See new stuff below on Kevin O’Leary’s good rant about getting Trudeau out so we can begin to clean up the mess that he has made of Canada. Also Greg Gutfeld on “Get out of your own head” and focus on helping others (i.e. recommends from psychology research on getting over anxiety). And more…
More theological speculation, Wendell Krossa (In service to the meta-narrative issue)
It’s coming on Christmas and I am doing some theological speculation, aware that some share the view of the pissed atheist who said, “Let’s get rid of all this metaphysical bullshit”.
If only, eh. Reaction to religious speculation on the metaphysical is a well-intentioned materialist sentiment that is reacting to religious extremism, as it should. And notable materialists have done us all a service in exposing the lunacy of so much inherited religious belief and practice.
But speculation on “metaphysical” realities has always been critical to the human meaning impulse, and the inseparably related impulse for purpose. You know- the search for TOE, for what actually created it all and why, for what reason/purpose? The meaning/purpose impulse in our consciousness gets to nitty gritty daily life stuff.
The best that materialist minds have come up with to explain the creating and sustaining Source are speculations like “multiverse mythology”. That suits the materialist belief in meaningless randomness as a fundamental explanation for what is and why it exists. Philosophical nihilism in my view. The multiverse myth is widely accepted as true by the public, but entirely unproven, as physicist James Baggot argues. See his “Farewell to Reality: How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth”.
Amazon advertising blurb for Baggot’s book:
“Modern physics is heady stuff. It seems that barely a week goes by without some new astounding science story; some revelation about hidden dimensions, multiple universes, the holographic principle or incredible cosmic coincidences. But is it true? What evidence do we have for super-symmetric squarks’, or superstrings vibrating in an 11-dimensional space-time? How do we know that we live in a multiverse? How can we tell that the universe is a hologram projected from information encoded on its boundary? Doesn’t this sound like a fairy story?
“In Farewell to Reality Jim Baggott asks whether all that we currently know about the universe is based upon science or fantasy. In addition, he wonders whether these high priests of fairy tale physics – such as John Barrow, Paul Davies, David Deutsch, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Gordon Kane and Leonard Susskind – are the emperor’s latest tailors.”
Multiverse is the myth that infinite trillions of universes have been and are being birthed till one randomly falls together in the impossibly fine-tuned balance of “Just Six Numbers” (Martin Rees). Just like the now disproven myth of DNA falling together randomly in the mud puddle long ago.
And what creates the mechanism that constantly births infinite universes? What purpose is driving that impulse to organization? I mean, nothing cannot produce something.
True believers in materialism, acknowledging that something must create what exists, then project god-like properties onto creating entities like “Self-Organizing Principle”. And that evokes a “WTF”. But that materialist-constructed god is satisfying to the materialist mind that wants above all to avoid personhood and purpose and hence, true meaning.
The above speculations- multiverse, Self-Organizing Principle, etc.- hit the mind as just as absurd as the materialist denials of the uniqueness of human consciousness, the most real thing that we know, perhaps the only real thing that we know. Materialist dogma asserts the irrational absurdity that meat produces mind and the wonder of the human self. Absurd? Yes, just like those aliens puzzled over “feeling meat, thinking meat”. Ha.
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
Elite materialists among the consciousness researchers- i.e. Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and the panpsychism theorists- offer a graduated progression of basic consciousness up through to more advanced forms of consciousness till we reach the complexity of the synapsing human brain and then “Poof”- human consciousness is produced. Produced by the material brain. The poof theory. Mind made from meat. The wonder that is the human self ‘poofing’ into existence out of complex interactions in meat (i.e. neuronal synapse, etc.).
Then the most stunning of all miraculous emergences- human love springing forth from the human spirit that incarnated in all humanity. This mother of all wonders has been the central driving force behind humanity changing everything gradually for the better. Love explains/answers the meaning and purpose impulses better than anything else.
But love, by the definitions of the materialist cult, is reduced to nothing more than something animal- i.e. “species altruism”. Just another contemporary affirmation of anti-humanism. Devaluing the human. Removing wonder from reality, life, and humanity.
What we are as “human” is uniquely new and divine. Nobel laureate John Eccles got this right in stating, “We are led to conclude the human self is a supernatural divine creation”. A divine creation that interacts with the material brain and body.
The emergence of modern humanity, incarnated with uniquely human consciousness and a human spirit that is essentially love, is taking us all on a great liberation crusade, a great exodus out of animal existence and reality and into a more truly human future.
The great battle of life and history is the struggle of love to conquer the inherited animal, the real monster/enemy in the real battle of life that is fought inside each of us.
Notes:
Time to move beyond the dehumanization and devaluation of humanity as mainly animal- the “98% similarity to apes” mantra. That 2% points to a universe of stunning difference, and challenges ideas that genes in DNA define all that is human. John Eccles explains the profound difference between the animal and the human. We are not just another species of animal. See “The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind”, “The Human Mystery”, among other books by Eccles.
Other good sources: See Harold Morowitz’s “The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex”.
Amazon blurb:
“When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts–indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts and represents something utterly new and different–we call that phenomenon emergence…. And as he offers these insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, and life itself, Morowitz also seeks out the nature of God in the emergent universe, the God posited by Spinoza, Bruno, and Einstein, a God Morowitz argues we can know through a study of the laws of nature.”
Further related reads offering helpful speculation on the metaphysical element in meaning- Stephen Meyer’s “Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe”. A strong quibble with Meyer’s dragging his conclusions in the direction of the Christian God. He does better when he leaves things at “Intelligence… Mind…etc.”.
Also some thought-provoking suggestions in Roy Varghese’s “The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God”
In “The Wonder of the World” Varghese covers the fundamental questions of existence. He presents a “journey through the Wonder of the World: space, time and motion; the quantum micro-verse; Big Bang and other cosmologies; the saga of life on planet Earth and the appearance of rational self-consciousness.”
See also materialist Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”. An insider takes shots at his own belief system:
“In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable….. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology… An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one…. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.”
Now, moving along…
Continuing my “bit of theology” for Christ-mas. Better if it had been some version of “Historical Jesus-mas”. Kinda clumsy, eh. But then it would have been a more historically accurate celebration season, you know, the message thing, Wendell Krossa
Jesus’ insight on God as an unconditional reality went directly to the core of human narratives as a historically unprecedented message of liberation. His message went to the very core of being human, to the core of our narratives that explain reality to us, to the why and purpose of our existence, to the nature of the creating and sustaining Source that is at the root of all, to the real TOE. I take that insight of his, viewing the messenger- Historical Jesus- not as a religious person but as a secularish “wisdom sage” who offered advice on how to live as fully human, based on his stunning new theology of a profoundly nonreligious deity that was the ultimate validating ideal for human life and behavior.
His central insight thoroughly overturned the cohering center of all previous human narratives- deity. He spoke specifically to the essential nature of deity or Ultimate Reality.
Ultimate Reality? I prefer to avoid using the term “God” as that immediately orients most people’s minds to religious definitions, categories, features. To the contrary, unconditional, as the fundamental nature of God, best explains God as an entirely nonreligious reality. This is critical to grasp because all religion is essentially about religious conditions. That has always has been the essential nature of religion from the beginning. No religion has ever presented the unconditional nature of God to humanity. A conditional social institution cannot do other than affirm conditional reality.
The Jesus insight on deity changes everything. It went to the depths of human consciousness, to the subconscious, to the archetypes of the subconscious that shape our thinking, our emotions, our motivations, and our responses/behaviors. His stunning new theology was intended to transform completely the human understanding of the very core of reality and life. And that transformed core, if embraced as Jesus presented it, would have then spread its influence out to everywhere else, to transform everything else, and notably to alleviate primal human fears from the long history of enslaving threat theology.
Historical Jesus declared that there was no retaliatory deity behind the natural world punishing us for our sins. The myth of retaliatory, punitive deity exercising punitive justice through the natural world, has been the greatest psychopathology to ever burden minds and spirits. It added an unnecessary psychic burden of fear, guilt, shame, despair, depression and more to already unbearable human physical suffering.
And with threatening deity firmly lodged at the core of narratives and embedded in human subconscious, then followed the wasteful history of conditional salvation religions.
This is why I go more and more after root contributing factors to the varied issues/problems we face in life. I am getting older and I want to focus my remaining time and energy more on the root contributing or causal factors to human problems and suffering. Hence, my inspiration from the military guy who advised us, for example, that we can physically fight and eliminate the violence of terrorism crusades, but such eruptions will only continue until we go after the ideas that fuel them and make fundamental changes there. And there is no more basic idea than that which has long been the cohering central idea of human narratives- i.e. deity.
Example: Richard Landes, and his colleagues, with detailed historical evidence, have shown how apocalyptic millennial ideas can carry societies into mass-death crusades as in Marxism and Nazism. If we ignore the driving factor of apocalyptic millennial myths behind such crusades, then we have learned nothing from history, argues Landes.
Apocalyptic millennial ideas continue to dominate the world religions and now also shape our so-called secular/ideological systems of belief such as environmental alarmism/climate alarmism.
My point here, probing a bit further- Ask yourself, what constitutes the cohering center of the apocalyptic millennialism complex of themes? The cohering center is the nature of the deity that validates the rest.
Now some honing of my point… liberation from that in narratives which generates needless fear- i.e. the ideas, beliefs that generate unnecessary excessive fear, psychically harmful fear, personality deforming fear, in addition to the many natural fears of life that arise from natural disasters, disease, accidents, and predatory cruelty.
My project is concerned with psycho-pathological fear, fear generated by primitive ideas like apocalyptic that exaggerate normal problems in life (natural world threats) out to apocalyptic-scale, thereby inciting the survival impulse of populations and rendering them susceptible to the irrational salvation schemes of apocalyptic prophets that destroy life/societies to “save the world”. Salvation schemes that demand sacrifice as in de-growth or de-development that ruin societies, and salvation that demands the purging of some purported threat as in the demonization of CO2, the food of all life, along with the purging of people enjoying the good life in modern civilization (population bomb, depopulation crusades). Such insanity erupting in repeated “Madness of crowds” episodes.
Apocalyptic deforms narratives and consciousness. It distorts human understanding of the true state of life and is too often about base manipulation and control of people to their destruction. Mental pathologies like apocalyptic descend from the earliest shaman who initiated religious fear-mongering with tales of angry deities who demanded appeasement/placation through violent bloody animal and human sacrifice, backed by threats of divine punishment through natural world events.
Nothing was more threatening than the deity behind “Destruction of Mankind” or “Return to Chaos” myths exemplified in early Egyptian and Sumerian/Zoroastrian mythologies that set the pattern for all following religious traditions and their conditional salvation schemes.
Add here that the myth of apocalyptic deforms the hero’s quest by affirming to people that they are heroes fighting some great evil, some great monster/enemy that threatens their world and must be exterminated in order for them to righteously and justly save their threatened world. And the deformity from such pathological mythology is evident in the damaging outcomes of their hero’s quest that destroy life. Sowell’s “test of facts” or outcomes. The great examples of recent history? Marxism, Nazism, and now environmental alarmism.
The deformity of the hero’s quest, evident in destructive outcomes, exposes the virtue-signaling of the self-identified “heroes”. Destructive outcomes expose such compassion as “narcissistic compassion” that is no true compassion for oppressed people. It is something more psychopathic in nature.
Better- Embrace a hero’s quest that is constrained by Classic Liberal principles, systems of common law, and truly representative institutions that produce outcomes that protect the freedoms and rights of all equally. Those outcomes better affirm that you are on an authentic hero’s quest.
Continuing… Panic-mongering has nothing to do with mature humanity.
It has to be classed with all forms of human “evil”- People inciting irrational fear, as in the climate alarmism that continues to dominate public narratives and consciousness today. There is nothing more callously reckless in life, and harmful to people, than to alarm them in order to manipulate and control them. Apocalyptic prophets of today resort to the violent and destructive myth of apocalyptic to terrorize and traumatize populations, thereby inciting people/s survival impulse and then pushing irrational salvation schemes that ruin people’s societies and lives, destroying life to “save the world”.
There is something psychopathic about people pushing apocalyptic crusades and unaware of, or carelessly and callously in denial about, the harm that they generate through apocalyptic-scale panic-mongering. Denying harm that is done to others from programs and policies that you support and enact is dangerously psychopathic in nature. Apocalyptic-scale panic-mongering is especially egregious in the face of so much overwhelming evidence to the contrary that life has been improving across long-term history.
Thankfully, many people no longer claim to hold “climate crisis” alarmism as a high priority concern. It registers low in public surveys of what concerns people. But surveys also show that many people still support salvation schemes like decarbonization which shows that perhaps people are just tired of the alarmists crying wolf, but then they still believe the overall alarmist narrative and support the proffered salvation scheme of decarbonization. That will not end well.
We can only hope that more people will eventually become truly ‘woke’ in regard to climate change.
Notes: Wendell Krossa
Why my “obsession” with theology? Because it is the mother of all “core” issues. And because I see the horrific outcomes of mass-death crusades that are driven by bad religious ideas, notably the complex of myths termed the “apocalyptic millennial” complex, a complex built around the bad theology of retaliatory, violent, destroying deity.
This apocalyptic millennial complex is better understood when fleshed out as the larger complex of primitive myths that includes-
(1) The baseline myth of a lost original paradise- i.e. a better past that corrupt, evil humans have ruined. That undergirds the sense of the loss of something good and, hence, now unbalanced justice demands that that the lost good must be restored to rebalance justice in the cosmos and life.
Consequent to the myth of a better past that has been ruined, primitive mythology pivoted to (2) blame people, to blame humanity as the evil enemy that must be punished and even exterminated in order to restore the lost paradise and save life. In contemporary terms- today the evil enemy of nature is greedy, consuming humans in industrial civilization.
Then to further re-enforce the narrative that evil humans had ruined divine nature (i.e. Earth as goddess), the ancients added the ongoing threat that (3) life was declining toward apocalyptic ending. And to even further re-enforce alarm, apocalyptic prophets repeatedly set “always imminent” dates to raise hysteria levels and validate the use of desperate measures to “save” the world that was threatened by the looming apocalypse.
But ah, also introduce hope into the mix. Create salvation schemes where elites tell the ignorant and unenlightened commoners what they must do to be saved from imminent destruction and death- i.e. (4) demand some sacrifice/payment. Today’s sacrifice- i.e. de-growth, de-development, a return to primitivism (i.e. return to the more pure and strong life of “noble savage” existence as hunter-gathers with no ecological footprint). Add to this sacrifice/payment element the redistribution projects pushed in the endless annual COPs.
Couch all this madness in a deformed version of the hero’s quest where those identifying as true heroes will engage a tribal battle to conquer and (5) violently purge a purported monster/enemy identified as fellow humans.
And when the enemy is purged/exterminated, then (6) salvation is attained in a renewed communal paradise.
Most critical to understand in this set of primitive themes is- What is behind this complex? What is the cohering center of this complex that has wreaked so much destruction across history? What validates the rest of the primitive and distorting ideas in the complex? The cohering center is none other than the “wrathful” God royally pissed at humans for ruining his original perfect paradise. Hence, the subsequent threats of divine retaliation for human imperfection by violently destroying the entire world in an apocalypse. The mother of all hissy fits. Followed by divine demands for sacrifice/payment/suffering as required conditions to achieve redemption.
The cohering center of this complex of myths is the violent, destroying God who threatens people in this life through natural disasters, disease, accidents, and predatory cruelty, and continues to threaten people with after-life harm that adds sting to death. That “monster God” is the core issue to deal with. And that pathological version of deity has dominated mythologies and religions across history and has now transitioned into secular/ideological systems of belief to also dominate those. I.e. “Vengeful Gaia, punitive Universe, angry Planet/Mother Earth, payback karma”, etc.
Religious reformism or core issue, Wendell Krossa
I don’t have much time left to “waste” on what I view as more peripheral issues- i.e. the religious reformism that ignores the obvious core issue of monster deity that holds belief systems together and validates the full complex of bad religious themes. Many religious people ignore the God factor for whatever reasons, perhaps fearful of being smeared as “heretical” and consequently being ostracized, banned, excluded from the ingroup of some religious cult. I went through being framed as heretical, with consequent exclusion from a religious group. However, I actually welcomed that as liberating because I was on my way out of religion anyway. An extra kick in the ass to get moving on.
And to alleviate the concerns of true religious believers- Yes, there is an Ultimate Reality, a great metaphysical Source of all, a Sustainer of all reality, and that deity has the defining feature of personhood. It is not just “force, energy, or quantum fields”. But it is most definitely not the monster God of historical religions and mythologies, the highly conditional deity that has always validated conditional religions.
That threatening, fear-inciting, and conditional nature of all religion (i.e. demanded sacrifice, atonement, retributive justice, violent punishment, etc.) is what Historical Jesus rejected entirely, overturned, and replaced with his stunning new theology of an unconditionally loving God. A new core reality that was entirely opposite to every primitive theology of preceding history, including those of his era.
And then Paul, to the great ongoing shame of “Christ-ianity”, buried the new unconditional theology of Jesus entirely in his retreat back to highly conditional primitivism in his Christ myth.
Historical Jesus understood what was at stake in “saving” humanity, or stated better- “liberating” humanity from what really had ailed people across the millennia, i.e. the mind- and personality-deforming curse of threat theology, the fundamental pathology in the millennia-long human perception of deity. Threat theology added further psychic suffering to already unbearable physical suffering. Divine threat had long darkened and enslaved human minds spirits with unnecessary fear and that exhibited in all sorts of mental/emotional maladies, in psychosomatic things like “demon possession”.
That mental/emotional pathology was most likely the response to exacerbated and unnecessary fear generated from primitive mythology as well as by anxiety, depression, despair, and nihilism over varied other things in the person’s life. I have witnessed what was termed “demon possession” among tribal people in Mindanao, what they claimed was caused by evil spirits but could be diagnosed due to varied stresses in the “possessed” person’s life. Anthropological studies conclude the same thing.
Many sicknesses of Jesus’ day were expressions of desperation by scared people, from theologically-incited fears. Ancient demon possession represented psychopathology of the most extreme kind. Note also that apocalyptic hysteria was rampant in the time of Jesus.
Again, see the excellent detail on how “Cruel God” theology deforms human personality in Zenon Lotufo’s “Cruel God, Kind God”.
And that is my bit of theology for “Jesus-mas” coming up in December.
I wind this up referring once more to Kristian Niemietz’s ch.10 in “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies”. He points to a critical issue to understanding the root of contemporary psychopathological problems such as the wide embrace of destructive narratives like socialism and climate crisis alarmism. He states that emotional satisfaction not rational logic or evidence determines our choice in beliefs. Emotional satisfaction is our intuitive response to subconscious impulses and archetypes, things that we don’t consciously question.
We embrace certain ideas, themes, belief systems because they just feel right, true, and good. This is because they have long been deeply embedded in human subconscious thereby creating the “collective unconscious” that Jung refers to, the collective conscious of humanity that we see expressed repeatedly and endlessly in the great public meta-narratives of religion and in the secular ideologies of the modern era that have adopted the same core themes of the religious precedents.
Hence, many of us intuitively respond to the same old themes and narratives from across history just as Joseph Campbell noted in stating that people have believed the same primitive myths all across history and across all the cultures of the world.
This helps to understand why people today hear some apocalyptic millennial narrative and just intuitively, subconsciously affirm it because it presents the same basic archetypes as ever before that resonate with populations. That happened with Marxism and Nazism and is now happening with environmental alarmism, and also with Woke Progressivism as a version of neo-collectivism very much like all past versions of socialism.
Many respond subconsciously to such crusades as righteous battles for the oppressed and subsequently are not able to admit to the evidence of destructive outcomes. The emotional affirmation of embracing a movement that is outwardly presented as right, true, and just overwhelms rationality and evidence. People just affirm the crusade because the core themes resonate with deeply embedded archetypes in their subconscious.
“Emotional satisfaction”- the comforting and self-validating belief that we are part of something true, right, and good. That we are the righteous heroes fighting a just war against evil enemies. That we are on God’s side, the side of good.
Added note:
With ongoing aging, I have little to no time for peripheral tinkering, and less toleration for what is not core and fundamental to any given issue.
I affirm all religious reformism if it moves a tradition toward what is today considered authentically humane thinking and behavior. Unfortunately, much reformism often just plays around edges and ignores the root of the problem with religion- the conditional God that demands endless religious conditions. Even worse, much religious reformism ignores the great evil of threat theology that has undergirded the corrupt sacrifice industry across history, with endless demands to meet salvation conditions.
Think of the wasted time, resources, and energy of billions of people across history trying to fulfil demands for sacrifice and other religious conditions.
Now a memory aid summary for readers on the run. Here is a list of some of the more notable irreconcilable contradictions between Historical Jesus and Paul, the contrasting main themes in their differing messages:
(1) Unconditional love versus highly conditional atonement religion.
(2) Nonretaliatory versus supreme divine retaliation in apocalypse and hell myths.
(3) Restorative justice (no eye for eye) versus punitive, destroying justice.
(4) Nonviolent resolution of problems versus violent destruction in apocalypse and hell, and violent pacification of deity by blood sacrifice for atonement.
(5) Nontribal inclusion of all humanity versus highly tribal favoring of true believers and exclusion of unbelievers.
(6) Nondomination in relationships versus ultimate eternal domination by Lord Christ with his rod of iron totalitarianism.
(7) Non-dualism versus eternal dualism (i.e. heaven/hell).
And so on…
These things are so profoundly contradictory and opposite that you cannot mix and merge them in a belief system without creating profound cognitive dissonance in otherwise normal intelligent people, dissonance that is absolute lunacy, insanity. No wonder such theologies deform human personality.
Note to true believers- Take Historical Jesus seriously. But to do so, first understand who the man was and what he actually taught as per the “Q Wisdom Sayings” research. And get a grip on the general “Search for Historical Jesus” material, now in the third phase known as the “Jesus Seminar”. Some good research there. Getting into that will help anyone better understand the issues between Paul and Jesus.
Posts to a discussion group (things we converse about): Wendell Krossa
“This will fire up any Canadian…
“The guy who does “policy, not persons” better than anyone, businessman Kevin O’Leary, talks Justin Trudeau “the mouse that has to be squashed by the broom” as in get rid of this most incompetent prime minister who has destroyed Canada.
“O’Leary is usually Mr. Cool and Calm. And he knows business and investment like few do. Listen from around the 12-minute mark as he details how Trudeau has ruined Canada and begs for people to get rid of him, as it will take decades to undo the damage that he has caused to Canada over the past 9 years.
“This guy knows commerce, economies, business. Listen to his heated rant on “the damage, the abuse, the mismanagement, the incompetency…” of Trudeau. Watch him lose his cool and blow his top at the mess that Trudeau has made of Canada. As he shouts, “I am so pissed at what he has done to ruin this country”. He repeats multiple times, “I am so pissed”.
“He urges Trudeau to “just go, get out of the way, and leave us alone” so we can begin to clean up the mess that you have made of this country.
“Before the 12-min mark he details how foreign leaders are terrified of Trump and how good that is. Putin, Xi, the Iranian leaders….”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bQjVrnFOJU
AI consciousness (artificial intelligence) becoming human? Wendell Krossa
No. “Human-like” maybe, but not human. It is machine-generated and human-created, and the belief that it will become human derives from the materialist assumption and absurdity that human consciousness is created by meat, by material. It isn’t. Human consciousness is profoundly mysterious and Nobel laureate John Eccles got it right in stating that the conscious human self was a “supernatural spiritual creation”. You cannot produce that from machines, as in computers.
Here the lady, that Lex Fridman interviews, affirms that if biology can produce consciousness, then machines probably can also. She refers to “panpsychism” as also affirming this view of materially-produced consciousness but then goes on to dance around the issue a bit more cautiously, wanting some mixed conclusion that is open to varied alternatives- i.e. maybe consciousness is unique, maybe there is something of the machine-produced in the mix, and so on…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfQ7El0eSFg
You will repeatedly hear this drum banged on this site– i.e. the difference between Historical Jesus and Paul’s Christ myth, Wendell Krossa
Because the irreconcilable contrast between the two messages, between the core themes of their messages, illustrates the fundamental problem with human narratives across history and the influence of such narratives on our lives- i.e. the “behavior based on validating belief” relationship.
Honing or getting more pointed- We have amassed historical evidence now on how bad ideas in our narratives incite and drive bad outcomes, as contrasted with how good ideals in our narratives inspire good outcomes. I am speaking to the influence of validating ideas on human thinking, emotions, motivations, and responses/behavior.
These two- Jesus and Paul- represent two opposing sets of fundamental narrative themes that have long framed human narratives, both religious and secular/ideological. The contrasts between good and the bad, if you will.
I posted this just above to highlight the differences between the basic themes of the narratives of Jesus and Paul…
(1) Unconditional love (i.e. no sacrifice demanded in Jesus original message in the “Q Wisdom Sayings” gospel). Versus the highly conditional atonement religion of Paul (i.e. the supreme condition of the sacrifice of a godman).
(2) Nonretaliatory in Jesus (no more eye for eye but love enemy because God does). Versus supreme divine retaliation in apocalypse and hell myths (Paul’s theology- “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord”, and Lord Jesus returning in fire to destroy all who don’t believe Paul’s Christ myth).
(3) Restorative justice (again- no eye for eye) versus punitive, destroying justice.
(4) Nonviolent resolution of problems versus the violent destruction of apocalypse and hell, and the violent pacification of deity by blood sacrifice for atonement.
(5) Nontribal inclusion of all humanity (“sun and rain given freely to both bad and good people”) versus the highly tribal favoring of true believers and exclusion of unbelievers as per Paul’s Christ.
(6) Nondomination in relationships (“If you want to be great then serve others”) versus ultimate eternal domination by Lord Christ with his rod of iron totalitarianism (“every knee shall bow”).
(7) Non-dualism (God as the Oneness of Ultimate Reality that is love) versus eternal dualism (i.e. the cosmic dualism of God and Satan, heaven/hell).
And so on…
The differing themes in the messages of Jesus and Paul illustrate the motivating ideas behind the battle for good against evil, the war that takes place primarily inside us. The battle of the human spirit against the inherited animal impulses to tribalism, domination, and punitive destruction of differing others.
The Jesus themes affirm and inspire the best of the human spirit. Paul’s main themes incite the worst of our animal impulses to tribalism, domination, and punitive destruction. And yes, these themes are mixed to serious cognitive dissonance in the Christ myth of the New Testament, with the better themes of Jesus distorted by Paul’s darker themes, even buried. The issue of contradiction in the merger and mixing of themes needs to be sorted out.
On the exercise of daily love, Wendell Krossa
“There is no situation in life” where you can treat another human without love (Leo Tolstoy). Love is the very essence of our being human. It is our highest ideal, what defines us as human. It is the essential nature and character of the human spirit and human consciousness.
When we violate love in daily life, we get the whispers of conscience cautioning us that we are off track. When we exercise/express love then we get subtle affirmations that we are being our true selves, that we are acting out our true purpose in life. And that feels good. That is divine affirmation- the voice of God whispering “Well done”.
And this from two of the best probers of “behind the scenes dynamics” in this discussion of how mainstream media destroyed itself, and hence the continuing abandonment by its audience…
“Transcript: America This Week: The Insanity Era Dies. What’s Next: The mainstream press is suffering calamitous losses after last week. What will replace it? Plus Trump’s picks and Ambrose Bierce’s ‘A Horseman in the Sky’”, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, Nov. 16, 2024
“…in San Francisco, the fury is overwhelming”
https://www.racket.news/p/transcript-america-this-week-november-144
Post to discussion group on the Taibbi/Kirn commentary:
“This is excellent on what went wrong in mainstream media that has now resulted in the decline toward the dying spasms of that media as audience turn away ‘en masse’. They also comment on the fury in blue cities that media ignored (yes, angry, real angry Democrats) that turned many red (i.e. they voted Republican). Much good insight here…
“Why do you think those Democratic mayors in long-standing liberal cities (i.e. San Franscisco, Oakland), and Das, got ousted in this election? These guys explain things here…Listen to Kirn explain the horror show of just trying to buy something in a drug store in some blue cities, some over the counter thing like aspirin, toothpaste, or whatever. Its all locked up and requires an onerous process to get the items. The outcome of lax-on-crime policies in Democratic-run cities.”
“And let me take off on a side bar here from Taibbi and Kirn’s discussion of media lying and hysteria that resulted in their being discredited and now dying… What we get from this discussion is the insanity of media lying, the hysterical exaggeration of the evil of political opponents, and of course most illustrative of this has been the hysteria over climate alarmism.
“Climate change is not the fraud. The fraud element is the alarmism that exaggerates the mild warming that we have had, out to apocalyptic-scale lunacy in order to terrorize survival-incited populations to then buy into decarbonization, the attack on industrial society that is part of a larger project to de-growth, de-development, and the push to take humanity into another destructive spasm of collectivism that has ruined billions of lives over the past century. Just like the 24 Socialist experiments that all failed miserably. Note Venezuela as the latest example of taking a rich country and ruining it entirely.”
“Get out of your own head” Greg Gutfeld
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYAS_UJ8p5o
Greg Gutfeld talks about so many in media being miserable post-election. He says,
“The way to get out of it (the self-inflicted misery and depression) is to get out of your own head and embrace the world around you… turn anxiety into curiosity… instead of worrying about how tomorrow affects you, become curious about how you can affect tomorrow. Research shows that people who dwell on themselves experience more depression but people who turn outward replace that anguish with curiosity.”
He goes on to relate this to identity politics that focuses on “me”, what hurts my feelings, too much self-obsession…
My added points: In the post-election commiserating on media that Gutfeld refers to, we see too much of the contemporary Woke mindset of “you are a victim”. Wokeism places everything within the simplistic tribal dualism of “victim/victimizers, oppressed/oppressors”, and reduces many situations in life to such simple-minded tribalism. This is part of resurging collectivism that generations of college kids have been indoctrinated with. Part of the new “Woke racism” that has infected all areas of society and is ruining our liberal democracies.
Again, Classic liberalism is the best solution here- To get outside of our own heads and focus on the rights and freedoms of all, and on our responsibility to make a unique contribution to such society, to thereby improving life for all.
Another on “denying self to serve others”: We exist to love, love as oriented to serving, helping others. The nature of authentic love to be other-focused, not just self-focused.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, physician to the Queen decades ago, talked about the fact that focusing on our problems and feelings only makes them worse. A more helpful response is to focus on others and helping them. Get involved in helping them with their problems.
Jordan Peterson said the same in stating that the young generation has been taught to focus on themselves, on how they feel, and that has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression, etc. The answer, he says, is to focus on serving others, on making a sacrifice to help others. That is what we are created to do. That is how, in part, we conquer our anxiety and depression, said Peterson.