evidence wasn't 100% clear, but they decided that it had bent: Einstein had god more clearly than the classicists. Now that test I see as objective. The Scientists, priests of a sort, really were trying to determine the truth. They were letting nature pull the strings, without interfering themselves. At least they were trying to the best they could. Very unusual, for humans.
My favorite illustration comes from fiction: Kipling, not surprisingly (who dealt with gods and tests and evidence marvelously). In The Man Who Would Be King a couple of soldiers of fortune, Peachy and Danny, play on superstition and luck to control the people and the priests of Kafiristan. First they parley themselves into kings, then Danny gets named a god. The priests have been amassing treasure for Alexander, the Macedonia warlord who'd passed that way twenty-four hundred years earlier. The priests had hailed Alexander as a god, and the treasure belonged to him. Convinced that Danny is Alexander returned, the priests actually turn all of the gold and jewels over to him!
Fiction! You see? Can you imagine the priests of the Roman Catholic Church turning the treasures of the Vatican over to a resurrected Jesus?
Priests control the gods by controlling the evidence which is allowed to reach them.
These days universities do the same: funded by the same forces that have always controlled the evidence which reaches anyone.
Jesus' halo ought to be enough; except the priests would take his halo away from him. With mirrors.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Either / Or: First Draft
Christians say that God has a name and that his name is Jehovah. Jews say Jahweh (and Christians who've read more than one book say there's no difference: so let's ignore that.) Muslims say God has a name and that his name is Allah. Well, which is it? And why do Arabs have a say in the matter? So it's got to be Jehovah, right? As Hitler used to say, There's aways one of two possibilities. Jehovah.
There couldn't be three possibilities, could there? Could God's name be Harry? Or Barbara? Or Beeblethrux? And it couldn't be that God has no name, could it? How could a magical entity exist without a name?
Never mind, that's all trivial throat clearing: here's my real dilema: I don't care about names. What I care about is consciousness, awareness, sentience. I know that humans are hardly more aware than caterpillars, look at an ad sometime if you doubt it. So I'm used to that; but I can't stand the idea of there being no consciousness: just as I can't stand the idea of there being no God (of whichever name I don't care).
So: either there is a God (whatever his name), and he is conscious, and therefore, at Judgment, the truth can be known (at least by God) (even if he can't share it with caterpillars). Or, there is and will be no Judgment, no awareness, no consciousness, no truth: not among caterpillars — and not among gods either.
Few have ever understood anything I've said: and at universities (or barrooms) where a few have understood varying degrees of what I've said, no quorum developed, no synergy, so I write, justifiably, with irony so heavy you may call it sarcasm.
There couldn't be three possibilities, could there? Could God's name be Harry? Or Barbara? Or Beeblethrux? And it couldn't be that God has no name, could it? How could a magical entity exist without a name?
Never mind, that's all trivial throat clearing: here's my real dilema: I don't care about names. What I care about is consciousness, awareness, sentience. I know that humans are hardly more aware than caterpillars, look at an ad sometime if you doubt it. So I'm used to that; but I can't stand the idea of there being no consciousness: just as I can't stand the idea of there being no God (of whichever name I don't care).
So: either there is a God (whatever his name), and he is conscious, and therefore, at Judgment, the truth can be known (at least by God) (even if he can't share it with caterpillars). Or, there is and will be no Judgment, no awareness, no consciousness, no truth: not among caterpillars — and not among gods either.
Few have ever understood anything I've said: and at universities (or barrooms) where a few have understood varying degrees of what I've said, no quorum developed, no synergy, so I write, justifiably, with irony so heavy you may call it sarcasm.
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