The Pragmatic Christian

Parallels between the seven days of creation and Easter week

2005-12-29T10:41:00.000-08:00

There are some interesting although rough metaphorical parallels between the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 and Easter week, which I represent symbolically here with a Celtic cross, the circular design representing the world. Seven-- for the seven days- is a spiritual number.

DAY OF CREATED IN EASTER WEEK
WEEK GENESIS

Sunday Light (bright) TRIUMPHAL entry to Jerusalem

Monday Water CLEANSING the temple

Tuesday Earth and plants Paying taxes, giving tithes, predicting the future
(earth means practical,
plants mean growth)

Wednesday STARS (bright) Jesus' ANOINTING and
and PLANETS (dim) Judas' DESERTION

Thursday Wild beasts and fish Last Supper, Judas' betrayal, Jesus' arrest
(the flesh)

Friday Man Jesus' trials and crucifixion
(salvation for)

Saturday Rest Jesus dead in tomb

Descriptions of the easter week days are from "The Bible for Dummies", which is the best book I've seen so far on the Bible.

The new Biology

2005-12-29T10:40:00.000-08:00

Aristotle taught that man's soul -- the principle of life- is his shape. The new cell biology is finding that the skin of the cell (NOT the DNA!) is also what gives it life. So that a cell is controlled, not like some robot with a tiny brain of DNA inside, but by the environment ! Thus if you put a stem cell in the environment of muscle tissue, it grows muscle,. Put it in another organ, and it grow that organ. http://www.brucelipton.com/newbiology.php

The new biology

@ 2001-2005 Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D.

Recent advances in cellular science are heralding an important evolutionary turning point. For almost fifty years we have held the illusion that our health and fate were preprogrammed in our genes, a concept referred to as genetic determinacy. Though mass consciousness is currently imbued with the belief that the character of one�s life is genetically predetermined, a radically new understanding is unfolding at the leading edge of science.

Cellular biologists now recognize that the environment (external universe and internal-physiology), and more importantly, our perception of the environment, directly controls the activity of our genes. The lecture will broadly review the molecular mechanisms by which environmental awareness interfaces genetic regulation and guides organismal evolution.

The quantum physics behind these mechanisms provide insight into the communication channels that link the mind-body duality. An awareness of how vibrational signatures and resonance impact molecular communication constitutes a master key that unlocks a mechanism by which our thoughts, attitudes and beliefs create the conditions of our body and the external world. This knowledge can be employed to actively redefine our physical and emotional well-being.

=====================================

Dispelling the Myth of Genes:

If the brain is removed from any organism, the immediate and necessary consequence of that action is� death of the organism. Removing the cell�s nucleus, referred to as enucleation, would be tantamount to removing the cell�s brain. Though enucleation should result in the immediate death of the cell, enucleated cells may continue to survive and exhibit a "regulated" control of their biological processes. In fact, cells can live for two or more months without a nucleus. Clearly, the assumption that genes "control" cell behavior is wrong!

.......

The cell membrane, once thought to be like a permeable Saran Wrap that holds the cytoplasm together, actually provides for the bacterium�s digestive, respiratory, excretory and integumentary (skin) systems. It also serves as the cell�s "brain."

=====================================

Dr. Lipton (who has impressive credentials) describes this in his book,

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles

END

Sin and personality type

2005-12-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

Whether or not we make it to heaven may depend on if we can overcome our addictions to particular sins. By way of developing a theory of what we can focus on, note that personality types are thought to have characteristic sins, given below. They also have characteristic virtues, which would be the antidotes, and might indicate an appropriate path for good works.

Enneagram Characteristic
Type# Sin/Virtue**

1. Perfectionist Anger /Serenity
2. Helper Pride/Humility
3. Performer Deceit/Truthfulness
4. Artist Envy/Equanimity
5. Sage Greed/Non-Attachment
6. Loyalist Fear/Courage
7. Connoisseur Gluttony/Sobriety
8. Boss Lust/Innocence
9. Mediator Sloth/Action

# MBTI correspondences from testing given by Richards/Flautt/Baron (1997) and others on http://intraspec.ca/ennea0.php Probably best to take an enneagram personality test such as at http://www.9types.com/ or http://similarminds.com/personality_tests.html if you are uncertain of enneagram type.

** http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/history.asp

A possible solution to the problem of predestination

2005-12-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

In predestination, a seeming contradiction occurs because God both determines whether we are saved or not, while at the same time He has given us free will, so that presumably the choice is ours.

In my view, the contradiction is only apparent and occurs because we have forgotten that God has made us ( if you want to look at it scientifically, He chose the parental genes). At any rate, this includes the strength of our will, so while the will is free, according to our design, the will may or may not resist sin.

On God's genetically predisposing us to salvation or not

Romans 9:21 (KJV) "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? "

Karl Barth on election and predestination

Karl Barth followed the Gospel teachings that Christ died for all,
so that all men, women and children are elected for salvation. But not all are predestined to be saved, for man has to accept that election, as stated on http://cspar181.uah.edu/RbS/JOB/barth.html ,
"It therefore follows that for Barth predestination is 'the non-rejection of man.' "

On Barth's dialectic

2005-12-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

This is an attempt to understand Karl Barth's dialectic with the use of a Venn diagram, so I invite criticism and suggestions. It may also be useful in seeing how well our own beliefs match with the Word. The Venn diagram is on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology .

With regard to Barth, Barth takes the the Bible or the Word as a priori (these are given by the circle labelled "truths" in the diagram. ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology if it does not appear here. ) Beliefs is our Christian believe (presumably all or nearly all) of what the Bible tells us) if we have read it in faith so that the Holy Spirit helps with the interpretation. In that diagram knowledge (particular beliefs we obtain from a particular passage) is a part (that which is known) of the overlap of these.

I am not sure what definition of truth (for a list of philsophical definitions (NOT NECESSARILY PERTINENT HERE) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth . On the one hand, it would seem to be that of Kierkegaard, existential and very personal. On the other hand, since Barth finally described his writings as "sermons", it would seem closer to the consensus (of believers) definition of truth, which would seem to be close to Peirce's definition, as 'the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate' ) ("all" here meaning all believers). James, another pragmatist, allowed for emotional influences as well, -- if love and trust, that would point to a faith definition of belief. [For the above, see http://www.philosophyprofessor.com/philosophies/pragmatic-theory-of-truth.php .]

In my own (pragmatic) way of interpreting this, particular truths are those which gives results in accordance with what one observes inwardly due to the Spirit working on us. That is, both the meaning and the truth of any idea (in this instance in the Bible) is a function of its practical outcome. And the meaning of an idea is to be found in its "conceivable sensible effects" and that humans generate belief through their "habits of action." The particular " habit of action would be the intention of faith in God, in the the words of the Bible, etc. The "sensible effects" would be Paul's list of the fruits of the Spirit in Romans. And on the other hand, we have the wages of sin is death. In fact, Peirce defined the meaning of a concept or proposition as that form which is most directly applicable to self-control in any situation and to any purpose. For more on these pragmatic concepts, see ( http://radicalacademy.com/amphilosophy7.htm ).

Rahner's transcendental theology

2005-12-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

Introduction

If man has free will, then he transcends nature, which is deterministic, as pointed out by Kant in his Anthropology[1].

This transcendence is called by various names in various disciplines: For example, in Rayner's Inclusionality [2], it refers to the world, represented spacially outside but also embedded or included in us all, joining all of us together and with nature. In Rahner's anthropological theology [3] it refers to God being able to reach us with His Word and permitting us to know God.

In both of these philosophies, what is outside of us is also inside of us. For example, Jesus said "I am in you and You are in me." Again, the basis can be found in Kant, who found that the mental/physical aspects of man was only an apparent dualism on the earthly plane, because these were aspects of a larger whole on a higher plane, which we might call, along with Rahner,Tillich and Spinoza, God, the ground of all being.

Kant's thought is thus key to understanding that these philosophies, which appear on the surface to be widely different, are in fact quite similar.

In classical analytic philosophy, such as that of Aristotle, you have the a priori, (that which is before, and is given or assumed, which is an abstract general), and the a posteriori, that which comes after, the particular, the concrete, the data. Knowledge is obtained by confirming the former with the concrete data of the later. The concrete data might be a concrete perception, an image. The a priori its abstract meaning or name.

Kant's revolutionary idea was to give a method for obtaining knowledge of the a priori from the a posteriori, something never done before other than by empirical observation, and show their inverse dissimilarity. In this he provided a method to obtain the a priori from the mind itself, through its judgements. There are few achievements in western philosophy as enormous as this.

This can be referred to as the pragmatic approach to synthesis-- what the mind DOES- This turn to the mind of man as a necessary ingredient in metaphysics was crucial to Heidegger's -- and thus Rahner's -- enormous successes.

An important point I had overlooked with regard to free will, and the scholastics, from what you say, seem to have overlooked as well, was Paul's observation In Romans-- and it is also found in Augustine -- that man by himself can will only evil. And as Luther found from his reading of Romans, it is only through God's grace that man can will (and do) anything good.

The dualism of mind and space is sometimes referred to as the Double Aspect theory, which you can Google on. Kant probably spelled it out most precisely, but I can't give you a reference, other than the page cited below, I am also studying it.

Kant's Transcendental Deduction

In my view, the key to understanding what the mind is is to study Kant's transcendental deduction, which is the central section of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is a deduction of the properties of mind (what it is) from its behavior (what it does). The basic idea is that the mind is so constructed that we can make sense of objects. By examing the possible types of objects we can perceive, Kant arrives at a set of categories necessary to do the job. Necessary is the key word.

An interesting observation that emerges from such an approach is the behavioral description of the self or observer. It does not change in time. This says to me that it is beyond the realm of everday existence. The taoists speak of two realms of existence which emerge from, and later return to, the T'ai Chi or timeless universal spirit-energy: the timeless symmetical space-ordered world of Early Heaven of Fu Xi, and that of Later Heaven of King Wen, which is the everyday world of time and space.

These roughly correspond repsectively to Kant's a priori and a posteriori worlds. What Kant did was to place mind between these two worlds to deduce the categories of Fu Xi or the a priori (sounds like Early Heaven, doesn't it !) from the a posteriori (posteriori is like Later-> later heaven).

You could also use Peirce's categories for Kant's deduction if you flip the inside/out and the time order:

Thirdness == a priori or Law (possibly Sheldrake's morphisms)

Secondness == the mind or thinking, quantity

Firstness == a posteriori or quality

While the deduction can be notoriously difficult to understand because of the technical terms involved, and some have spent entire careers studying it, there are several accounts on the web, such as that found at

http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/kant/kant032.htm if you Google on

transcendental deduction

Peirce's categories align to it as well.

Kant's theory of space and time

Kant's theory of space and time shows that his concept of space,

"........that space and time do not really exist outside of us but are "forms of intuition," i.e. conditions of perception, imposed by our own minds"

is essentially that of inclusionality. The phase "do not really exist outside of us" is true, for the space we observe is not space itself, but what is IN space.

For more details, see below.

- Roger Clough

=============================================

From http://www.meta-religion.com/Philosophy/Biography/Immanuel_Kant/three_points_in_kant.htm

What space and time are:
Kant proposes that space and time do not really exist outside of us but are "forms of intuition," i.e. conditions of perception, imposed by our own minds. This enables him to reconcile Newton and Leibniz: agreeing with Newton that space is absolute and real for objects in experience, i.e. for phenomenal objects open to science, but agreeing with Leibniz that space is really nothing in terms of objects as they exist apart from us, i.e. with things in themselves.
How space is known:
Kant does not believe that the axioms of geometry are self-evident or true in any logically necessary way. They are logically "synthetic," which means that they may be denied without contradiction. That is a significant claim because it would mean that consistent non-Euclidean geometries are possible (which would involve the denial of one or more of the axioms of Euclid, as Bolyai, Lobachevskii and Riemann actually accomplished). Nevertheless, Kant did believe that the axioms of geometry are known "a priori," i.e. that they are known to be true prior to all experience, because Euclidean axioms depend on our "pure intuition" of space, namely space as we are able to imaginatively visualize it. Only if non-Euclidean space can be visualized would Kant be wrong.
The cosmology of space and time:
Kant does not think we can know, or even imagine, the universe as either finite or infinite, in space or in time, because space and time are only forms of perception and cannot be imagined or visualized as absolute wholes. The universe, as the place of things in themselves, is not in space or in time and so is neither finite nor infinite in space or in time. Thus there cannot be an a priori, rational or metaphysical, cosmology. Kant's Antinomies are intended to show that contradictory metaphysical absolutes can be argued and justified with equal force, meaning that neither can actually be proven. It can be argued however, that Einstein answered Kant by proposing a non-Euclidean (Riemannian) universe that is finite but unbounded (i.e. without an edge).

Joseph Marechal was the first to apply Kant's transcendental deduction

to Aquinas, by modifying Kant's treatment -- essentially extending his

set of categories-- in such a way that the Divine (presumably in the

form of the Holy Spirit) can act through the mind.

This is of great interest in understanding how we might relate with or

communicate with God, but it is also somewhat controversial.

(see http://www.cts.org.au/2001/topica/lepoint.htm )

Kant's transcendental deduction is the central section of his Critique of Pure Reason.

It is a deduction of the properties of mind (what it is) from its behavior (what it does).

The basic idea of Kant was that the mind is so constructed that we can make

sense of objects. By examing the possible types of objects we can perceive,

Kant arriveds at a set of categories necessary to do the job.

While the deduction can be notoriously difficult to understand

because of the technical terms involved, and some have spent

entire careers studying it, there are some fairly readable accounts on the web,

such as that found at

http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/kant/kant032.htm

Transcendental Thomism

Although Marechal's description includes a more Thomistic type of anthropolgy,

to my mind at least, Marechal, in effect by allowing divine activity to act on or

interface with the mind, extended Kant's set of categories to include categories

such as Absolute, Infinite Being, God. That is where the controversy centers,

http://www.cts.org.au/2001/topica/lepoint.htm since it places the divine

in the same space as the human categories of Kant.

The suggestion is that the divine activities belong to a higher realm of

potential categories, as I understand it.

Perhaps there is some help available with an analogy to Taoist thought,

a topic I am familiar with. An interesting observation that emerges from Kant's deduction is

the behavioral description of the self or observer. It does not change in time.

This says to me that it is beyond the realm of everday existence.

The taoists speak of two realms of existence which emerge from,

and later return to, the T'ai Chi or timeless universal spirit-energy:

the timeless symmetical space-ordered world of Early Heaven of Fu Xi, and that

of Later Heaven of King Wen, which is the everyday world of time and space.

These roughly correspond repsectively to Kant's a priori and a posteriori worlds.

What Kant did was to place mind between these two worlds to

deduce the categories of Fu Xi or the a priori (sounds like Early Heaven,

doesn't it !) from the a posteriori (posteriori is like Later-> later heaven).

The T'ai Chi would correspond to Rahner's and Tillich's ground of all being,

Early heaven to Kant's a priori and Later heaven to Kant's a posteriori.

In this way everything is grounded in God.

Rahner, the transcendental Heideggerian

When later asked what he had learned trhere from Heidgger, his standard reply was "He taught me how to think",

or a variant, "He taught me what happens when I read the Bible." In his thesis, Rahner had incorporated transcendence from Kant into the secular existentialism of Heidegger, a notable achievement. Here's more on this transcendence:

From http://www.island-of-freedom.com/RAHNER.HTM

"Karl Rahner's approach to theology is characteristic of the 1930's: a Christian response to the secular loss of the transcendence of God. Whereas earlier generations met this challenge through liberalism and modernism, Rahner and his circle argued that the recovery of the sense of the transcendent could only be achieved through a reappropriation of the classical sources of Christian theology, especially Augustine and Aquinas. His approach fused German idealism and existentialism with Thomism.

Rahner believed that the polarity between "transcendence" and "immanence" was false, being imposed upon Christianity by secular world views. Human experience is unintelligible unless it is interpreted in light of the transcendent mystery of God through "transcendental reflection." Humans transcend themselves in every act of questioning and thinking, by which they demonstrate themselves to be both part of the natural world and yet simultaneously oriented towards the mysterious horizon of being that Christians know as God, the infinite horizon of hope and love. The dilemma of immanence or transcendence of God must thus be overcome without sacrificing either. Due to the ability of humans to discern the transcendent element of their situation, there is an implicit knowledge of God latent within humanity, which it is the function of transcendental reflection to identify. The sense of relation to God, a natural knowledge of God, he terms "transcendental revelation," but is inadequate in itself and needs to be supplemented by a supernatural knowledge of God, or "categorical revelation." This revelation reaches its climax and fulfillment in Jesus Christ."

Rahner's transcendental anthropology

From

http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/mwt/dictionary/mwt_themes_800_rahner.htm

"How does Rahner develop this philosophical theology? It is clear that in building his own system, Rahner always starts from the human as an existential unity, who is simultaneously historical and transcendental. On the one hand, the historical dimension of human being refers to the fact that we are always connected to the world through our spatio-temporal and actual (“categorical” in Rahner’s terms) experiences. In this sense, categorical experience is a posteriori experience. Even, Rahner maintains, our transcendental knowledge or experience of God, which is conditioned by our transcendentality, is also a posteriori, since it is “mediated by a categorical encounter with concrete reality in our world, both the world of things and the world of persons” (FCF, 52). "

To me, two modes of Rahner's anthropology look like the two halves of the brain given by Sperry's cerebral hemisphere

model of the brain- (for mind, really, not the brain)- with the right and left brain metaphors being:

left brain metaphor right brain metaphor

in time timeless

in the world transcendent/spiritual/inclusional

particulars wholes

logic aesthetics

Rahner's transcendental psychology

Anton Losinger's "The Anthropological Turn - The Human Orientation of the

Theology of Karl Rahner" is a fairly slim volume minimizing the use of highly

technical terms, and so is a good concise introduction to Rahner's

"Foundations of Christain Faith", which even as a summary can be difficult

going. Yet even Losinger requires meditative slow reading.

On p. 24, an account of given of Rahner's tripartite psychology,

which is parallel to conventional tripartite psychology, even

to Peirce's categories, but including the transcents to/from God.

Peirce and conventional tripartite psychology can be described thusly:

Thirdness = doing & communication with others in the world

Secondness = thinking (communication with self)

First = sensing/feeling= raw perception

These seem to be roughly parallel or analogous to Rahner's transcendental

psychology:

Communio = interactive communion in God's presence

God's communication to us through the Word (nature and grace)

Self-awareness (the possibility of transcendence)

[1] See

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:OBrGqOzmR2AJ:www.stanford.edu/~allenw/webpapers/KantProblem.doc+kant+pragmatic+anthropology&hl=en

[2] See http://www.bath.ac.uk/~bssadmr/inclusionality/index.htm

---The urgent do later. The important do now.---

A simpler version of my story theory

2005-12-29T09:24:00.000-08:00

A simpler version of the story theory (see http://tap3x.net/EMBTI/j8clough.html ) is to use the semiotic square,

which you construct in the spirit of Claude Levi-Strauss' mythic binary oppositions in this order (ABCD):

A Problem D. Solution

(hex. A) (opposite hex. A)

C. Successful B. Unsuccessful

strategy strategy

(inverted opposite ( inverted hex. A)

hex. A)

By opposite I mean all lines changed from yin to yang or vice versa. By inverted, I mean turn the hexagram upside down. (It may be the same in some rare cases).

Each trigram has a mood as well as a personality. See http://www.jadedragon.com/archives/fengshui/fengsh2.html for characteristics. [Note that these also can be used as yin and yang forms of the five phases to understand

interactions between personalities.]

The mood trigrams are the inside of a hexagram, meaning the bottom trigram. The personality of the protagonist is the outside, meaning the top trigram, and it stays the same.

EXAMPLE

Now let's arbitrarily let the protagonist be a reluctant, scholarly type, trigram mountain (mt.), having a problem with anger, trigram thunder. (He may not necesarily literally be the youngest son).

Then the story square is

A. mt./water D. thunder/fire

(Hex. 4) (Hex. 40)

Youthful Folly Taking Apart or

or Enveloping or Deliverance

C. fire/mt B. water/thunder

(Hex. 56 ) (Hex. 3)

Sojourneying Difficulty

or the Wanderer at the Beginning

or Sprouting

The hexagram numbers were obtained from the 8x8 matrix at http://www.kheper.net/topics/I_Ching/hexagrams.htm

The hexagram meanings were obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Changes#The_hexagrams

You need an I Ching book to understand the full meaning. The sequence ABCD is then the scenario for the mythic, primordial drama. One interpretation would be:

THE SCHOLAR'S DILEMMA

A. A scholar seeking tenure is on the brink of a dangerous abyss he has

foolishly created or stumbled across.

B. This closes the door for his progress toward that goal.

C. But a sabbatical opens another door. There he finds new ideas.

D. He analyzes these and publishes a landmark paper that delivers

the desired tenure.

Another approach would be to use the Jungian archetypes, where shadow is the opposite trigram of the personality, and so forth.

The heavens are telling....of continuous creation

2005-12-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

Below is an image of giant galactic nebula NGC 3603, taken from

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1999/20/

which shows all of the stages of stellar evolution, which is happening at this moment throughout the universe. This supports the view that Genesis is an allegory composed by God but filtered through the mind of Moses-- who, as a man, not God, was quite naturally unaware of modern images much later taken by the Hubble telescope, even though God would have foreseen and understood them.

According to the site,

"In this stunning picture of the giant galactic nebula NGC 3603, the Hubble telescope's crisp resolution captures various stages of the life cycle of stars in one single view.

This picture nicely illustrates the entire stellar life cycle of stars, starting with the Bok globules and giant gaseous pillars (evidence of embryonic stars), followed by circumstellar disks around young stars, and progressing to aging, massive stars in a young starburst cluster. The blue super-giant with its ring and bipolar outflow [upper left of center] marks the end of the life cycle.

Credit: Wolfgang Brandner (JPL/IPAC), Eva K. Grebel (Univ. Washington), You-Hua Chu (Univ. Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and NASA "

God and STUART KAUFFMAN's self-organizing universe

2005-12-29T08:19:00.000-08:00

Just to be clear, I'm not talking here about materialistic pantheism but panentheism, which includes the non-material, and this is Biblically based, not some New Age religious view.

I'm writing this to demonstrate that there are parallels between the Bible and Science, even though the Bible speaks of the spiritual, and science the material level. The concord suggests to me that both both views are true.

According to Genesis, in the beginning, God created heaven and earth, the latter from a formless void, and saw that it was good, so that, to believers, God, who is Spirit, not material, is both inside (immanent) and outside (transcendent) the material world. It also shows that God loves order and law.

A possible explanation of the parallelism, using Stuart Kauffman's Non-Darwinian view of evolution as part of the self-organizing universe (see http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/zd-Ch.20.html ) is the inclusionality of attractors, as shown in the diagram of a Lorenz attractor.

To scientists, chaos theory shows that completely random systems can evolve points or loops of convergence (attractors), which show order as well. A biological example is life itself, which is ORDERED, not random. Kauffman proposes that the continuing organization of increasing levels of complexity of life -- which we refer to as evolution-- occurs by much the same principle. Thus Kauffman's theory of evolution is not NOT randomly-based, as Darwin's was. To the believer, this accords with the Biblical view that God loves order, and so Kauffman's theory is to that extent Biblically based.

As Kaufman puts it, on http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/zd-Ch.20.html , like inclusionality nature seems to be interconnected::

" Think of a wiring diagram that has ten thousand light bulbs, each of which has inputs from two other light bulbs. That's all I'm going to tell you. You pick the inputs to each bulb at random, and put connecting wires between them, and then assign one of the possible switching rules to each of the light bulbs at random. One rule might be that a light bulb turns on at the next moment if both of its inputs are on at the previous moment. Or it might turn on if both of its inputs are off.

If you go with your intuition, or if you ask outstanding physicists, you'll reach the conclusion that such a system will behave chaotically. You're dealing with a random wiring diagram, with random logic — a massively complex, disordered, parallel- processing network. You'd think that in order to get such a system to do something orderly you'd have to build it in a precise way. That intuition is fundamentally wrong. The fact that it's wrong is what I call "order for free.""

There are other epistemological considerations regarding "order for free." In the next few years, I plan to ask, "What do complex systems have to be so that they can know their worlds?" By "know" I don't mean to imply consciousness; but a complex system like the E. coli bacterium clearly knows its world. It exchanges molecular variables with its world, and swims upstream in a glucose gradient. In some sense, it has an internal representation of that world. It's also true that IBM in some sense knows its world. I have a hunch that there's some deep way in which IBM and E. coli know their worlds in the same way. I suspect that there's no one person at IBM who knows IBM's world, but the organization gets a grip on its economic environment. What's the logic of the structure of these systems and the worlds that they come to mutually live in, so that entities that are complex and ordered in this way can successfully cope with one another? There must be some deep principles.

For example, IBM is an organization that knows itself, but I'm not quite talking about Darwinian natural selection operating as an outside force. Although Darwin presented natural selection as an external force, what we're thinking of is organisms living in an environment that consists mostly of other organisms. That means that for the past four billion years, evolution has brought forth organisms that successfully coevolved with one another. Undoubtedly natural selection is part of the motor, but it's also true that there is spontaneous order."

END

Psalm Cycle 120-134, the Beatitudes, and the Celebrate Recovery principles

2005-12-29T08:11:00.000-08:00

Note: Psalms 120-134 comprise the songs of ascent, being the fifteen steps of ascent

to Jerusalem. [KJV version]. There are 15, which form two cycles of 8 and 7, the

final or 16th returning to the first, Psalm 120.

(Elsewhere I have also fitted these to the 7 last words of Christ.)

1 - Theme: Catastrophe and darkness.

Principle: Realize I'm not God; I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency

to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable.

Beat.1: "Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor"

Ps 120: " In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. "

Ps. 128 " Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD;"

2 - Theme: Hope and encouragement.

Principle: Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to him, and that he has the power to help me recover.

Beat.2: "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted"

Ps. 121. " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."

Ps. 129. "...may Israel now say: Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have not prevailed against me. "

3 - Theme : Commitment, humility and release.

Principle: Consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ's care and control.

Beat.3: (humility) "Happy are the meek"

Ps. 122. (release) " I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD. "

Ps. 130 (commitment) "I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. "

4 -Theme : Self-evaluation and Confession

Principle: Openly examine and confess my faults to God, to myself, and to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.

Beat.4: "Happy are the pure in heart"

Ps. 123 ".. Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us: ".

Ps. 131 "...Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. "

5 -Theme : Accepting change.

Principle: Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask Him to remove my character defects.

Beat.5: "Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires"

Ps. 124. "... Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. "

Ps. 132. "Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house, nor go up into my bed; will not give sleep to mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids, Until I find out a place for the LORD, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob."

6 -Theme : Making amends.

Principle: Evaluate all my relationships; Offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me and make amends for harm I've done to others except when to do so would harm them or others.

Beat. 6.: "Happy are the merciful"

Ps. 125 "...As for such as turn aside unto their crooked ways, the LORD shall lead them forth with the workers of iniquity: but peace shall be upon Israel. "

Ps. 133. " Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! "

7 -Theme : Peace and spiritual growth.

Principle: Reserve a daily time with God for self examination, Bible readings and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life and to gain the power to follow His will.

Beat.7: "Happy are the peacemakers"

Ps. 126 " The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."

Ps. 134. "Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD. "

8 -Theme : Outreach

Principle: Yield myself to God to be used to bring this Good News to others, both by my example and by my words.

Beat.8: "Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires"

Ps. 127 " Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of [God's arrows] : they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate."

Ps. 120. " In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. "

==================================================

END

On Bricolage

2005-12-29T08:06:00.000-08:00

I believe that when we look at something, or when we read a text such as the Bible or poetry, or try to make sense of our lives, or write a play, or read tea leaves, the mind performs bricolage, which is a kind of divination, for lack of a better word, to make sense of the whole.

From http://omni.bus.ed.ac.uk/opsman/quality/SEM_black_run_7.htm :

"Bricolage

This refers to a type of logic referred to by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962)

and in Totemism (1962). Levi-Strauss derived the meaning of bricolage from the "bricoleur" --

someone who does odd jobs, making and mending things from bits and pieces which have

been left over from previous jobs. It provides a "science of the concrete" by which the world

is ordered in minute ways. Judith Williamson says that advertisers employ bricolage as

they can only construct meanings for products out of the bits and pieces of ideological

thought that already exist. "

We can see a similar representation in the art of Alan Rayner, although I make no pretense as to how he actually painted the above, which is used on http://www.goodshare.org/raynerinc.htm to represent "Inclusionality – An Immersive Philosophy of Environmental Relationships"

Thus a pragmatist such as I am, or writer of scientific reports, as I was, or a reader of Tarot cards, an artist or dramatist. These all deal with a bricolage of data, starting with a blank display board or empty stage or empty mental space on which he pastes a collage of data bits or events, so arranging them into a pattern that makes sense. The sense comes, as in all art, from the whole emerging from the arrangement.

This may also be the mechanism of Alan Rayner's inclusionality (see the above link), by which I mean that there is no ONE thing inside of us that links all to all, but different views of collections (contexts) of spaces or experiences of such spaces. This would be similar to our own reading of a bible passage keeping in mind other passages we know.

This also fits the classic definition of art by Aristotle, from http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/aristotl.htm#H9 :

"Art is defined by Aristotle as the realization in external form of a true idea,

and is traced back to that natural love of imitation which characterizes humans,

and to the pleasure which we feel in recognizing likenesses."

So that the form is symbolic or iconic of a true idea, in the above case, the meaning.

Willard Quine went farther, believing that classical epistemology failed because of a circularity in the classical or Aristotelian concept of epistemology given above (because as above, given by Aristotle, the actual representation must exist for the statement to be true http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/ )and vice versa. Quine thus instead advocated a PSYCHOLOGICAL not philosophical model of epistemology. (see

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/ )

In such a "naturalized" epistemology, the mind divinizes meaning in the aesthetic mode of the bricoleur, not the rational model of Kant et al.

On the truth of a Bible verse

2005-12-29T08:03:00.000-08:00

There is something special about the Bible. The Barthian view (and mine) is that this is due to the error corrections

of the Holy Spirit when the Bible is read in faith.

Since the true meaning of any text comes only when the statement is compared to the context (what is revelant in the rest of the Bible), the Holy Spirit would thus seem to make sure that you interpret the text in the right context.

So you don't exactly trust the words, you trust the truth of the words-- as REVEALED to you via the Holy Spirit acting on you with the words. Faith is what opens you up for the double-edged sword's cuttings and discernings.

You don't read the Word, the Word reads you.

2005-12-29T08:02:00.000-08:00

It really doesn't matter, says Paul, how you read the Bible, if you read it

in faith for not matter if you are a literal reader of Bible, for example,

taking Genesis as straight fact, or on the other hand as an allegory,

you've been out-foxed.

For Paul says:

"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any

two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,

and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and

intents of the heart."

Hbr 4:12 (KJV)

Accepting the results of science if they conflict with the Bible

2005-12-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

I have a personal bias of accepting the results of science if they conflict with the Bible, even through Jesus once scolded Peter I think for using human reason to warn Jesus not to go to Jerusalem on a donkey before the easter event.

My only hope is that the Holy Spirit guided me to the scientific results, which can't always be in agreement with the Bible, particularly when science says that the negroes were the first men (and the other races were new "speciations" from them).

Very problematic, agreed. But in the final analysis, my heart and not my head accepts or rejects the scientific judgment.

It doesn't make sense rationally, only under the aspect of faith. When I read the Bible in faith, using the Barth model, the Holy Spirit gives us the correct interpretation. Presumably the same happens reading with scientific results.

On the other hand, it has been said that :

" the Bible and science never contradict because they talk about two
different kinds. The message in the Bible is spiritual. Christ says
that "one day of a man is 1000 years of God and 1 day of God is 1000
years of man". Therefore, the whole creation is still going on; all
days from 1-6; and evolution is one of the scientific aspects how it
is happening. (Even if evolution theories are not totally correct, it
is a fact that we have new strains every day, etc. "

What is truth ?

2005-12-29T07:53:00.000-08:00

I follow Kierkegaard and Barth in believing that If God or Jesus is the Truth, then we can never know what truth is because we can never understand God (other than what the Bible says). Kierkegaard and Barth were both existentialists, which is roughly the European term for pragmatism.

They meant truth found by analytical thinking. In pragmatism, truth is what results from performing an action, such as doing a scientific laboratory experiment. Or something spiritual, such as exerting faith in God (from which comes Paul's list of fruits of the spirit) or helping the distressed ("I was in prison and ye visited me").

In my own experience, I pray daily to God, asking in a prayer, to understand Him. The result over a period of months has been a growing love for God, but little improvement in understanding other than from the Bible, which I read daily. So I would conclude that we cannot know the Truth, in whole at least, but we can love the Truth.

Perhaps God wants to save us from such an endless pursuit. Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge (of Truth). And then there's the Tower of Babel. And Jesus never answered Pilate's question "what is truth ?"

The Holy Spirit, Semes, and the Princeton Egg

2005-12-29T07:50:00.000-08:00

How can an idea spread so rapidly ? No doubt advertising plays a role, and for each child that sees the ad,

word of mouth to others. Semes. They spread like a virus infection.

That would seem to explain it, but I once took a course in intellectual history and was struck by the fact that similar developments occurred all over the world at the same time. They spoke different lanaguages and were far apart and there was no radio or TV. I don't think that semes -- by word of mouth-- could explain it.

Another global phenomenon that is hard to explain on the basis of semes, because it is instantaneous and even starts up BEFORE a traumatic event is the change in random number standard deviations detected by the Princeton Egg computers at locations all over the world. Peaks develop during catastrophic events. See http://noosphere.princeton.edu/story.html

This is very hard to explain scientifically- with semes and advertisements. It could be a human phenomenon or the Holy Spirit acting through the minds of men possibly to warn us of a coming catastrophe.

Some hair-splitting on experience and authority

2005-12-29T07:44:00.000-08:00

To a pragmatist everything comes from personal experience or the experience of others. The later would then be authority if it passed muster and many agreed, or in the case given, the mother seemed to be mostly right to the child, or the child was told by the rest of the family that "mom is always right". But not from her own proclamation of authority. And as you say, there is also continual testing, just as in science.

The definition given below (2) of pragmatism is fine, but that of analytic is wrong, or at least very misleading. Here's Webster's definition, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=analytical :

1 : of or relating to analysis or analytics; especially : separating something into component parts or constituent elements

2 : being a proposition (as "no bachelor is married") whose truth is evident from the meaning of the words it contains -- compare SYNTHETIC

vs. synthetic (the method by which pragmatists think):

1 : relating to or involving synthesis : not analytic
2 : attributing to a subject something determined by observation rather than analysis of the nature of the subject and not resulting in self-contradiction if negated -- compare ANALYTIC

Analytic thinking then, goes from generals to particulars (data of experience),

while synthetic goes from particulars (data of experience) to generals.

In religion, the generals are beliefs, while the data of experience are faith.

Karl Barth would say that the scriptures have no meaning - at least to us--if they are not heard, and I agree. I suppose you might argue that God heard them, because He said them, but we have no way of confirming this other than picking up a Bible or hearing it read. We pragmatists would say that if a tree falls in a forest while nobody observed it is an undecideable (unless you go back to check). So the Bible is not Holy, unless we read or hear it read. It takes the Holy Spirit to transmit the truth of the words to us. Or as Hebrews puts it, for the words to act on us like a double-edged sword. Like postmodernism, pragmatism starts with experience with a minimum of assumptions.

Presumptions in science aren't scientific ? I suppose you mean the presumptions of theory. Actually, it takes two to tango, an analytic theorist, who has presumptions leading to a theory, which leads to data, from the general to the particulars, as above,and a laboratory scientist - (a pragmatist or synthetist) who starts with NO presumptions,

and sees how well the theory fits the data. Both are useful, they just think differently.

Experience and authority are the sources of knowledge

2005-12-29T07:40:00.000-08:00

Experience and authority are the sources of knowledge.

To an analytic thinker, faith comes from beliefs obtained from an authority, such as the Bible.
To a pragmatic thinker such as myself, belief comes from faith, which is an experience.
So I do things backwards.

Let's look at Romans 10:17: "So then, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (WBS) "

It doesn't say "faith cometh by reading (the Bible)", but by "Hearing (it read) ". So I never read along with the readings in church, I listen. The other half is that hearing comes by the word of God, which in my interpretation,

following Karl Barth's model, is the work of the holy spirit, not us. Thus, as Karl and I see it, the truth of the Bible does not come by authority (although authority may tell us where to look), but by expeirence.In other words, the truth of the Bible comes not from authority but through the Holy Spirit.

Science is similarly pragmatic in that its truth is not fully believed until the results

or ecperiments or calculations of theory -- the data, what is experienced--- are repeated

by others.

Toward a calculus of meaning

2005-12-28T09:30:00.000-08:00

This is basically a remap of the Roget categories to Pierce's 9x9 (the TXJ), with the aim of setting up a calculus of meaning: the domain being God, man, and others, including text. God acts on His own, and I do not presume

to specify God's actions. But in the everyday world, God seems to act largely through others, so although theologically incorrect, I treat His actions here as acting through others. So God is not explicitly in the algebra,

but appears only implicitly here in the actions of others.

Roget's spectrum of words, as I call it, does go from earth to heaven, but on closer inspection it does so in pairs of antonyms. Except for one section where the opposite is true, generally the even numbers are positive and the odd ones negative. In a much simpler version, here I remap the Roget numbers into Peirce's 9x9 matrix, where Roget's numbers of about 1000 are separated into 81 sets of numbers. I have not yet separated these in terms of positive and negative.

a) Peirce's terminology of embeddings:

Thirdness = outside = Doing = D

Secondness = middle = relational = Thinking = T

Firstness = inside = raw Perceiving = P

b) Roget's terminology of embeddings:

I = abstract = Thinking by others = T public, social or objective =

as others think

II = space = Doing by others = D public, social or objective =

as others do

III = matter = raw Perceiving by others = P public, social or objective =

as others perceive

IV = intellect = Thinking by our own brain = t private, personal or subjective=

as I think

II = space = Doing by our own brain or body = d private, personal or subjective=

as I do

III = matter = raw Perceiving in our own brain = p private, personal or subjective=

as I perceive

between public (objective) and private (subjective) perspectives the TXJ line structure, although there is at least a possibility of doing so in the 9 line appraisals for each tetragram. Perhaps these might map to even and odd line numbers or perhaps to AM and PM readings. ]

A further possible differentiation, which I have not pursued here, other than suggesting a possible terminology, is that,

since the categories are given in terms of pairs of letters, the self can be attached to either member of the pair.

The member it is attached to would then be the verb, and the other the object of the verb. I would suggest

bracketing of the form <> to the member which the self is attached to. The self used in this way would also

include the "generalized other" of sociology, as used by George Mead. Thus P would be others in this sense thinking of an inner perception.

Leaving this aside for now, and proceeding, we have:

Social (y axis)

DD= Doing in the world or on world objects by others ("They run")

DT = Thinking in the world or of world objects by others ("They think of running")

DP= Perceiving in the world or of world objects by others ("They watch running")

PD = Doing in the world or on world objects by others ("They run")

PT =

PP =

Personal (x axis)

==============

Correspondences of Enneagram and MBTI types

En. MBTI SN assume FT
Blindness % chosen Dimness # meaning + numerology
(from tests)

2 ESFJ, ENFJ EFJ EFJ EJ = doing for others, goal-oriented love, relating
3 ESTP, ESFP ETP, EFP ETP EP = doing external thing, not goal-oriented* growth, expressively creating
4 INTJ, INFJ ITJ, IFJ IFJ IJ = doing something internal, goal-oriented practically creating

5 ISTP, INTP ITP ITP IP = thinking an internal, not goal-oriented change, uncertainty, sensuality
6 ISTJ, ISFJ ITJ, IFJ IFJ IJ = thinking an internal, goal-oriented devotion to family
7 ENTP, ENFP ETP,EFP EFP EP = thinking an external, not goal-oriented intuition

8 ESTJ, ENTJ ETJ ETJ EJ = feeling about others, goal-oriented power, control
9 INFP, ISFP IFP IFP IP = feeling something internal, not goal-oriented humanitarian
1 all J-types J ITJ IJ = feeling something internal, goal-oriented leader, initiator

% from Fudjack's site.

* 3 is the artistic achiever

# Note that J= female and even numbers, P= male and odd numbers,
also and F at all the corners (so apparent FT dimness, meaning less important)

+ where E means external or for others, while I is internal
J means goal-oriented, P means not goal-oriented
============================

Outline for a book

2005-11-15T12:48:00.000-08:00

Chapters

1. Pragmatism in a Christian context (Naturalized Epistemology)

2. The Bible / Hermeunutics

3. Pragmatic Theology

4. Faith vs. Reason and Religion vs. Science

5. The World

A pragmatic's way to Christ

2005-11-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

I'm a pragmatist -- I can't help it, I was born that way. So I always start from below, from earth, not heaven. The "below" for me is direct personal spiritual experience. It's personal and private, so I can't communicate it very well, any more than I could communicate the experience of beauty on seeing one of Matisse's paintings. But the certainty of an experience is to one of my kind as solid as a rock. You don't have to tell me that Matisse painted it, I know it from previous experience.

Thus I learn through experience. But instead of a Matisse painting, I close my eyes and induce the source- I feel love and trust of God, just as if I were doing aerobics. That's wordless ,centering prayer. The experience could also be that of reading the Bible, or worshipping God. But the most powerful experience is DOing the Word. Right now I am serving as Jesus' tool in guiding an alcoholic to sobriety. It all came to me in the makeover of my house, when this man, a homeless alcoholic, found that I had been sober in AA for 35 years..It is so beautiful that it staggers me to even think I could be one chosen to do this.

Thank you, Jesus.

Major Makeover- a sketch for my new musical (true story)

2005-11-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

MAJOR MAKEOVER- A musical

PLOT: Five disparate characters interact in a serendipitous major makeover of a cluttered house, and find themselves changed as well.

CAST

S = SUE is american indian woman with computer skills.

D = DAVID is formerly a homeless alcoholic who meets Sue in Dirt Bar with Brother WARREN. D wants to get sober, lives with S.

W = WARREN is D's brother. He has a lot of problems, including health problems, from drinking (removal of Peptic ulcer). Doctors warned him that if he drinks again, it could kill him.

B = BILLY is a master craftsman, self-taught, a neighbor of OSCAR's.

J = JERRY is dirt bar tough guy contractor who works with B.

O= OSCAR is house owner, retired, long time sober, Evangelistic Christian

ACT I

SCENES/SONGS

1. [CHAR. ANTHEM] O is long time sober and has returned to the Christian Church, but privately he is closed in by his dirty, cluttered house, full of skeletons.

2.[SONG] B is a neighbor of O's who did some previous plumbing work. When O has a new plumbing problem, he consults B who reveals that he's now doing bathroom remodelling.

3. B in a [SONG] explaining O's cluttered life, sends his helpers S and D to O to help him clean up the clutter. [DUET SONG] D is honest about his drinking, is trying to quit but without success. O reveals to D that he is 35 years sober in AA. At the end, when they have left, [SONG] in a prayer, O feels that God has sent D to him.

4. [SONG AND DANCE] Scene where B& J and D&S are at work in O's house. O had a mental block about straightening up his house, and is liberated by D&S, who are neat and organized, at least at work on the house, and are cleaning out all of O's skeletons, sotospeak. O is good for D&S because they need the money, and D comes to see O as a father figure, calls him, somewhat glibly, "Pops". B tells D to not use Latex paint if they want to paint the interior. J makes mildly critical remarks that set him above O.

5. D is spaced out at work one day - hungover and on Dilantin, which O has given him advance money for to work off. S is pitiful, in pain due to a dental problem which she hasn't insurance to cover. In the midst of this, a neighbor has a plumbing disaster. B comes by to get S&D to help, but they look awful, obviously unpresentable to help the neighbor. He tells D off about D's drinking.

6. [DUET] B talks to O about D. O supports D because D is a fellow alcoholic, even if he hasn't quite gotten the first step-- quitting.

7. [SONG] S is also beaten down by loss of job. She had lived with W, who beat her. She now lives with D and wants him sober, wears a sweatshirt with title "Denial".

8. [DUET] Oscar says it's like hitting S over the head with a twoxfour to get S to assert herself. S has serious dental problems that have turned infected ,a painful situation, but S has no medical insurance because she's out of work. Free "emergency" care is available, but it requires running a series of hurdles that S, because she was beaten, her sense of self is low, and she finds this difficult to do. But O's remonstrances to her and her painful jaw drive her on.

In the first half of the duet, O berates S, but then in the second half, O sees that he has the same problem- low self-worth, and S picks up a toy punching the bag and begins socking it with O pretending to be hit as she hits bag.

S sings {SONG] indian maiden song.

ACT II

SCENES/SONGS

1. [DUET] J looks tough but trustworthy, as shown by his remarks to O. He also has serious health problems and misses work a few days on the job with B.

2. [DUET] J is really a cheat and takes off with some of the profits. He'd done this twice before but B forgot to tell O.
O gets his money's worth, despite this.

3. [TRIO] According to S, B has said to O that he would like to teach young workers the practical skills he has learned, from plumbing to restoring historic homes. He now needs a new co-worker since J ran off withmore than his share of the profits.

4. [TRIO] O and B discuss D as replacement for J, but B is unsure of D because of D's drinking. S interrupts to say that ever since D met O, he's been drinking less. B leaves

5. [TRIO] W stops in to visit D, who had a seizure the previous night because of withdrawal from alcohol. S is there too, and despite all of their former antipathy (W beat S, S left W for S, W socked W when W returned to try to reclaim S), they're all friends. W forgaves W because he's manic/depressive, but won't live with him. S says that a friend called to say that they're rehiring peopleback where she formerly worked. D and W leave.

6. [DUET] O stops in to pick S&D up for work,and get S to emergency dental services. O asks S where's D-- he's out back with W - then tellS S that B will take him as co-worker if he can just stay straight. It would be an ideal situation, for B has a heart of gold and learning from B would turn D into a master craftsman. S says that ever since D met O, he's been drinking less and less. (D starts to reenter but hides himself when he realizes he's being talked about) O continues, singing that, despite the fact that he's never had a son, and never known the rewards of love and respect from a son, he is feeling some return of his self-worth from the love and respect he can feel emanating from D under all of the jibes and crass remarks. And S&D have given his sense a self a boost by giving him a nice clean house to live in, removing the skeltons from his life. He feels like a new man. [SONG] about regularity.

7. D them pretends to returns, holds S under his left arm, and S under his right, looks at O, smiles, and says, "Hi, pops! Pick us up same time tomorrow ?"

[goes into CLOSING TRIO]

END

Roget's spectrum of the world

2005-11-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

Introduction

Here's an exploration of a new concept, which would appear with some development to be useful for glass-bead games and hermeneutics.

The 997 word categories of the original version of Roget's Thesaurus, I recently discovered, go fairly smoothly from existence (earth) to religious affections (heaven). It is in fact a frequency spectrum -- with some noise--of all that can be.

Structure

If it goes from earth to heaven, then

997/4 = 249.25 so if my arithmetic is right,

1 to 250 =earth == cold and dry= cool thinking

251- 500 = water = cold and wet = cool emotions

501-747 = fire = warm and dry = warm thinking

748 - 997 = air = warm and wet = warm emotions

Synthesis

We can regard the middle value between any two points as a synthesis. For example, taking the end points

1= existence

997 = laity

we find as synthesis the middle value of 1+(997-1 )/2 =

1+498= 499 = folly.

Perhaps this is true, but I would think that 498 = wisdom is more appropriate That's perhaps the noise effect.

To take another example, let's arbitrarily try 639 and 237.

237 = opposite

639 = sufficiency

The average value is 237 +(639-237)/2= 237 +201 = 438 = blue

Blue is the color of the sky and sea . It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. Pairing opposite and sufficieny is a puzzle, so one has to trust.

Conclusion

It appears that the method works, although noise nees to be dealt with,and and especially interesting extension would be Fourier inversionof the spectrum to find the order in time of existence.

My Years in Meetings (Confessions of an ex-corporate executive.)

2005-11-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

-An organizational classic. New York Times, July 25, 1988 -
-----------------------------------------------------------------
My Years in Meetings (Confessions of an ex-corporate executive.)

By Herbert L. Kahn

Shortly after the small company of which I was a vice president was sold to a giant corporation a few years ago, our president and founder took his newly earned fortune and departed. His place was taken by a man I shall call Martell, a senior executive from Corporate Headquarters who swiftly introduced us to the big league way of doing things.

After that, if you had ever tried to telephone me, you would no longer have heard me answer my own phone. You would have encountered my secretary, who would have told you that I was in a meeting.

She would not have been lying. As a Divisional General Manager, I spent my whole day in meetings. Not only were there many meetings but, because The Corporation prided itself on its work ethic, each meeting lasted a long time.

At the beginning of each month, we met to forecast the month’s sales and expenses; in the middle, we met to discuss changes in the forecast; just before the end, we met to estimate what the results had probably been; when the figures became available, we met again to assign the blame for any departures from any of the three predictions.

The Corporation encouraged rivalry between divisions, which meant there was constant bargaining as each group tried to enlarge its budget and influence at the expense of the others.

The upshot was a series of exhausting character-building exercises that cOuld be called corporate isometrics: We put a good deal of pressure on each other but didn’t actually move.

Management, under the influence of the consultant or theory of the month, did its part by calling for bizarre but conceivably useful statistics: “What is the five-year trend of orders per square foot of branch sales office, and what is the variation from region to region?” Or, “What is the output of your machine shop, both in dollar volume and in weight of metal, per gallon of lubricating oil, and does it vary seasonally?”

There was no time to gather that information during the day. Instead, the search for it had the salubrious effect of
keeping my colleagues and me off the streets and out of the bars during evenings and weekends.

There seemed to be only one thing missing: a connection between our efforts and the company’s real business.
My division was supposed to design, make and sell high technology products. My superiors were presumably charged with guiding that enterprise. None of us, however, ever designed, made or sold anything, and we rarely even met anybody who did.

In one of my rare contacts with a real person — a project engineer — I heard him criticize an associate as a
“conference bum.” He explained that a conference bum was a fellow who liked to go to meetings because, presumably, it was easier than working. I assured him that these meetings were not only hard work but also vital to the success of the operation.

“How?” he asked.

That was a stumper. I thought most of the meetings I was forced to attend were a waste of time. But I was mpressed
to discover that by some magic the system worked. Somehow, our meetings caused products to get made and shipped, sales to increase and profits to rise. Evidently, I provided valuable leadership, though in in ways that were imperceptible to me.

I never got the time to figure it out. As part of a complex corporate strategy, my division was spun off to a different corporation, then amalgamated with another. I took advantage of a parachute that, while not golden, was at least low-alloy steel, and went into another line of work. I lost touch with The Corporation until late last summer, when I encountered Martell, my old boss,who was in trouble.

The problem was personal. He had recently ordered an addition to his house, which involved the installation of a wood stove and the felling of several oak trees that could feed the stove. He had decided that he and his teen-age son would attend to the cutting of the trees after they were felled; besides saving money, it would be a good lesson for the boy.

Martell had the boy draw up best-case and worst-case plans and schedules, along with a budget. He had met with the boy frequently to discuss exceptions and contingencies.

“Sounds very well thought out,” I said. “And the problem?”

“We’ve been working on it all summer,” Martell said. “He spends the days making projections and plans, and we meet about them in the evenings. But the wood just lies there. Absolutely nothing has happened to it. Do you have any suggestions?" Only one came immediately to mind.

“Plan for a cold winter,” I said.

----------------------------------

Herbert L. Kahn is a high-tech marketing consultant
in Weston, Mass.
-------------------------------
END

Some pragmatic arguments for God as Father

2005-11-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

This is not going to please the feminists, but on thinking the issue over, I find a few practical reasons why God must be

the Father, not the Mother:

a) The Father provided the male seed for Jesus under the power of the Holy Ghost. If Jesus emerged from mating of the Heavenly Father and Mother, He would be purely heavenly, not also true man.

b) One cannot serve two masters.

c) If God could alternately be Father and Mother, one could attempt to play the one against the other, as in a real life family.

On reading the Bible

2005-11-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

John Dewey probably said this much better somewhere in his writings. Reading a text is a pragmatic act, since it starts with the text as data input. Faith then becomes the throwing out of presuppositions, I think- openness- what Heidegger might call authenticity. Writing a text is analytic, since the text is the output, not the input.

Now as to pragmatic epistemology. As in any pragmatic act, the meaning of the text always comes from context, so that when you read a passage in a text, such as the Bible, there are various levels of meaning, each embedded in the other like Peirce categories, giving embedded levels of meaning from:

the immediate context,

the chapter as context

the book as context

the Bible as a whole.

These are like ripples on a pond, included within one another, like inclusionality.

Karl Barth's dialectical method could perhaps be used for these also, with the text as one pole and the context as the other, the meaning coming from a synthesis of the two, although this would tend to emphasize the context too much, I believe. Some refer to studying the Bible in this way as the inductive approach. Grant Osborne calls it the hermeneutical spiral.

These are the more rational (head) methods. These can in principle I suppose be used to find the meaning, but the task is daunting, and in practice you would probably die of old age before you got to the end of a sentence.

Luther was adept at such methods, but found that a more effective way was reading it as a little child.

Consider a man reading the Bible to his grandchild on his lap. The grandfather could represent the Holy Spirit, helping to interpret by putting the quote in contexts meaning memory of what she already knows. This means reading it from

the heart, say as you would read a letter from a dear relative. The context then comes from memory-- what we know of the Bible as a chapter or book or whole, just as we know the personalities and biographies of dear relatives.

Does the New York Times Crossword puzzle get easier later in the day ?

2005-11-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

Pattern theory, the atonement, morphic resonances, habits, and experimental evidence.

Does the New York Times Crossword puzzle get easier later in the day ? To see how this might be possible, we have to examine pattern theories of various sorts.

Pattern theory can be described using CS Lewis' words, found on http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/CHRISTIA/old_library/gen06.htm as the theory that Jesus helps us to do certain things because He has done them himself, and so understands the pattern of the action.

As CS Lewis put it, in Mere Christianity: "When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves

and reasons and holds our hand while we do it."

We can thus follow Christ's death and resurrection in Paulist fashion if we become like little children and enact the events to our selves.

Rupert Sheldrake has a theory of morphic resonances (see the above link) which is almost identical to pattern theroy as given above, except that it is generally described in secular terms. The short description is that once something is done, it is easier to do it a second time, even easier the third time, etc. A pattern is created that grows clearer with

repetition. The pattern itself acts on subsequent events.

Rupert Sheldrake's resonances do have some limited experimental support. An anecdotal oneis that a sheep in england found that he could escape from the pen by rolling on the ground under the fence, and soon afterward sheep were found to be doing this all over england. He also gives data on sets of experiments independently performed which showed better results or something like that (my memory is vague) when experiments are reproduced. I don't have any data, but it would seem that one could do the New York Times crossword puzzle better later in the day. (Please send your experiences or data to me.)

I'm not too pleased with Sheldrake's collaboration with Matthew Fox, who fancies that we were not born with original sin. But Sheldrake also has a recent book which reportedly gives a lot of data on experiments with dogs, showing that they can tell if they are being watched, even if you are behind them.

CS Peirce proposed a similar concept and referrred to it as habit.

And then there is deja vue, and difficult to see connections to synchronicity.

The Bible as a computer hard disk

2005-11-15T09:03:00.000-08:00

Diagrammatically, Karl Barth would have put it this way :
-----------------------------------------------------------

The Word of God revealed to the original authors:

The Word --> Holy Spirit ---> the Word written as text

{God] [correct meaning] [The Bible text]

The Word revealed to us:

scripture ----> Holy Spirit ---> reader (in faith)

[Bible text ] [ the correct [is revealed to reader]

meaning ]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Combining these:

The Word ---> H.S --> Bible --> H.S. --> Reader in faith

The analogy to a computer would be:

Program output (God's Word) --> writes to (HS) -->

--> file (Bible) on hard disk --> read by HS to us

Read in faith would then be using the right OS for the program.

---------------------------------------------------
Also Compare:

a) Word revealed to us:

scripture ----> Holy Spirit ---> reader (in faith)
[Bible text ] [ the correct [is revealed to reader]
meaning ]

b) The Bible read with human reason (as the Creationists do):

scripture ----> human reason ---> reader
[Bible text ] [interpreted [the literal text,
rationally] no revelation]

---------------------------------------------

So the Bible is just the storage file of God's Word, or as Barth puts it, a token.

What Barth means by Jesus speaking through the scriptures is that the scriptures are read in primarily faith (not primarily in reason). For faith invokes Jesus' presence. Actually, in the Gospels somewhere after the resurrection, just before He ascends to the right hand of God, Jesus says that he will send the Holy Spirit in his absence to make sure the Gospel is understood correctly.

Genesis as an Allegory

2005-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

My take on Genesis is----- if you had to explain what everything is and how it got here to a 5 year-old--- the earth, the sky, the stars, the oceans, the sun and moon, day and night, the birds and beasts, man and woman, good and evil--

you couldn't do a more beautiful job than God did as He 'splained it all to us in this great story.

God is by far the finest storyteller who ever lived.

Is there absolute truth in science ?

2005-11-15T08:35:00.000-08:00

Science isn't like religion, as I see it, it's just a tool. Nothing is engraved in stone. Nothing is ever absolutely true.

Science can't possibly know everything, as Godel proved. Science is a process of millions of scientists, like ants, each adding their little crumbs to the pile of knowledge. That's what my former life consisted of before I retired.

Science is continually evolving its knowledge to more perfect states, as Peirce put it. So nothing holds forever in science.

In science, you can assume anything you like. The test is how well it works. Presumably Kelvin et al. assumed that at some time earth was a liquid ball and calculated the time it would take to cool to its present temperature distribution, with the liquid now being only in the center.

While nothing is absolutely true in science, if other people can reproduce the experiment, the results begin to gather

credibility. All I was saying is that a bunch of guys have tackled the problem and similar results, namely that the span of time for earth to cool from a liquid ball to its present state is humungous conpared to the 5k years of the Creationists.

Billy Graham's unseen method of conversion

2005-11-15T08:13:00.000-08:00

Most people think that the reason that Billy Graham has been such a successful evangelist is his powerful talks.

That certainly plays a role, but if you look beneath all of the media and spectacle, you may notice that people actually have to get into their cars and drive to the stadium to hear the talk. They have to be involved enough - motivated enough- to do that. The actual doing, as I see it, is what fixes their involvement.

A sort of proof of this comes from long experience in many life conversion programs (AA for example), where they've found, as the saying goes, that "you can't think your way into a new way of living, but can live your way into a new way of thinking".

I think that Billy, whether consciously or not, has learned this same lesson. He knows that while the Crusade talks are certainly important, it's even more important that you DO something following the talk, and so he implemented

the famous, dramatic call to have those who choose Christ to now come down front.

So his conversion process has two stages:

1) Driving to the stadium, as I see it, helps change your vague desire for spiritual growth to something more specific-- "I'll do it with the Billy Graham Crusade".

2) Coming down front at the crusade makes the object (or subject) of this process to be Christ.

In my humble view, most churches only do stage 1). For stage 2), churches are different from Billy Graham's crusades so that the doing might be something as simple as a small commitment such as bringing cookies on sunday. A church-wide organized set of small such actions might do much to enliven a church and even help it grow.

The Achilles heel of Creationism

2005-11-15T07:59:00.000-08:00

What most strongly disproves Creationism to me, and thus opens the door to evolution of some form, is the plainer and more difficult to dismiss evidence that the planet earth is not 5000-6000 years old (as inferred from the biblical genealogy), but millions or billions of years old, as shown by carbon dating and the rate of earth's cooling. Even putting aside such dating, the sedimentary structure also points to long time periods in which different layers were laid down. And the most primitive fossils, most of which have become extinct, are evolutionarilly in the oldest layers.

The other defect in the Creationist point of view is the This time span of the earth's cooling from a liquid ball is certainly much larger than the 5k years between Adam and now.

That the earth is cooling is easily demonstrated by going down ito a mine, where the temperature increases a degree for every fifty feet you descend or dig. This suggested to Lord Kelvin in 1856 to calculate the age of the earth from the time it has taken to cool from a liquid ball to its present state. Fourier found an error I think and used a more sophisticated model. And other scientists and mathematicians up to the present day have worked on the problem.

To digress, an interesting feature, not widely known, is that the cooling is not entirely monotonic, as shown by Fourier's calculation and tree ring evidence I think, but resembles an exponentially decreasing curve with ripples on it. These ripples are caused by the fact that as the magma cools and solidifies at the surface, heat is generated by the solidifying crust. This should have been taken into account in studies of the greenshouse effect, but I fear it was not.

This time span is certainly much larger than the 5k years between Adam and now.

Can one be both a scientist and a believer?

2005-11-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

Can one be both a scientist and a believer?

I would say yes, because the causes are independent. Without a Bible, spirit and nature are two different worlds. As the sceptical Hume said (leaving out the Bible), you cannot get from "how" (the head, the world of science) to "why" (the heart, the world of spirit) by means of philosophy.

As to the "why", man operates by free will, God's hope being that man creates good, not evil, that man follows the Ten Commandments.

As to the "how", nature operates by mechanics, chemistry, and biology. Oranges and apples. The later - the "how" was held by eighteenth century philosopher/scientist/deists such as Descartes, to correspond to the thoughts

of the Deity, the rational one, the Great Watchmaker. These thoughts would be similar to rationalist Plato's world of pure ideas, the archetypes.

In Augustine's view, because only man can generate the good, while nature cannot do so deliberately, God (other than in the Creation and in special interventions) seems to let nature take its course, even to allowing cancer and catastrophes such as hurricanes and tsunami's, to occur. God allows such evils to occur (the "how") hoping that they might cause man to do the good (the "why").

The "why" is God's Word. Should a scientist choose to believe in it, the Bible gives the means to extract or generate it from the "how".

----------------------------------------------------
A simpler agument is as follows:

In the beginning was the Word (spirit), which emanated from God to produce nature and man. Spirit is the cause, nature is the result.

On the other hand, physical causation-- colliding of two billiard balls-- was SET UP by God, but He doesn't usually interfere, any more than He stops hurricanes or tsunami's. So science usually can do its business without considering God in the equation.

Thus one can be both a scientist and a believer.

The Bible is not a textbook of biology

2005-11-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

Regarding science vs. religion, and the Creationism vs evolution controversy here's my take:

All that we can know can be sorted into two bins, facts and values-- that which the head knows, and that which the heart knows.

The Bible isn't a biological textbook, as the Creationists would have it, for they look at the Bible as facts, with their heads, not as spiritual values, with their hearts.

In my view the Bible was never intended to be a scientific textbook, it was intended for a higher purpose, namely, teaching spiritual truths. You can't do both, because science and spirit are on two different epistemological levels. So while there are a number of errors in fact in the Bible, there are no errors in the spiritual truths, when the Bible is taken

as a whole, as it must be.

On the pragmatic meaning of truth

2005-11-15T07:19:00.000-08:00

By not useful, I suppose scientists mean that divine activity is not in their rule books. So it's irelevant. The fact is that they just don't know how to deal with it. And I suppose that is just as well, to keep them out of trouble.

But the usefulness of any idea-- pragmatically speaking-- is measured by the significance of the changes that would be wrought were the idea taken to be true. Certainly God's influence would be enormous. So to a pragmatist, an idea is true if it produces such changes.

To a pragmatist, then, beliefs are simply rules for actions. If they have been tested out as above, then they become knowledge. So there is a very close relation in the p-world between knowledge and ethics.

A model for the structure of mind, memory (inclusionality) and literature (Bible)

2005-11-15T07:09:00.000-08:00

Here I give a preliminary description of a model of mind, memory and the stucture of literature, such as the Bible, a novel, or a poem. The model has the following characteristics:

a) It assumes that the structure of literature, such as the Bible, is the same as mind, and that the structure of mind is the same as that of memory.

b) Memory is thought to be structured simultaneously by association in time as well as semantically, by meaning. That is used here.

c) The periphery is a circle, which represents points in time or the sequence of events, such as events in a novel, stories or parables in the Bible.

d) Meaning is given by a subject text in context. The meaningful contexts for any point on the circle are shown by

e) Creation is the clockwise direction, destruction is counterclockwise, and maintenance is a stationary point.

f) So far I have not included the bicameral brain metaphor, but I may look into a way of doing that.

g) So far the model is circular, but I plan to look into making it a polygon with perhaps 5, 7 or 8 sides. The five-sided polygon would be based on traditional five phase or element cycles of traditional chinese medicine. Here the arrows such as those in the picture above represent relationships, such as "creates" or "destroys". A 7-sided septagon would be similar, but the arrows probably have different meanings. Research in the past showed that the arrows emanating from any point turn out to be the same categories as the points on the polygon.

h) One way of classifying and sorting points would be to give the story or part of the story a name, and then assigning it to the Roget category it is listed under. For example, the category of "space" is Roget's category II, so one could call it R2. It would probably work better if the arrows are assigned to Roget categories, but I haven't yet examined this.

i) It is also possible to classify stories in terms of the protagonist, Enneagram type, and/or the life space, given by feng shui numbers. These are numbers 1-9, not the eight trigrams. So a given story might be 2, 6, 26 or 62. There's your structure, which is hierarchical.

See http://tap3x.net/EMBTI/j8clough.html for these numbers and additional information.

On UFO's

2005-11-15T06:59:00.000-08:00

Personally, I believe in UFOs. But there is a social taboo on admitting that UFOs exist. This may be a good thing, because people might not be able to handle the fact that we're under observation and even attack. And the theological implications are monumental. I believe that the Vatican has an office on that subject. If aliencs are good, are there

alien-type Jesuses? Or if they are evil, are they demons? Most fundamentalist Christians think so.

At the same time, the amount of personal testimony is staggering. If you Google on

UFO reporting center

you'll find a number of places on the web that collect such data.

I have also heard much of such testimony late at night on Coast-to-coast America (Art Bell and now George Noory). They can't all be crazy or lying. The testimony from policemen and airline pilots is hard to dismiss. There are also many cases of large numbers of people seeing them, such as the one about a year ago over Mexico City.

The number of people suffering from repeated abductions is also appreciable, but again there is a taboo against speaking of them. Psychiatrist John Mack of Harvard, killed, sadly, by a stray automobile about a year ago, had a program at Harvard to counsel them.

So I believe that UFOs exist. But they don't seem to exist in the same way that worldly objects do, for they leave very little hard evidence such as crashed vehicles. They appear out of nowhere and disappear in the same way, and sometimes perform manuevers such as right-angle turns, that would kill an earthly pilot. The suggestion has been made, which I accept, that UFOs do their travelling in the upper reaches of hyperdimensional space, presumably at speeds greater than that of light, and then descend to the lowest three of Cartesian space when looking for victims to abduct, or cattle to mutilate. There is much evidence of such mutilations, which appear to have been dropped from a height since the surrounding grass is undisturbed.

The holographic nature of creation

2005-11-15T06:55:00.000-08:00

Everything is connected. Last night on Coast-to-Coast America, Ian Punnit interviewed Fred Bell, http://www.pyradyne.com/ who has developed something called a holographic projector, which is described, along with Fred's work, at the bottom. I know it looks nutty, but Fred Bell is no quack, he is a highly credentialed theoretical physicist.

That aside, Bell, a descendent of Alexander Graham Bell, discussed what he calls "the holographic nature of creation". In brief, it means that everything is connected. It became obvious to me that we are heading to this as a new paradigm of reality which says that inside, everything is connected, as evidenced by the following set of concepts and phenomena, just off the top of my head:

inclusionality

synchronicity

Sheldrake's morphisms

psychic phenomena

Bohm's Implicate Order

Lotze's atomic relations

Leibniz' monads

quantum entanglement

Jesus' "I am in you and you are in me"

The Klein bottle

God as transcendent and immanent

the right brain metaphor

postmoderism

An excellent reference is MIchael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe". This is essentially the right brain metaphor. The left brain metaphor, that of science and rationality, began in the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

2005-11-15T06:50:00.000-08:00

A dialectical theology based on narrative space

I believe in letting the Bible explain the Bible, as much as possible. Barth used a dialectical approach. Here's an example of what seems to a somewhat related dialectic based approach - I think it's new : understanding Biblical concepts in terms of changes in narrative space.

The Book of Revelation is sometimes said to be the opening chapters of Genesis played backwards. In Genesis, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden to the world for sin-- disobedience. Conversely, according to Romans 1, we will be rescued in the final account (to the New Jeusalem, not another Garden) by faith. Disobedience and faith then should be opposites by symmetry, although on the surface they do no appear to be so. Disobedience has to do with things we do, faith with trust, and has nothing to do with works, as Paul and Luther both made clear.

So in these terms, Adam's sin wasn't so much from what he did, it's that he (Eve, really) believed the serpent ("It won't kill you to eat the apple, God just wants to keep you ignorant slaves."). In other words, he trusted in the serpent rather than God. As I see it, if you trust someone, you feel a sense of kinship or belonging. Sin is then more like breaking up with God, -- rejecting his love and grace-- which is the definition that Barth arrived at by his own method.

After Adam, we are all said to have original sin-- we're born with it. Since we didn't sin, original sin must be the wages of Adam's sin. It could be genetic, of course, but it also has to do with the fact that we were born outside the Garden-- outside of the Kingdom. So in terms of narrative space, original sin must simply mean being kept outside the Kingdom.

As to the atonement, it is, from Romans, that which made salvation by faith possible. In a certain sense, the Garden and the New Jerusalem are "up there", while earth is "down here". So getting expelled -- falling--is much easier than getting back home. We would need assistance. So another way of saying that Christ defeated sin, given the above, is that by his death the power of grace was created as a gift, to lift those with faith, who feel a longing or belonging with God, back home.

The collapse of right vs. wrong and the Jesus Space

2005-11-15T06:46:00.000-08:00

In "The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy", Hilary Putnam, one of today's greatest philosophers, points to the postmodern obliteration of an objective distinction between right and wrong -- of confusing fact with value - of "what is" with "what ought to be" - as the source of what is wrong with the world today.

For example, from http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2004/003/17.28.html we have:

"Though the pastors I listened to all these years might be surprised, it appears that leading philosophers are now endorsing their contention that the care of humans involves rules that are just as "factual" as the proper grade of motor oil to put in one's car or the amount of fertilizer to put on one's lawn."

But there's another way to go.

There are two role models for these worlds. In Romans 6-8, Paul refers to Adam as the role model for what is-- the techno-material man - and Christ as the role model for the spiritual--what we ought to be. Living as Adam is death, but living sinless as Christ is impossible. So how do we get from what is to what ought to be ? Paul gives the answer in Romans 6:11. One gets into "the Jesus Space" , as I call it, by following Christ, and considers oneself to be dead to sin (the ought to be) until one gradually realizes this condition. One never quite gets there, so perfection is not possible, but progress is.

Rahner, the transcendent Heideggerian

2005-11-15T06:20:00.000-08:00

After Catholic theologian Karl Rahner became a Jesuit, he was asked to obtain a doctorate in philosophy at Freiburg, Germany, where Martin Heidegger was rector. Rahner was greatly influenced by Heidegger's existential philosophy, but appalled at Heidegger's then-enthusiastic support of Nazism, so he studied under Honecker instead, although he attended Heidegger's seminars. One aspect of his doctoral thesis, Spirit in the World, concerned itself with an issue I am very interested in, what happens when we read the Bible. When later asked what he had learned trhere from Heidgger, his standard reply was "He taught me how to think", or a variant, "He taught me what happens when I read the Bible." In his thesis, Rahner had incorporated transcendence from Kant into the secular existentialism of Heidegger, a notable achievement. Here's more on this transcendence:

From http://www.island-of-freedom.com/RAHNER.HTM

God and Stuart Kauffman's self-organizing universe, evolution, and inclusionality

2005-11-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

Just to be clear, I'm not talking here about materialistic pantheism but panentheism, which includes the non-material, and this is Biblically based, not some New Age religious view.

As Kaufman puts it, on http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/zd-Ch.20.html , like inclusionality nature seems to be interconnected::

END

Psalm Cycle 120-134, the Beatitudes, and the Celebrate Recovery principles

2005-11-15T06:07:00.000-08:00

Note: Psalms 120-134 comprise the songs of ascent, being the fifteen steps of ascent to Jerusalem. [KJV version]. There are 15, which form two cycles of 8 and 7, the final or 16th returning to the first, Psalm 120. (Elsewhere I have also fitted these to the Seven Last Words of Christ.)

1 - Theme: Catastrophe and darkness.

Principle: Realize I'm not God; I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable.

Beat.1: "Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor"

Ps 120: " In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. "

Ps. 128 " Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD;"

2 - Theme: Hope and encouragement.

Principle: Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to him, and that He has the power to help me recover.

Beat.2: "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted"

Ps. 121. " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."

Ps. 129. "...may Israel now say: Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have not prevailed against me. "

3 - Theme : Commitment, humility and release.

Principle: Consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ's care and control.

Beat.3: (humility) "Happy are the meek"

Ps. 122. (release) " I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD. "

Ps. 130 (commitment) "I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. "

4 -Theme : Self-evaluation and Confession

Principle: Openly examine and confess my faults to God, to myself, and to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.

Beat.4: "Happy are the pure in heart"

Ps. 123 ".. Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us: ".

Ps. 131 "...Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of

his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. "

5 -Theme : Accepting change.

Principle: Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life

and humbly ask Him to remove my character defects.

Beat.5: "Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires"

Ps. 124. "... Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. "

6 -Theme : Making amends.

Principle: Evaluate all my relationships; Offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me

and make amends for harm I've done to others except when to do so would harm

them or others.

Beat. 6.: "Happy are the merciful"

Ps. 125 "...As for such as turn aside unto their crooked ways, the LORD shall lead them forth with the workers of iniquity: but peace shall be upon Israel. "

Ps. 133. " Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! "

7 -Theme : Peace and spiritual growth.

Principle: Reserve a daily time with God for self examination, Bible readings and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life and to gain the power to follow His will.

Beat.7: "Happy are the peacemakers"

Ps. 126 " The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."

Ps. 134. "Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD. "

8 -Theme : Outreach

Principle: Yield myself to God to be used to bring this Good News to others,

both by my example and by my words.

Beat.8: "Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires"

Ps. 127 " Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of [God's arrows] : they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate."

Ps. 120. " In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. "

==================================================

END

On Bricolage

2005-11-15T05:26:00.000-08:00

I believe that when we look something, or when we read a text such as the Bible

or poetry, or try to make sense of our lives, or write a play, or read tea leaves,

the mind performs bricolage, which is a kind of divination, for lack of a better word,

to make sense of the whole.

From http://omni.bus.ed.ac.uk/opsman/quality/SEM_black_run_7.htm :

"Bricolage

This refers to a type of logic referred to by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962)

and in Totemism (1962). Levi-Strauss derived the meaning of bricolage from the "bricoleur" --

someone who does odd jobs, making and mending things from bits and pieces which have

been left over from previous jobs. It provides a "science of the concrete" by which the world

is ordered in minute ways. Judith Williamson says that advertisers employ bricolage as

they can only construct meanings for products out of the bits and pieces of ideological

thought that already exist. "

We can see a similar representation in the art of Alan Rayner:

although I make no pretense as to how he actually painted the above, which is used

on http://www.goodshare.org/raynerinc.htm to represent

"Inclusionality – An Immersive Philosophy of Environmental Relationships"

Thus a pragmatist such as I am, or writer of scientific reports, as I was, or a reader

of Tarot cards, an artist or dramatist. These all deal with a bricolage of data,

starting with a blank display board or empty stage or empty mental space

on which he pastes a collage of data bits or events, so arranging them into a pattern

that makes sense. The sense comes, as in all art, from the whole emerging

from the arrangement.

This may also be the mechanism of Alan Rayner's inclusionality (see the above link),

by which I mean that there is no ONE thing inside of us that links all to all,

but different views of collections (contexts) of spaces or experiences of such spaces.

This would be similar to our own reading of a bible passage keeping in mind

other passages we know.

This also fits the classic definition of art by Aristotle, form

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/aristotl.htm#H9 :

"Art is defined by Aristotle as the realization in external form of a true idea,

and is traced back to that natural love of imitation which characterizes humans,

and to the pleasure which we feel in recognizing likenesses."

So that the form is symolic or iconic of a true idea, in the above case, the meaning.

Willard Quine went farther, believing that classical epistemology failed because of a circularity in the classical or Aristotelian concept of epistemology given above (because as above, given by Aristotle, the actual representation must exist for the statement to be true and vice versa. Quine thus instead advocated a PSYCHOLOGICAL not philosophical model of epistemology. (see

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/ )

In such a "naturalized" epistemology, the mind divinizes meaning in the aesthetic mode of the bricoleur, not the rational model of Kant et al.

On the truth of a Bible verse

2005-11-15T05:21:00.000-08:00

There is something special about the Bible text. If there are errors, the Barthian view (and mine) is that this is due to the error corrections of the Holy Spirit when the Bible is read in faith.

So you don't exactly trust the words, you trust the truth of the words-- as REVEALED to you via the Holy Spirit acting on you with the words. Faith is what opens you up for the Heb. 4:12 double-edged sword's cuttings and discernings.

You don't read the Word, the Word reads you.

2005-11-15T05:19:00.000-08:00

It really doesn't matter, says Paul, how you read the Bible, if you read it in faith for not matter if you are a literal reader of Bible, for example, taking Genesis as straight fact, or on the other hand as an allegory, you've been out-foxed.

For Paul says:

"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."

Hebrews 4:12 (KJV)

When science conflicts with the Bible

2005-11-15T05:14:00.000-08:00

Should one accept the results of science if they conflict with the Bible? I know, I know.... Jesus once scolded Peter I think for using human reason to warn Jesus not to go to Jerusalem on a donkey before the easter event.

Some hold the view that one should only compare like categories: science with science, spirit with spirit.

But perhaps the Holy Spirit guided me to the scientific results, which can't always be in agreement with the Bible, particularly when science says that the negroes were the first men (and the other races were new "speciations" from them).

Very problematic, agreed. But in the final analysis, my heart and not my head accepts or rejects the scientific judgment.

reading with scientific results.

Consider 1 Corinthians 13:12 :

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (KJV)

Face to face is the larger reality of Christianity. But in the everyday world, even if you have no belief in God, and know no scripture, you can still see, although only part of reality. That's the world of science.

What is truth ?

2005-11-15T05:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I grow weary of trying to explain the pragmatic outlook, when it's so different from traditional analytic thinking, so much so that it is nearlyimpossible to understand by most. Not their fault, and I would have the same problem had I not been born this way.

I go with Kierkegaard and Barth in believing that If God or Jesus is the Truth, then we can never know what truth is because we can never understand God (other than what the Bible says). K and B were both existentialists, which is roughly the european term for pragmatism.

The purple princess and global awareness

2005-11-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

Will those who believe that science knows all of the answers, while religion is nonsense, please explain to me how every three year old girl in this country knows that the Purple Princess outfit is the one to get for Halloween, for it tops all of its competition by miles. Sorry, all sold out.

No doubt advertising plays a role, and for each child that sees the ad, word of mouth to others. Semes. They spread like a virus infection.

Experience vs. Authority/ Analytic vs. Synthetic

2005-11-15T04:50:00.000-08:00

To a pragmatist everything comes from personal experience or the experience of others. The mother who warns a child to beware a hot stove would then be authority if she passed muster and many agreed, or in the case given, the mother seemed to be mostly right to the child, or the child was told by the rest of the family that "mom is always right". But not from her own proclamation of authority. And there is also continual testing, just as in science.

As to analytic vs. synthetic or pragmatic, consider these definitions.from Webster's dictionary, see

http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=analytical :

Analytical

1 : of or relating to analysis or analytics; especially : separating something into component parts or constituent elements
2 : being a proposition (as "no bachelor is married") whose truth is evident from the meaning of the words it contains -- compare SYNTHETIC

vs. synthetic (the method by which pragmatists think):

Analytic thinking then, goes from generals to particulars (data of experience), while synthetic goes from particulars (data of experience) to generals. In religion, the generals are beliefs, while the data of experience are faith. Karl Barth would say that the scriptures have no meaning - at least to us--if they are not heard, and I agree. I suppose you might argue that God heard them, because He said them, but we have no way of confirming this other than picking up a Bible or hearing it read.

We pragmatists would say that if a tree falls in a forest while nobody observed it is an undecideable (unless you go back to check). So the Bible is not Holy, unless we read or hear it read. As Karl Barth puts it, It takes the Holy Spirit to transmit the truth of the words to us. Or as Hebrews 4:12 puts it, for the words to act on us like a double-edged sword.

Like postmodernism, pragmatism starts with experience with a minimum of assumptions.

Presumptions in science aren't scientific ? I suppose you mean the presumptions of theory. Actually, it takes two to tango, an analytic theorist, who has presumptions leading to a theory,

which leads to data, from the general to the particulars, as above, and a laboratory scientist - (a pragmatist or synthetist) who starts with NO presumptions, and sees how well the theory fits the data. Both are useful, they just think differently.

Experience and authority as sources of knowledge

2005-11-15T04:43:00.000-08:00

Thus, as Karl and I see it, the truth of the Bible does not come by authority (although authority may tell us where to look), but by expeirence. In other words, the truth of the Bible comes not from authority but through the Holy Spirit.

Science is similarly pragmatic in that its truth is not fully believed until the results or experiments or calculations of theory -- the data, what is experienced--- are repeated

by others.

Toward a calculus of meaning

2005-11-15T04:25:00.000-08:00

This is basically a remap of the Roget categories to Pierce's 9x9 (the TXJ),

with the aim of setting up a calculus of meaning: the domain being God,

man, and others, including text. God acts on His own, and I do not presume

to specify God's actions. But in the everyday world, God seems to act

largely through others, so although theologically incorrect, I treat His

actions here as acting through others. So God is not explicitly in the algebra,

but appears only implicitly here in the actions of others.

Roget's spectrum of words, as I call it, does go from earth to heaven,

but on closer inspection it does so in pairs of antonyms. Except for

one section where the opposite is true, generally the even numbers are positive

and the odd ones negative. In a much simpler version, here I remap the Roget

numbers into Peirce's 9x9 matrix, where Roget's numbers of about 1000 are

separated into 81 sets of numbers. I have not yet separated these in terms

of positive and negative.

a) Peirce's terminology of embeddings:

Thirdness = outside = Doing = D

Secondness = middle = relational = Thinking = T

Firstness = inside = raw Perceiving = P

b) Roget's terminology of embeddings:

I = abstract = Thinking by others = T public, social or objective = as others think

II = space = Doing by others = D public, social or objective = as others do

III = matter = raw Perceiving by others = P public, social or objective = as others perceive

IV = intellect = Thinking by our own brain = t private, personal or subjective = as I think

II = space = Doing by our own brain or body = d private, personal or subjective = as I do

III = matter = raw Perceiving in our own brain = p private, personal or subjective =as I perceive

These give the following 9-fold map or matrix, where going up or going to the right means to the outside. Going down or to the left means to the inside. The map is much like the phases of TXJ or Tai Xuan Jing, where each letter is a phase digram, e.g. PP or pp is a solid line over a solid line. [Hence there does not seem to be a differentiation between public (objective) and private (subjective) perspectives the TXJ line structure, although there is at least a possibility of doing so in the 9 line appraisals for each tetragram. Perhaps these might map to even and odd line numbers or perhaps to AM and PM readings. ]

A further possible differentiation, which I have not pursued here, other than suggesting a possible terminology, is that,

since the categories are given in terms of pairs of letters, the self can be attached to either member of the pair. The member it is attached to would then be the verb, and the other the object of the verb. I would suggest bracketing of the form <> to the member which the self is attached to. The self used in this way would also include the "generalized other" of sociology, as used by George Mead. Thus P would be others in this sense thinking of an

inner perception. Leaving this aside for now, and proceeding, we have:

Social (y axis):

DD = Doing in the world or on world objects by others ("They run")

DT = Thinking in the world or of world objects by others ("They think of running")

DP = Perceiving in the world or of world objects by others ("They watch running")

PD = Doing in the world or on world objects by others ("They run")

PT =

PP =

DP =

Personal (x axis):

Unfinished.

==============

Correspondences of Enneagram and MBTI types (From Fudjack)

En. MBTI (SN Blindness)->[FT Dimness] = meaning + numerology
(from tests)

2 ESFJ, ENFJ (EFJ EFJ) -> [EJ] = doing for others, goal-oriented love, relating
3 ESTP, ESFP (ETP, EFP) -> [ETP EP] = doing external thing, not goal-oriented* growth, expressively creating
4 INTJ, INFJ (ITJ, IFJ) -> [ IFJ IJ] = doing something internal, goal-oriented practically creating

5 ISTP, INTP ( ITP) ->[ ITP IP] = thinking an internal, not goal-oriented change, uncertainty, sensuality
6 ISTJ, ISFJ ( ITJ, IFJ) ->[ IFJ IJ] = thinking an internal, goal-oriented devotion to family
7 ENTP, ENFP (ETP,EFP) -> [EFP EP ] = thinking an external, not goal-oriented intuition

8 ESTJ, ENTJ (ETJ) ->[ ETJ EJ] = feeling about others, goal-oriented power, control
9 INFP, ISFP ( IFP )->[ IFP IP] = feeling something internal, not goal-oriented humanitarian
1 all J-types ( J) ->[ ITJ IJ ] = feeling something internal, goal-oriented leader, initiator

* 3 is the artistic achiever

# Note that J= female and even numbers, P= male and odd numbers,
also and F at all the corners (so apparent FT dimness, meaning less important)

+ where E means external or for others, while I is internal
J means goal-oriented, P means not goal-oriented
============================