Christian apology by a non-Christian

[Skip]

Not to be tediously repetitive and obvious, but these views seem to me to be a consequence of your metaphysic, which (and correct me if I'm wrong) is a materialist one,

I have never denied this.

If, though, you allow for the spiritual, then it is entirely possible (and even likely) that the soul survives physical death, and that what happens to it next is a consequence of how it has executed its existence in this world.

I find it implausible, but will allow for it. Then, it's still individual responsibility.... that is, allowing also for free will, because without that, any consequences would be simply monstrous.

Similarly, it is entirely possible (and again, likely) that the soul had some sort of existence prior to incarnating into this world - an existence either similar to this "flesh and bones" existence, or of some different, perhaps more immaterial, type - an existence during which it might have been judged "bad", and "in need of redemption",

Karma? All right, but it doesn't seem very fair to start out as a helpless infant, at the physical and psychological mercy of others, with no memory of one's wrongdoings, no defences, yet already convicted and sentenced. A world with such divine 'justice' is incomprehensible, in light of the human justice by which we are expected to abide during life.

Another possibility that accounts for "original" sin is that along with genetic inheritance, there is moral inheritance, such that the sins of our (original) ancestors have been passed on to us - again, this does not seem fair, but again, we do not know how and why the rules of this place were created,

And yet the same unaccountable entities demand that we obey irrational rules with rational minds.

Do you know what I think causes the greatest amount of mental illness? (not just in humans, other animals, too) Contradiction. Being told that the perception of one's senses is false; that what one experiences is not what's happening; do as I say, not as I do; black is white and up is down.
Parents should not do that to their children. Gods should not do that to their creatures.

Assuming you're alluding to the crucifixion of Christ,

Yes, and Osiris, Mithras, the Huns' white horse, the Jews' ram, the young Aztec warriors, the Hindu widows and Chinese servants. As I said, pervasive almost to the point of ubiquity.

perhaps you could look at it in a different light: God (as/through Christ) made this sacrifice not to "persuade" or "mollify" *Himself*, but as an expression of love, of the lengths to which He is willing to go to offer salvation to His people.

Well, there is my problem. He and I have widely divergent definitions of love. What did the people need saving from, but his own anger? Why was he so angry in the first place? When my kids did something wrong, I lectured them at tedious length and punished them with extra chores or house arrest - not by making them kill their pets - or me.
On the other hand, I've heard that SS recruits were given dogs to train and then required to strangle those dogs as a test of discipline and obedience. Much like the Abraham story. Monstrous - and unacceptable to a materialist who values life.

After all, don't we laud as heroes those men and women who die in the course of defending or saving others, e.g. firefighters?

No. What we laud them for is taking a risk; being afraid and doing it anyway. We do not want them to die; it's not their death that saves others, it's their continued functionality.

Can you see this as the same principle writ large?

In no wise. Altruistic people are not bred for the express purpose of being ritually slaughtered.

As for the practical point of the sacrifice ... it is part of some interplay between the divine and the demonic, some sort of system by which divinity may choose to humble itself before the demonic, in order to acquire the "capital" by which it may then offer a lifeline to grace and salvation.

That same old pinochle game between Jehovah and Satan, with us as markers? No thanks.
And, anyway, that's not how it's presented in the various mythologies. It's the creation gods, the ones being worshipped, to whom we offer up the still-beating hearts of our livestock and children.

I think this puts the sacrifice into a whole different perspective, where it is not merely understandable, but amazing and humbling too for us - that a deity would put itself in that position for us.

What are we getting out of this generosity, except forgiveness for crimes we didn't commit? If he didn't throw the tantrum in the first place, he wouldn't require assuaging and could save himself the trouble of taking mortal form and going through the charade of dying/fooled ya!/resurrection. All you're saying is that the gods must all be crazy, and I agree.

I'm not stuck on Christianity: it's a latecomer and derivative. I reject all of them.

... Perhaps, too, there have been other similar sacrifices in the past, which have over time been lost to memory, or "expired", and this latest sacrifice was not so much the start of the possibility of redemption, as a "renewal" of that possibility (this seems less likely to me, but I'm simply exploring possibilities). Or perhaps it's an answer I can't even begin to imagine.

Go with Option 2; the other one leaves millions of people stranded between empires and cultures.

I don't know whether or not it is possible, one thing I do know though is: we all have a duty to do our utmost to bring it about.

Meh. Done my bit; leaving soon.

... you seem to think (unless I'm misreading you), "We listen through the wrong ear because we're crazy"; I think it's the other way around, I think "We're crazy because we listen through the wrong ear [and are crazed by what we hear]".

Circular. Whether mad gods create insane people or mentally unbalanced people invent crazy gods, the outcome is a violent, dismal, nasty world-order.

Why the robes and pomp and burnings at the stake?

Perversion of the purity of the essence of the original redemptive message due to - again, forgive the repetition - "listening through the wrong ear".

Where is the original message? The one we received early on and garbled? How and why did we garble it? How come, with so many anointed messengers over the millennia, god never managed to send a single clear, executable directive?

... I suppose I'd view it as a partnership, with the divine as the major partner.

Controlling interest. Okay. Still - why no discernible cumulative effect?

...as for the saved reaching down to the unsaved, don't you see that happening already in the world around you?

Yes. Pathetically few, underfunded and chronically outgunned, but also are evenly divided between believers of mutually inimical faiths and unbelievers.

The problem, it seems to me, is that we are as a group so prone to listening through the wrong ear (or, in your frame, "crazy") that progress is difficult.

Progress is largely illusory. I recently told an acquaintance that I believe we've taken three steps forward for every two steps back over the last 2000 years ... Watching the most self-righteously and willfully ignorant, blindly selfish and callous Americans destroy in a decade the social gains of half a century, I'm no longer sure I do believe it.

I know personally how much of a problem this is because I struggle with addictive behaviours, which I know are leading me down the wrong path, yet I can't seem to do anything about them. Even believing theoretically in the possibility of salvation, I struggle to connect the lifeline.

We are certainly creatures prone to habit, subject to environmental and cultural pressures; complex and fragile. It is sometimes helpful to forgive ourselves, and seek the solace of our own kind (and some of us can sometimes be very kind!) rather than wait for a supernatural entity to absolve us. At other times, random acts of charity, childish play or uninhibited song can be healing.

[Harry Baird]

Hello, Skip,

I think some (by no means all) of your objections to what I'm suggesting stem from your (seeming) assumption in certain cases that I am advocating standard Christian doctrine, when in fact I see things differently. Like Gustav, I am a non-Christian who simply sees value or truth in certain aspects of Christianity - you might say that I borrow from Christianity, or wish to see it amended or corrected. The other world religions that have elements in which I find most value are Jainism (for its respect for other life forms) and Manichaeanism (for its view of a duality between forces of good and evil).

Your assumption of standard Christian doctrine is most apparent when you ask/say things like:

* "And yet the same unaccountable entities demand that we obey irrational rules with rational minds.",

* "Gods should not do that [tell contradictions --HB] to their creatures.", and

* "What did the people need saving from, but his own anger?"

I do not, however, accept the standard Christian story that God is simultaneously omnipotent and the Creator of all - I agree that if He were, it would be particularly hard to defend Christianity. I believe that God works within the constraints of this place, and that what we need saving from is all that which wishes us harm, over which God has only limited power. Too, then, I do not believe that God is responsible for any harm or contradiction that we suffer, nor is he responsible for any irrational rules. He is the one trying to save us from this mess, however we got into it in the first place, not the one who got us into said mess.

Nor do I believe that the Bible is (at least wholly) divinely inspired, such that through it God "told us contradictions". Instead, I believe that the sources of the Bible are diverse.

This assumption of an omnipotent Creator God might also come into play when you ask rhetorically, "That same old pinochle game between Jehovah and Satan, with us as markers? No thanks.". It seems to me that embedded in this question is an assumption that God set this game up when it could have been avoided; that it is an unjustifiable set-up which speaks poorly of God's judgement/character. In fact, I do not believe that God is responsible for injustice, and that any injustice in the set-up of the game was unavoidable on God's part - that He is doing His best within the constraints within which He works.

Similarly, you ask: "What are we getting out of this generosity, except forgiveness for crimes we didn't commit? If he didn't throw the tantrum in the first place, he wouldn't require assuaging and could save himself the trouble of taking mortal form and going through the charade of dying/fooled ya!/resurrection".

With respect to "crimes we didn't commit", I am not entirely sure what the truth is, but here are a few things I think to be likely:
(1) we have free will,
(2.a.) we either abused our free will to end up on the Earth in the first place, given a chance to redeem ourselves, and/or,
(2.b.) this Earth is a place where the consequences of our infractions are dire, possibly unfairly so, not by the fault of God, but by its nature, which He had only a limited role in defining.

In any case, it is probably obvious to you by now that I don't believe in a tantrum-throwing God; I believe in a patient, hard-working, loving God who is striving His best under difficult circumstances (a battle) to save as many of us as He can from circumstances not entirely under His control. Perhaps this also answers your question as to "why no discernible cumulative effect?": because you are not guaranteed victory in a battle.

Approaching the rest of your post in sequence, you write:

"it doesn't seem very fair to start out as a helpless infant, at the physical and psychological mercy of others, with no memory of one's wrongdoings, no defences, yet already convicted and sentenced".

Well, whether or not it's fair might depend on what one has been "convicted" for. Also, I have suggested that the world might simply not be fair, not due to any contrivance on God's part, but simply due to the way it has been set up despite His wishes, possibly in part by forces not so inclined to justice and our well-being as He is. This makes His continued efforts to aid us even more admirable. If He becomes angry (and I'm not sure that He does), it would only be because He has done so much for us, and we have not reciprocated in kind.

With respect to human/animal sacrifice, I find it as abhorrent as you do. I think, though, that Christ's sacrifice is different, because voluntary, and because resurrecting. You suggest that what we actually laud firefighters for is "taking a risk; being afraid and doing it anyway. We do not want them to die; it's not their death that saves others, it's their continued functionality". I'm not sure whether this adequately addresses your point, but Christ, too, by the Biblical account, was afraid and did it anyway, and, to the best of my knowledge, continues to be functional too - recall that his death was followed by a resurrection.

These are good and challenging questions: "Where is the original message? The one we received early on and garbled? How and why did we garble it? How come, with so many anointed messengers over the millennia, god never managed to send a single clear, executable directive?". It is, indeed, peculiar (and frustrating and confusing) that we do not have a single, consistent, universally-agreed upon Holy Message to which we can recur for guidance. To be honest, I do not have a fully worked-out answer as to why not; the best I've come up with is that the "rules of the game" do not allow for it - that this is a place where the light is permitted to reach only in certain, limited ways (again, not by God's will, but due to the way the place has been set up). As for the original message of redemption, I would say that it was spread orally by Christ and his original disciples, and suffered various degrees of interpretation and corruption after that, partly, again, due to people "listening through the wrong ear".

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The first impression, reading over the last few posts, is hard to state because it might be interpreted as 'offense', is that I am reading the thoughts of men who are quite roundly outside of a concrete relationship to religion and spirituality.

It is as if both Skip and Harry are looking in through a chink in a wall to a drama which is only partially seen. I suggest the viewer and the view would operate their viewing differently if either of them had a tangible spiritual life or religious life. Also, there is almost no academic, if you will, or scholastic and studied relation with the subjects they desire to deal on. Skip's thought-processes seem rather murky generally though I think I do understand his 'objections' when he states them, but generally I see him as a man who has only superficially 'investigated' these issues and has asked limited questions.

I know Harry somewhat more because we have conversed over some time but I also discern an intelligent and thoughtful person who yet does not have a 'tangible spiritual life' and so really seems like an intellect looking in on something dimly seen through a 'chink' in a wall. Great work, good skill in organizing ideas, but no internal relationship. So, based on what I read, his appreciation and understanding of 'Christianity' is nearly entirely intellectual and there is little or no connecting point to any sort of living, divine or sacred potency, however it is conceived. Religion is a relationship with the greater self through one's full self and it is only in modernity that we have fragmentary and partial 'mental' relationship with life generally, and specifics specifically. It seems to have to do with the way that the mind compartmentalizes and categorizes.

'Christ' then is a mere idea and in some sense an empty, non-numinous symbol. But it has to be understood, I think, that 'religious life', though a description hard to squeeze into a paragraph, is about engagement from other levels within a person. I find it interesting that even with Harry's description of his friend's religious choice it seemed to have been a choice arrived at 'reasonably', in similar manner as one might research the best car to drive or sift through the language in a loan contract. In any case I did not sense a quest for an Image of the Self, or the core of the Self itself, nor for 'Living Water', nor the appreciation of a Symbol containing divine power or potency sought as a result of a sense of profound perdition, of coming to the end of one's ability to manage existence. Though it is easy to render it ridiculous and laughable, in Christian lore it is a Savior that reaches out, essentially, to a dying man and brings him back into life. On existential levels, outside of intellectual traditions either profound or shallow, this is for a Christian, and one who has gone through the ringer, the Key element.

No one of you blokes is speaking on that level.

The symbol for that, and its link with the soteriological, can of course be expressed in an image: a drowning man rescued by a power or potency outside of that calamity. It is in my view very different to toss up opinions of either the sense or the senselessness of a given spiritual life (or religious system, etc), when one is fully outside of that sort of relationship. Relatedness to a divinity in every religious tradition I have looked into is a far greater and more total existential relationship. It is expressed through a complete being and not through an auditory soundtrack, or some thin, linear discourse. It is only *fair* to at least acknowledge that this is so.

So, what I sense is that Skip has rejected the whole notion of the possibility of relatedness to 'divinity' because his internal structures are basically shallow. By focussing on a limited political-materialistic view and having no other view available to him---likely from lack of wide reading and also likely no real interest in the essence of the question---he privileges the most reduced and also ridiculized views of the general question (viz: What is and what can be religion in the life of a man), and brings those views into service of his desire: to undermine the possibility of such a relationship because he has none.

I think there is a great deal more in fact that one could say about this whole approach, which is very common 'these days'. One is that it is inevitable as old structures fall to the ground and before they are restructured again. Two is that all manner of different people have gone through this particular mill and have come out the other side looking for new language and new means to re-sacralize life and the living of life. This endeavor can be traced and is part of our intellectual traditions especially in the cusp between the 19th and the 20th Centuries. But---duh!---one would actually have to take the time to become familiar with them. And once again: this is not in the domain of interest of the merely Common Man, he who asserts himself into the present and attempts to make judgments and decisions of things about which he is fundamentally unqualified. This is precisely the point I have been stressing though it is indeed unpopular. Oh well....

It is not enough to spout discourse from the dark corner of one's own limitation.

My sense of Harry is, as I say, a man who is turning all this over in an upper compartment of the self: almost entirely in the brain-department. But with any religious relationship, and speaking from a perspective of the majority of man's history of relationship to Divinity, well or badly conceived, it *happens* on another level. One participates in it and with it.

However, his description of the Manichean, if indeed he feels himself really and truly to exist in that level of conflict, would seem to have potential as a possible 'living' religious platform.

I cannot from what little I am able to understand of Manichian texts (highly symbolic representations and not translated into concrete intellectual terms as are all dimensions of Christianity as expressed through Greek rhetoric) understand just how a Manichean would organize himself in this life and how he would undertake to oppose the evil lord of this world. I find that the overall pattern, though, the symbolic representation as an organization of perception (of our world) is compelling in many ways.

Now, I am not outside of any of the 'problems' I am outlining, just for the record. If I critique an attitude or an outlook, or note a 'defect', it is because this operates in me, too. I am of the opinion that we need to be more self-conscious of what is happening around us and how we give expression to it.

As I have said previously, I think that to be able to look at 'Christianity' one does well to have another point of reference. Unfortunately Christianity suffers because it is a limited description, locked into deeply meaningful stories which are yet too narrow compartments for wider view and metaphysics. That may be because of the unsophisticated level of early Christians or the limitations of man generally in that period of time. (And these limitations still function and live in us, now, as I have been pointing out). I suggest that one can access a far more full overarching view of *religion* through examination and familiarity with the terms of the Vedas. I will make an effort to express some part of that in another post.

[Skip]

When addressing questions about religion, I can only refer to what's in the readily-available literature. I have not delved at all deeply into the arcane, scholarly or esoteric. I'm dealing only with what ordinary people profess to believe; what they are taught; what they depend on for their salvation. Christianity is numerically over-represented in my vicinity, but I don't see it as all that unique in the underlying principles. These days, religious authority is concentrated in purveyors of the single, all-knowing, all-judging, all-powerful, commandment-writing masculine creator image - Big Omni. Previous organized religions were of more local scale and had multiple deities, but most of the tenets were similar. What they have in common is hierarchy and the demand of surrender (a sacrifice, if not of blood, at least of possessions, or autonomy or personal happiness.)

I could, if I made the effort, trace the development of each civilization through to its decline and fall; note and how the religion was deployed at each stage. It's not a huge anthropological mystery. It's much more of a psychological mystery - and that's beyond my capability to unravel.

Harry Baird:

I do not, however, accept the standard Christian story that God is simultaneously omnipotent and the Creator of all - I agree that if He were, it would be particularly hard to defend Christianity. I believe that God works within the constraints of this place, and that what we need saving from is all that which wishes us harm, over which God has only limited power. Too, then, I do not believe that God is responsible for any harm or contradiction that we suffer, nor is he responsible for any irrational rules. He is the one trying to save us from this mess, however we got into it in the first place, not the one who got us into said mess.

In that case, you have to deconstruct the prevailing mythologies, choose the bits from each that you like and build an enlightened modern theology. You won't be the first to attempt this formidable task, but you may be the first who succeeds.

I wish you the greatest possible pleasure and satisfaction in the endeavour.

[Harry Baird]

Well, Gustav, I'm not quite sure what to say after that brutal attack. You sure have offended me. (I'm kidding)

Seriously, I've already admitted that mostly what I have to say is based on theory and not practice, so how could I be offended by your restating that? Yes, "engagement" on those "other levels" is what is missing from my spiritual life.

In terms of Skip's materialism, I actually think that in that, Skip, you've set yourself a particularly tough row to hoe (and I would say the same of every materialist): you've committed yourself to rejecting and "explaining away" every spiritual, "supernatural", and "paranormal" event that ever occurs - "daunting" doesn't begin to describe such a task in my view. I will say, though, that *within* the confines of your materialism, you seem to be a thoroughly decent and ethical chap.

Thank you for your supportive words re constructing a new theology, however, I would probably want to have some solider ground to stand on before I attempted such a bold endeavour - some sort of revelation, for example, or at least more definitive spiritual experiences under my belt. Mostly in this thread I've been speculating based on the little information I have: to move from speculation to declaration (of a type I would feel confident in making and promoting to the world) would require much more extensive information and *confirmed* knowledge. There are all too many metaphysical systems floating around whose epistemic basis is entirely unclear (straight out of the author's imagination in many cases would be my guess) - I would not want to merely add to such confusion, I'd prefer to get involved only if I had some degree of certainty that I was in fact clearing it up with real knowledge. I suppose, though, that if I were to attempt it anyway, I could make it very clear where I was speculating and where I truly knew what I was talking about.

[uwot]

I say that defining things is crucial, and is the primary act of any man, in any context, except those who have given up or surrendered the field. Do you agree or disagree with this? How do your definitions, if you make them (and I assume you do), function. What are those definitions?

I think that is nonsense. The primary act of any person is to experience things to define. As I said previously, definition is fluid, even the definition of definition. Language is consensual or it is solipsistic. I make my definitions the same way that the vast majority of people do, mass man if you will; we practice language with other human beings and adjust it if the results are not those anticipated. We don't waste our time insisting that others see things our way.

In the intellectual sphere, we deal in a world composed of words, a language-world. To become involved in intellect and ideas is to get involved with language, and meaning, and the history of thinking that lies behind it all. 'Books' are the receptacles of this, and we read books in order to familiarize ourselves, and to immerse ourselves, in the ideas of our fellows.

You wrote:

• 'I suspect what you describe as study is what I would call having read a few books'.

And yes, of course, that is part of study. But it is certainly not all. For example, I have lived in numerous countries in Latin America and so I have opinions about Latinos and Latin American issues. Not only from reading but through living in the place. Your statement, in my view, is loaded more with animus than with anything else, I sense. Do you mean that there is a source of knowing that is independent of 'books', i.e. of language? If so what is it? Speak about how you approach knowledge, or meaning, and how you think about these things.

People who read books in isolation choose the books they read. I would suggest that you haven't studied anything until you have exposed your understanding to rigorous confrontation. It takes enormous self discipline to read work that challenges your own view; few people do it outside of an academic setting. Confirmation bias is enough of a problem in academia, it is rampant outside and something you fall foul of. I agree that travel broadens the mind and if you were talking specifically about Latin American issues, I might take your views more seriously. The point about being somewhere is that it will give you far greater knowledge of that place than reading alone, because "there is a source of knowing that is independent of 'books', i.e. of language"; it's called experience.

'Indeed. And if you ever study philosophy, you will discover it is more than semantics.'

This is another loaded statement. It is the animus that shines out of it.

What on Earth are you talking about? I looked up animus, some Jungian term, I gather.

That is not so much a problem if that animus can also begin to express itself. Do you mean to say that you suppose I have no contact with philosophy? And by philosophy that you mean those philosophies that are written in books? Do you mean to say that I have not read enough books, or just certain ones?

No. I mean that people like you think an education is reading books that reinforce their shriveled opinions.

Do you think I mean, when I speak about the value of metaphysics, or the effect of it, that I am referring solely to 'semantics'? But semantics (as in specific definitions of words) was your contribution here. When I speak of 'defining' I mean it in a larger sense: What sort of world we are in; What structures lie behind it or underneath it, etc. Please speak about how you approach and answer some of these questions.

Well, there you go. That's you defining define. What you would achieve by 'defining', I would attempt by using science and philosophy; looking at the world and putting it into a context. The trouble with having rigid definitions is that you are compelled to hammer the world into shape in order for it to fit. That is more or less the issue identified by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Oh, I see. You are a conspiracy nutter.

Another merely baiting statement. You are up to three or four now and I find it tiresome if you don't simultaneously work to fill out your own ideas. I would say that Perception, generally, is a sort of 'conspiracy' between those who organize their perception. How we come to see our world is the working out of a series of agreements. In this sense it is a grand conspiracy we are all part of. To look at the cultural and social world that surrounds us and to see it as the sum of 'conspiration', influenced by propaganda (television and the studied use of communication), and largely or significantly determined by economic forces, is a rather obvious statement it seems to me. How do you see it? How do you think about it? How do you think about the way that you, as a person, have been informed? From whence came your values?

I think this view is simplistic. You appear to believe that the media we absorb is cumulative; I accept what you say about "a series of agreements", but once again, you miss out the importance of disagreements. Someone who uncritically accepts another's opinion is only slightly more of a fool than someone who uncritically accepts their own. I couldn't tell you whence came my values; I don't think it is coincidence that they are broadly in line with my parents or the society I happen to live in. Philosophically I have an unrigorous approval of the aims of utilitarianism, left of centre politics and a general sense that the christian doctrine of doing unto others as you would have done to yourself, is good advice.

Only if you need idolatry to do your thinking for you. Have you no idea how religion works?

Talk about 'how religion works'. Talk about what it is and what it does. You are essentially saying: You do not see how religion works. So, go to work on speaking about that.

Religion is distinct from people's 'spiritual beliefs'; I have no problem with people thinking whatever they wish. Christianity on the other hand is predicated on beliefs that are intended to be accepted. If you wish to go back to it's roots, as you do with words, it was only it's adoption by the Emperor Constantine that rescued it from the obscurity of countless other cults. The Roman's were very concerned to win the battle of hearts and minds as well as military victory, they knew the importance of keeping 'mass man' subdued. Part of the 'appeal' is the idolatry, the crucifixion and the virgin Mary, for example. Another attraction is the simple answers that appeal to 'mass man'. The fundamental questions of philosophy and science: 'where did the world come from?', 'what is it made of?' and 'how does it work?' are wrapped up in the trinity; the father, son and holy ghost.

Again you have misconstrued. I said I didn’t choose their idols for them; I don’t believe they are necessary for philosophical or ethical development. Many are harmless, some, such as you appear to advocate, are damaging.

I think the work I used here was 'authority'. I accept authority and consider authorities as persons of tremendous and indispensable value and importance. In 'authority' I will use the stem which is to say 'author' (1250–1300; earlier auct(h)or, Middle English auto(u)r < Anglo-French < Latin auctor writer, progenitor <augēre to increase, augment], I mean 'originator' and 'definer'. This is a basic act of literary culture. It is how ideas come into our world. To hold to ideas is to have been exposed to ideas, and this happens by coming in contact with 'authority' in one form or another.

Which is all very interesting, but you are possibly the only person on the planet who uses 'authority' in that way.

I have the sense that you do not, or did not, really share those ideas that you value with your children. I may be very wrong, but this is how I interpreted your previous statement.

You are completely wrong. Children quickly learn your values without you having to express them. Again; experience it a vital source of knowledge. I try to live by my ideals and to teach my children by example. The only time I get into 'Do as I say, don't do as I do.' is when I do something stupid.
Incidentally, I think this is a baiting statement and that you are therefore a hypocrite.

This is not so uncommon and so I am speaking less of you than of general trends. It is part I think of 'abandoning the field', which means really leaving it up to someone else, or to culture generally. Our definitions of the world, then, will be absorbed generally, they will flow in from around us through any number of different media. This is what I am speaking about. I think it is far better to go right to the sources and to select those sources.

I think there is something about Richard Dawkins 'memes' in what you say. I think his evolutionary model of ideas is not only desirable, it is thankfully inevitable. The world changes, and with it our understanding and language.

And this is an act of discrimination, of defining, of selection. It is a conscious and volitional act of valuation. And also I mean to limit the information to those sources that one feels contain 'real value', formative value. This means to discriminate against 'the world'. To keep certain things out.

You are welcome to your medieval world view, you should have no difficulty keeping riff-raff out.

Now, if you want to speak to this or about this please do. Talk about your relationship to education and how you approach or approached it.

Education is learning something new, not simply that some other crank agrees with you.

The fact that fewer people believe constants does not mean they believe nothing.

Do people now believe less in 'constants'? Are you sure? Is it not possible that having no 'constants' as a referent may lead away from the capacity to define anything in reality? I mean if taken to its logical extreme? Have you really thought about this?

Yes. So did Bertrand Russell; his conclusion that logical atomism doesn't work is good enough for me. On that issue, I am happy to accept his 'authority'.

It seems quite true that even without 'constants', as I am speaking of them, people will still have thought and be able to think about 'something'. But this is sort of my point: thinking merely os something might really be thinking about 'nothing' as the term is used popularly: trash, irrelevancies, etc. And while it is true that millions of people thinking of irrelevancies is not the same as thinking, almost Buddha-like, of 'nothing', it is not at all the same as pointed or informed thought, which at its highest point, I say, is 'aristocratic'. In the original Greek sense!

Indeed? That's not what anyone else means by aristocratic anymore.

This is a chance for you, uwot, at least with me, to begin to write out full paragraphs of what you think. If you are actually interested in conversation I think you owe to me, to readership and also to yourself. Again, I regret putting it to you in this way sensing that you will react against it. But if you don't fill out your own ideas you will get no more response from me.

I'll take that risk.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

What on Earth are you talking about? I looked up animus, some Jungian term, I gather.

• An·i·mus (n-ms) n.
  1. An attitude that informs one's actions; disposition.
  2. A feeling of animosity; ill will. See Synonyms at enmity.
  3. In Jungian psychology, the masculine inner personality as present in women.

I meant it in the sense of number 2 but with an understanding of 2 certainly number 1 would apply. Number 3 is indeed specific to Jungian psychology. A sort of 'bad spirit' that gets into women...

The primary act of any person is to experience things to define.

The act of defining, in the sense I mean, would not then be a primary act, it would be an act almost on the other side of experience. Still, there seems to be a problem with highlighting 'experiencing' as something of much value at all, if only because a cow or a fish is certainly 'experiencing' its reality. Experience in itself, then, is not the defining thing. But I certainly would agree with you that 'experience', like existence, is primary. You have to exist first!

Definition is indeed fluid, but defining as I am defining it is selective and moves toward fixity; toward establishing of 'basic things' and even perhaps things that do not change. To define things as I do, and even to see it as a possibility, and certainly to choose it and decide it is 'necessary', is exactly the area I am working in. Coming to 'strong definitions', deciding to arrive at them, is itself a defining act. Like the classic two-bladed sword it is problematic. To decide on one thing is to effectively decide against, or exclude, another. Still, and no matter what objections are brought to bear against it, I see that it is the primary human act, and that to be 'human' in this sense is not the first act of experience, but rather on the opposite end of a long, long chain of decisions.

[...] because "there is a source of knowing that is independent of 'books', i.e. of language"; it's called experience.

I do believe I understand what you are saying, and perhaps I have some sense why you say it, or what ideas support it logically, but I must say that even superficially it seems that it would be challenged. It would depend a good deal on how one conceived 'source of knowing'. Myself, I have come to decide that it is language itself that contains a or perhaps 'the' mystery. It is language as possibility, or meta-language, or Knowing which is also tied to Being and to Memory that hold many hard-to-unravel 'secrets'.

Have you ever looked into the question of feral children? Children that were not raised within human language structures? It is very curious what seems to happen to them: they do not gain what it is that makes humans human. And so they remain stuck at some other, inferior, level. This places a great emphasis therefor on the language-context, and that is one area of my emphasis: language, culture, literacy, sophistication in handling language, also the Great Repository of human knowledge: libraries, language systems and books. But really what that means are those men, those persons, who have taken all that into themselves. Who when they speak, speak from that depth.

Mere 'experience', as in an animal (though certainly there is a great deal of awareness of a certain sort), is simply not enough. To make sense of what is experienced, to begin to order it, and to begin to discriminate and to decide, would seem to be the crucial areas.

I would suggest that you haven't studied anything until you have exposed your understanding to rigorous confrontation. It takes enormous self discipline to read work that challenges your own view; few people do it outside of an academic setting. Confirmation bias is enough of a problem in academia [...]

Can you speak some of how submitting yourself to 'rigorous confrontation' worked out for you? When did you first submit to such a confrontation? Did it come easy for you or did it take a long time to develop this discipline? What are you now confronting yourself with?

It would seem to me a very good thing to consciously subject oneself to having to confront the other side of every idea and belief that we may hold and to regard our perceptions and ideas as evolving, or potentially so. Yet on another level it would seem that if we understood our structure of ideas as fluid-in-se, and if there were---if you'll permit me to say it in this way---no indivisible atomic base, then it would follow that the 'atoms' would be infinitely divisible, and would keep dividing and never be able to restructure themselves into forms. How do you solve that one? Is there no 'bedrock' for you?

I mean that people like you think an education is reading books that reinforce their shriveled opinions.

Can you be more specific? When you mean 'shriveled', what exactly are you comparing my opinions (if you are speaking of me) to? Can you speak more exactly of a specific idea of mine that you have determined is shriveled?

That's you defining define. What you would achieve by 'defining', I would attempt by using science and philosophy [...]

Then we are engaged in quite the same thing. In my own case I would use 'science' where science is called for and where its function is possible and useful, and philosophy where philosophy is useful and possible. To that I of course add (or do not subtract) another one: religion. But the definition of 'religion' is very problematic. It cannot be defined in a word or a paragraph. It seems to require a whole conversation. Still, and no matter what---and you seem to agree actually---we are called upon to define. We disagree when our definitions do not coincide. And with this we have Strife. Battles. Conflict. The possibility of winning and losing. The possibility of 'the wrong' winning and 'the right' losing.

[...] you miss out the importance of disagreements. Someone who uncritically accepts another's opinion is only slightly more of a fool than someone who uncritically accepts their own. I couldn't tell you whence came my values; I don't think it is coincidence that they are broadly in line with my parents or the society I happen to live in. Philosophically I have an unrigorous approval of the aims of utilitarianism, left of centre politics and a general sense that the christian doctrine of doing unto others as you would have done to yourself, is good advice.

I do not accept your definition of having missed the point of disagreement. Where we seem to have some agreement is in the need to use critical skills in examining all that comes to us.

I also have a sense that part of this process involves an actual examination of 'what has informed us', so that we KNOW and can tall some other [from] 'whence came my values'. That means a sort of archeological examination of oneself, to see what is 'down there'. It is in that spirit actually that I speak about some of the things I speak about, or value certain things, or highlight them. I have, to my satisfaction at least in some sense, looked into 'what informed me', and to what cultural influences have, like a boat on the water, blown me around. It is in that spirit exactly that I say: We must not fail to understand and to appreciate the values stored up as language and meaning within our own traditions.

While I think I can appreciate a doctrine of 'utilitarianism' I am also attracted to what is clearly not arrived at through subtraction of what is non-utile. So, we cut right to the chase in this. I hold to a notion of a 'higher metaphysic' and to values that are not connected with the immediately tangible, and so I would define choices and values that are non-utilitarian. Still, I can respect your platform whatever it may be.

Religion is distinct from people's 'spiritual beliefs'; I have no problem with people thinking whatever they wish. Christianity on the other hand is predicated on beliefs that are intended to be accepted.

Religion is very hard to define, in fact. To speak generally and superficially about it will more often than not amount to an error, as I see things. I sense that your definitions (heh heh) of these questions is quite superficial and limited to your own present and to a critique of your present. But an examination of what religion is, and what it has been, and what it could be, and even if or if not is is quintessential to man and necessary and even inevitable, are huge and demanding questions that cannot be approached through (absurd) reductions offered a priori. That is my starting point, even, for an examination of the question.

All religions in the sense of ethical systems make demands on all people within those cultural bounds so your statement about Christianity specifically is without value. It contributes very little. Also, if indeed you don't really understand 'what informs you' you might not be exactly the one to be qualified in saying just what Christianity does and doesn't do. It may be far more complex than you imagine.

I wrote:

• "And this is an act of discrimination, of defining, of selection. It is a conscious and volitional act of valuation. And also I mean to limit the information to those sources that one feels contain 'real value', formative value. This means to discriminate against 'the world'. To keep certain things out."

To discriminate, select and define in our present could be to discriminate among different brands of ultra-libertarian viewpoint or praxes, so your view that my terms are Mediaeval is simply inaccurate. The mediaeval, as I understand it, is a sort of substrate to our thinking and has to do with the fact that, at one time, though perhaps not now, (depends on the person and the views that inform him), the World was once orderable, or a perceived order was seen as possible, that it existed somewhere, somehow. The Mediaeval world is relevant because it was an attempt to construct a social system on an existent sense of such an Order. In this sense there was, at some level, a bedrock to which one could refer. That Mediaeval world was indeed shattered and is still breaking apart but this does not mean that our World is not still orderable, nor that there is no underlying structure that we might discern. How it comes about---if it comes about---that the World is reordered and that a newer and more solid foundation will be discerned, is of course inner structure of the problem. It is certainly being ordered, now and today, but I am not sure that we agree with those terms. It could very well happen that it moves in the direction of a badly lit science-fiction dystopia, we see some of that but we are not sure.

Allow me to offer you this Bjornstrandian definition. You can tack it up somewhere...

To me, and in this present conversation, 'riff-raff' means people who imagine they are qualified to make sweeping statements [about religion, about Christianity] but who, when interrogated, show themselves as virtually illiterate in the specifics of those questions.

That is a tough statement, I know.

Education is learning something new, not simply that some other crank agrees with you.

I would phrase it differently, and substantially so. It seems to me that to educate one has first to be educated. That involves a great sacrifice toward gaining education, and that means an endless (as you say) process of confrontation with persons who have done that work, who have also lived life, and have something useful and valuable to say about 'things'. To arrive at a curriculum and decisions of what one might 'educate' with is to have made a great selection from among a multitude of things, and to have highlighted or exalted some things as being of more value than others.

Here is an example, from your neck of the woods, of a man that I personally admire and to whom I would very much have liked to have received 'education' from. (He died before I was born so I only have recourse now to his ghost!) Richard Livingstone.

Here is a PDF of 'A Defense of Classical Education'. It is out of print an unavailable in the original edition. If you run across it let me know. I'll give you one hundred guilty American dollars for it...

[uwot]

Thank you for the clarification of animus, Gustav. You are quite right.

Definition is indeed fluid, but defining as I am defining it is selective and moves toward fixity; toward establishing of 'basic things' and even perhaps things that do not change.

I understand that, I even commented on it in my previous post, pointing out that Russell had attempted a similar thing with logical atomism. The fact that you chose to ignore that is, to my mind, confirmation of your confirmation bias.

To define things as I do, and even to see it as a possibility, and certainly to choose it and decide it is 'necessary', is exactly the area I am working in. Coming to 'strong definitions', deciding to arrive at them, is itself a defining act.

Philosophers have at times tried to model their thinking on Euclidean principles, discovering some 'basic things', some axioms and then building a logically valid structure on what they take to be sound premises, Descartes' Cogito being the most famous.

Like the classic two-bladed sword it is problematic. To decide on one thing is to effectively decide against, or exclude, another. Still, and no matter what objections are brought to bear against it, I see that it is the primary human act, and that to be 'human' in this sense is not the first act of experience, but rather on the opposite end of a long, long chain of decisions.

You are not the first to describe humans as 'rational beings'; if that is how you choose to define us as a species, I wouldn't argue.

[...] because "there is a source of knowing that is independent of 'books', i.e. of language"; it's called experience.

I do believe I understand what you are saying, and perhaps I have some sense why you say it, or what ideas support it logically, but I must say that even superficially it seems that it would be challenged.

It has been and not just superficially. You should brush up on 17th and 18th century philosophy and then have a look at what Kant made of it. He’s a bit of an authority.

It would depend a good deal on how one conceived 'source of knowing'. Myself, I have come to decide that it is language itself that contains a or perhaps 'the' mystery.

And do you have the language to convey this ‘mystery’? Let’s see if we can’t help you with it.

It is language as possibility, or meta-language, or Knowing which is also tied to Being and to Memory that hold many hard-to-unravel 'secrets'.

So what are these 'secrets'?

Have you ever looked into the question of feral children? Children that were not raised within human language structures? It is very curious what seems to happen to them: they do not gain what it is that makes humans human. And so they remain stuck at some other, inferior, level. This places a great emphasis therefor on the language-context, and that is one area of my emphasis: language, culture, literacy, sophistication in handling language, also the Great Repository of human knowledge: libraries, language systems and books. But really what that means are those men, those persons, who have taken all that into themselves. Who when they speak, speak from that depth.

Yes, yes, man is a rational being, we get that.

Mere 'experience', as in an animal (though certainly there is a great deal of awareness of a certain sort), is simply not enough. To make sense of what is experienced, to begin to order it, and to begin to discriminate and to decide, would seem to be the crucial areas.

It certainly helps to put our experiences into a philosophy, but again, you are simply defining a human being as a rational animal.

I would suggest that you haven't studied anything until you have exposed your understanding to rigorous confrontation. It takes enormous self discipline to read work that challenges your own view; few people do it outside of an academic setting. Confirmation bias is enough of a problem in academia [...]

Can you speak some of how submitting yourself to 'rigorous confrontation' worked out for you? When did you first submit to such a confrontation? Did it come easy for you or did it take a long time to develop this discipline? What are you now confronting yourself with?

Well, I did a degree in philosophy, read a whole pile of books, discussed them with some very bright people who had different takes on them and was made to realise that my ideas weren't nearly as clever or original as I fancied. It all worked out very well, thank you, because now I have a wealth of 'authorities' I can use to support my claims and an appreciation of logic that enables me to pick apart arguments, where people are bold enough to make them.

It would seem to me a very good thing to consciously subject oneself to having to confront the other side of every idea and belief that we may hold and to regard our perceptions and ideas as evolving, or potentially so.

You should try it.

Yet on another level it would seem that if we understood our structure of ideas as fluid-in-se,

Eh?

and if there were---if you'll permit me to say it in this way---no indivisible atomic base, then it would follow that the 'atoms' would be infinitely divisible, and would keep dividing and never be able to restructure themselves into forms. How do you solve that one? Is there no 'bedrock' for you?

There was once a philosopher called Bertrand Russell, no wait, done that already. Actually you have rediscovered Zeno’s Paradoxes, bravo! Bedrock isn’t essential; ideas are like wet sand, the trick is to keep moving.

I mean that people like you think an education is reading books that reinforce their shriveled opinions.

Can you be more specific? When you mean 'shriveled', what exactly are you comparing my opinions (if you are speaking of me) to? Can you speak more exactly of a specific idea of mine that you have determined is shriveled?

That you think theory usurps observation as a source of knowledge.

That's you defining define. What you would achieve by 'defining', I would attempt by using science and philosophy [...]

Then we are engaged in quite the same thing. In my own case I would use 'science' where science is called for and where its function is possible and useful, and philosophy where philosophy is useful and possible. To that I of course add (or do not subtract) another one: religion. But the definition of 'religion' is very problematic. It cannot be defined in a word or a paragraph.

Religion is a piece of cake to define compared to science or philosophy. Any given religion is the sum of its ‘holy’ books and/or the pontificating of the senior clergy, some of whom get very shirty if you suggest otherwise; try telling the pope he’s doing it wrong. The problem you are having is your relationship to religion and the fact that, despite all the dreadful things done in the name of different religions, none of them are ghastly enough for you.

It seems to require a whole conversation. Still, and no matter what---and you seem to agree actually---we are called upon to define. We disagree when our definitions do not coincide. And with this we have Strife. Battles. Conflict. The possibility of winning and losing. The possibility of 'the wrong' winning and 'the right' losing.

The chances of either of us changing our opinion is negligible. You, because you don’t believe that I have the educational background or the intellectual chops to challenge your point of view; me, coincidentally, for exactly the same reasons. Although I would add that you have made very few substantive claims which can be challenged, it’s all padding. If you really want to debate, you need to expose some points from the shelter of your absurdly inflated ego.

[...] you miss out the importance of disagreements. Someone who uncritically accepts another's opinion is only slightly more of a fool than someone who uncritically accepts their own. I couldn't tell you whence came my values; I don't think it is coincidence that they are broadly in line with my parents or the society I happen to live in. Philosophically I have an unrigorous approval of the aims of utilitarianism, left of centre politics and a general sense that the christian doctrine of doing unto others as you would have done to yourself, is good advice.

I do not accept your definition of having missed the point of disagreement. Where we seem to have some agreement is in the need to use critical skills in examining all that comes to us.

Splendid, then let’s see what critical skills make of what has come to you. What are the points you wish to defend?

also have a sense that part of this process involves an actual examination of 'what has informed us', so that we KNOW and can tall some other [from] 'whence came my values'. That means a sort of archeological examination of oneself, to see what is 'down there'. It is in that spirit actually that I speak about some of the things I speak about, or value certain things, or highlight them. I have, to my satisfaction at least in some sense, looked into 'what informed me', and to what cultural influences have, like a boat on the water, blown me around.

So you’ve done a bit of self reflection.

It is in that spirit exactly that I say: We must not fail to understand and to appreciate the values stored up as language and meaning within our own traditions.

If those values have turned you into a complete wanker, do you not think it wise to drop them like a hot potato?

While I think I can appreciate a doctrine of 'utilitarianism' I am also attracted to what is clearly not arrived at through subtraction of what is non-utile.

Indeed, you are ‘attracted’ to your ideas. You are making an aesthetic judgement; there is little in the way of substance. You ‘like’ your ideas and protect them with self indulgent myths that it is our inferior discrimination that blinds us to your wisdom. In fact you are simply talking bollocks. Let’s see what your ‘bedrock’ is.

So, we cut right to the chase in this. I hold to a notion of a 'higher metaphysic' and to values that are not connected with the immediately tangible, and so I would define choices and values that are non-utilitarian. Still, I can respect your platform whatever it may be.

Yes, this does cut to the chase. You hold to a self congratulatory notion of a ‘higher metaphysic’ that you cannot describe in any compelling way to anyone but yourself. How is anyone to challenge that which you cannot relate?

Religion is distinct from people's 'spiritual beliefs'; I have no problem with people thinking whatever they wish. Christianity on the other hand is predicated on beliefs that are intended to be accepted.

Religion is very hard to define, in fact. To speak generally and superficially about it will more often than not amount to an error, as I see things. I sense that your definitions (heh heh) of these questions is quite superficial and limited to your own present and to a critique of your present.

I should not be a case of sensing; if you are uncertain of any point I make, ask me for clarification and I will do my best to provide it.

But an examination of what religion is, and what it has been, and what it could be, and even if or if not is is quintessential to man and necessary and even inevitable, are huge and demanding questions that cannot be approached through (absurd) reductions offered a priori. That is my starting point, even, for an examination of the question.

You are the one searching for the atomic definitions. What have you got so far? Let’s see if they stand up to scrutiny. Without some evidence that this project of yours is working, why should anyone take it seriously?

All religions in the sense of ethical systems make demands on all people within those cultural bounds so your statement about Christianity specifically is without value. It contributes very little. Also, if indeed you don't really understand 'what informs you' you might not be exactly the one to be qualified in saying just what Christianity does and doesn't do. It may be far more complex than you imagine.

I forget who, but someone once said: “You do not have to eat the whole apple to know it is rotten.”

• "And this is an act of discrimination, of defining, of selection. It is a conscious and volitional act of valuation. And also I mean to limit the information to those sources that one feels contain 'real value', formative value. This means to discriminate against 'the world'. To keep certain things out."

To discriminate, select and define in our present could be to discriminate among different brands of ultra-libertarian viewpoint or praxes, so your view that my terms are Mediaeval is simply inaccurate.

Despite your playful use of smileys and your ‘(heh heh)s, you give the impression that you are a humourless berk. Now there's a word with an interesting etymology, in case you wonder, I mean it in it's commonly understood sense rather the original. I was just laughing at this absurdity:

In 'authority' I will use the stem which is to say 'author' (1250–1300; earlier auct(h)or, Middle English auto(u)r < Anglo-French < Latin auctor writer, progenitor <augēre to increase, augment], I mean 'originator' and 'definer'.

The mediaeval, as I understand it, is a sort of substrate to our thinking and has to do with the fact that, at one time, though perhaps not now, (depends on the person and the views that inform him), the World was once orderable, or a perceived order was seen as possible, that it existed somewhere, somehow.

Right. How is that different from this:

Definition is indeed fluid, but defining as I am defining it is selective and moves toward fixity; toward establishing of 'basic things' and even perhaps things that do not change.

The Mediaeval world is relevant because it was an attempt to construct a social system on an existent sense of such an Order. In this sense there was, at some level, a bedrock to which one could refer.

Which is what I understand you to be trying to achieve.

That Mediaeval world was indeed shattered and is still breaking apart but this does not mean that our World is not still orderable, nor that there is no underlying structure that we might discern.

There are sciences which trying to discover just that. If they succeed, they will show everybody how the world works, because the evidence will be objective, precisely because it will have to stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

How it comes about---if it comes about---that the World is reordered and that a newer and more solid foundation will be discerned, is of course inner structure of the problem. It is certainly being ordered, now and today, but I am not sure that we agree with those terms. It could very well happen that it moves in the direction of a badly lit science-fiction dystopia, we see some of that but we are not sure.

We shall have to do all in our power to see that it doesn’t. Part of that, in my view, is making sure people who think as you don’t achieve any real influence.

Allow me to offer you this Bjornstrandian definition. You can tack it up somewhere...

To me, and in this present conversation, 'riff-raff' means people who imagine they are qualified to make sweeping statements [about religion, about Christianity] but who, when interrogated, show themselves as virtually illiterate in the specifics of those questions.

That is a tough statement, I know.

I’ve heard worse.
So anyway, Gus; I think all you have done so far is make an appeal to an unpleasant take on rationalism, which includes some self serving claims about mass-man. I know you like to wrap up your ideas in swaddling, but you need to see if they can stand by themselves. What are the points you wish to defend?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Thank you for the clarification of animus, Gustav. You are quite right.

Well, I did a degree in philosophy, read a whole pile of books, discussed them with some very bright people who had different takes on them and was made to realise that my ideas weren't nearly as clever or original as I fancied. It all worked out very well, thank you, because now I have a wealth of 'authorities' I can use to support my claims and an appreciation of logic that enables me to pick apart arguments, where people are bold enough to make them.

Right. I have observed, in personal life and certainly on Internet forums, that if this is the primary desire with which one approaches conversation, if this is the spirit that moves one, that the whole point of conversing is negated right at the beginning. Usually, and I think this is so in your case, if 'animus' is strongly there, the understructure of the conversation is not really about the ideas, agreed on or disagreed on, but on something more elemental, often 'unconscious', but essentially destructive.

So, I think I am going to decline the offer to engage with you, at least in this cut, paste and chop method. This still leaves options for you though if the subject or any related subject is interesting to you: write out complete posts that express your ideas in relation to the subject and independently of my posts. While I think that you 'project' on to me negative interests that in fact motivate yourself, and I don't get much to work with in your posts and with your ideas, still to some degree where you seem to wish to go with it could be interesting. Have at it then.

I am not so sure that I would myself be content if my received education resulted only in the means to 'pick apart arguments'. You may guess that I have the sense, a general and unconfirmed (vague if you wish) sense that, for many, and generally, intellectual tools when gained are used to 'pick apart', disassemble, atomize, and deflate not only specific ideas but in the final analysis to very structure of the self. I am not sure if this is the case in those sorts who originate the ideas, but it does seem to be the case when certain ideas filter out and get hold of 'average people'.

My sense---I do not know how to 'prove' it but only to suggest it---is that this is part of a trend and a process that, despite rationalistic pomp, is not 'really' so. My understanding thus far is that people get possessed by certain ideas (one could toss in the notion of 'spirit' in the specific sense of 'animus' here and link it to your anger actually to suggest a way this functions) but it is less the 'ideas' that are in possession of them but something else, something in fact 'irrational'. As you may guess this is the area I desire to explore though I am not unaware of the problematic nature of the territory. You are somewhat wrong to conclude that I am a 'rationalist'. I see ratiocination as one part of what makes up a man. What I am getting at here is that we could put forward a whole group of men who we consider to be paragons of ratiocination and yet might find that, if they had to plan or undertake anything in the world, they might quickly demonstrate a more essential irrationalism that is there, at a more fundamental level. I think this may be one of the reasons why I cannot abandon sheer and nearly absolute 'spiritual inspiration', or revelation, as forces or perhaps 'structures' that offer to man a more complete vision of Reality. It seems to me that reason ('science', clear, ordered seeing, expository, etc.) does indeed enable men to see their surroundings with greater clarity, to see 'really'. But it does not and does not propose to offer an internal or 'intuitive' means to understand or to relate to 'the whole'. And, as seems to be the case with you, mental skills that 'function like acid' and essentially dissolve away the possibility of a holistic, one could also say 'mystic', relationship with a sense of the Whole, in the end seem to function very much against the Individual. You might say to me "Well, Gus, you ignorant wanker, I can prove to you that all parts of that are WRONG", and such things are done all the time, and with great 'certainty' too. It is there, in my case, though I am not exactly certain what to think about it (as a praxis), that one must become artful in evasion. Eluding.

My impression is that, in some instances, people who are 'strong in idea' use that strength to break apart other people's 'certainties', which are intuited, or felt, and which are supported by a sort of *absurd Euclidean geometry* through which their *meaning* is expressed, or encapsulated. I would in this instance link you, for the sake of this example, with one who imagined himself 'strong in idea', even to the point of referring to a credential. And it is true that you can, and you did, and you will, use your idea-strength to 'pick apart' the illogical arguments of those linked to 'intuited understanding of the Universe' or their place in it. And in a strict, or even in a loose, 'logical' sense it would al appear completely correct and would, to some observer, make sense. But I question this as an achievement. First, it is likely that 'someone did this to you'. You subjected yourself to it. So you learned about the Method first hand. And you then learned to participate in it.

You see where I am going, naturally.

I find this all rather curious and interesting. That ratiocination goes to work on symbolic and intuited structures and etches them down to their 'parts'. Once that is done it is easy to dismiss the parts. But there is something suspect in this. I do indeed mean this quite specifically when it has to do with the 'intuited faith' of a given person, just so you have it clear. I begin to think of it as a form of a 'game'. A game with serious consequences but a game nonetheless. You may also take it as a sort of 'axiom ' that I do not believe that at the most fundamental level man is 'rational' in the sense you seem to desire to privilege. And while I do not wish to join your view of the primacy of 'experience' with the following, I do suspect that in the final analysis, after science, after the '17th and 18th Centuries', and after everything and anything, the tool with which man approaches his being in this world (that is to say the tool of himself in totality), and the sense that he derives from the use of that 'tool', will be exactly and precisely a 'mystical' or 'intuited' understanding. In this the 'intuited' trumps that rational. (Naturally, I am speaking on a meta level and not on a specific level. In the world of specifics it seems to me that 'science' can and does dominate the show, and this may only increase).

I do find your insinuation that I (and by this you really do mean a whole class of persons) am part or will be part of an obscuring force or movement interesting. It is not an invalid assertion, not completely, as it pertains to structures of religiosity---'organized religion' as Skip says. It is very hard to say what brings destruction and destructive impulses into the world. But in your case when you got stuck on 'animus' as your primary motivator to engage here, I think you actually lost sight of 'me'. What you are seeing is more an image you have cast up as me. And you are arguing against that in large part. I do not know exactly what part of man's 'mystical' personality to save and preserve, and I am certainly not convinced that all eggs should be put in an irrational and 'religious' basket. It is just as I say it: I do not think that we should erase the connecting lines to our religious traditions. I think we should reexamine them, perhaps remodel them (the connecting lines), but in no sense do away with the content there.

What I am attempting to do here is to explore some strange and difficult territories and I do it with a general 'good faith' even if you desire to paint it differently or if some aspect of what I do angers you. When given an opportunity to expand on my thinking I will certainly take the opportunity to do so: in independent posts, as I have here. If you want to converse with me do the same, and eliminate the use of words such as 'wanker' and all other terms of insult. If your next post is a cut-up job, a 'picking apart', and if it contains one term such as the above, there will be no response from me. (Though I will certainly read what you write.)

[Skip]

Harry Baird:

Skip, you've set yourself a particularly tough row to hoe (and I would say the same of every materialist): you've committed yourself to rejecting and "explaining away" every spiritual, "supernatural", and "paranormal" event that ever occurs - "daunting" doesn't begin to describe such a task in my view.

You might be surprised at the lightness and freedom of life without spooks. No soul, but lots of ethics. It does for me. If I discover upon my death a whole other world of spirits, at least I won't make the faux pas of calling them by the wrong name: I shall meet them fresh, as it were, unencumbered with preconceptions, garbled beliefs and hubris.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The following is not an elaboration of doctrine, it is just reflections on the notion of 'Christ' after a rereading of Jung's 'Aion'. Jung's view is that 'Christ' has become an archetypal idea, an archetype, for Western man. Meaning that the 'image' of Christ has taken on emblematic dimension for (Western) human 'being', the being of Westerners. I don't think I could dream up a more far-out thinker than CG Jung. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he talks about his personal relationship to his spiritual and symbolical discoveries and, like Blake or Meister Eckhart and other religious figures, his material is so outlandish that one doesn't quite know what to do with it.

But one of his interesting ideas stuck with me: the image of the Crucified Christ. In Jung's view it is the fate of a man who progresses in awareness of the full dimension to come face to face with the core of darkness itself. Just to become aware of one's incarnation, one's body-boundness, and to understand how very fragile it is, and what a thin separation there is between well-being and living hell, is to allude to a great deal that plagues man, and that is not to consider all the man-made terrors. And this, for Jung, is what the Crucifixion represents: man who comes into inconceivable tension, tension that is almost too much to bear.

Skip recently offered his understanding of what drives people mad and when I thought about it, and though it is true that lies and distortions offered to a child and people generally, when it contrasts with what they really see and know, is crazy-making, it occurred to me that merely coming to fully understand our condition and our fate (death, essentially) is actually the source of human madness. A delirious condition when faced with all the facts of existence. We learn how to block it out, more or less, and this is in some sense a great skill of life: not to look too directly at the facts.

___________________________________________________________

In any case, some of the following arose when thinking about these things and parts of the recent discussion:

Christ's misfortune (even if it is fable and myth) as an indication of the fate of men and culture and cultural movements that were just beginning. If so, what is that Fate exactly?

Something quite extreme happened, something dangerous and fateful, and it occurred within---religiously speaking---more 'real time' than any other religious revelation. The man Jesus walked in specific time, Roman time, among known people, in real historical time. This has always impressed me in comparison to other religious fables: this fable, even if the facts are distorted, occurred in our known 'real time'. In this sense the 'deeply divine' impinges into a time signature and is seen as occurring side-by-side with 'real reality'.

It is still true that much mythological and fabulous material was tossed in to the Jesus story, but Jerusalem existed, Judea existed, and Judea was factually occupied by Rome, and it was all visualized by a peculiar Hellenic eye: Greek historical view as for example that sort by Thucydides and Plutarch. The Gospels pretend toward eye-witness accounts of factual events, but the more intensely one looks at the stories there, the more fabulous and irreal they become. The same sense of 'non-mythologized event' cannot be applied to most mythologies bound up with most world religions.

Still, the Gospels attempt to present facticity within real historical time and a time that connects more directly than mythological time with ourselves and our present. They seem to take place in a liminal or borderland zone where mythologized reality meets 'real' reality. And in that dusky zone the Emblem of God, the emblem of god-related man---man as a sort of further step in man's evolution from myth-bound time to reality-bound time, if one were to decide to see it like that---was hunted down in his 'god-time' by decidedly 'earth-time powers and potencies'. He was captured, tortured and then killed most brutally by the 'structures of the present'. And that captured man suffered most really. And that suffering, though it was just one drop of so much general suffering (and torture and oppression) became conscious suffering. It was 'explored', as it were. It was entered into in a sympathetic sense. It was not purely lonely suffering but in this sense shared suffering. Awareness of what it is to suffer in a most humiliating fashion at the hands of 'the world' but more than that one's people, one's fellows.

What was hitherto 'above' and 'beyond' descended into the now and the tangible to experience that level of suffering, but I mean less some God beyond and more man himself. To experience unsolvable conflict. Excruciating and tangible, maddening conflict. And those who witness this, those for whom these events became real, were drawn into that Fate even if perhaps they didn't know it. What happened, encapsulated in symbolic portrayals and fabulous stories, in theatre really, in pictures and emblems, became fused into man's consciousness at various level. (A thousand years of exploration in art certainly).

Those who came under this View became 'captured, by it in a similar manner as man becomes captured in his twisted, insoluble fate: the fate of coming into this inconceivable world. Thus, a certain manner and means of seeing the world arose. It might be described as our 'modern way of perception whether we recognize it as such, or not. It is therefor we ourselves who become the Emblematic Man; we who are suffering in conflict of which we are not (fully) aware and which we cannot solve.

It isn't surprising therefor that we desire most vehemently to be rid of that suffering: that inescapable theatre of suffering and those who rehearse the suffering and remind us of it. Viewed in this way perhaps we desire, if it were possible, to return to some vision of reality when such awareness were not so acute? To pull the thorn out of our side, out of our brain, out from behind our eyes. To become free children again. Could it be? What price would we be willing to pay to be empowered to throw off the unwelcome lens which forces us to see the world in this way, but also to feel the world in this way in some deep level. (Tortured, pained, conflicted, 'impossible'). Why, an earthly holocaust is a relatively small price to pay. We can incinerate our way out of the conflict. We can perhaps destroy the Outlook and those who hold to it, rehearse it, 'enforce' it.

Could it be that 'crucifixion' is also perhaps the real end of religion? In the sense of 'no more antique hallucination', no more mythological fantasy adventures, but awareness however dim of the dawning of a 'new' level of awareness of 'what it means to be human'? And also of the awareness of having to construct this new human possibility within a real real world, a factual and concrete world? If so, the Mediaeval world might be seen as unique and valuable, as quite original and even relevant. Because there was an attempt to construct an inspired temporal kingdom on the face of the unwilling Earth. When this attempt that stands as the foundation of our present world is compared to other attempts to organize man socially---Chinese, Hindu, Inca, Persian, etc.---the European Mediaeval stands out in unique ways insofar as it was founded on a 'human'-centered platform, where an individual had more special relevance, indeed a more extensive existence. We now are living in the product and outcome of much of that. The way we see and relate to ourselves, the 'space' within ourselves where we are 'conceived'. But also the way we visualize the whole Earth-sphere and fill it up with human spirits (as the human is a European creation, and a Christian project). We project ourselves into 'God' and see each human particle as real, valuable and worthy. (And there is an alternative: to see those particles as particles in a mere machine, as mere units to be correctly fitted into a world-machine or else removed; as particles managed by highly organized electrons within programming machines, etc.)

And there again we face a painful 'crucifixion': Do we become full humans in the sense of 'divine'? Or do we become Satanic Nazis of the dark Earth-realm? Will it be possible to rekill our reborn and awakened awareness of the full possibility of ourselves and do away with a terrible, conflicting guilt that this may not be possible? Or, will we be able to carry through with the implication of alive, constant awareness within our bodies and within the world?

Do we bring ourselves into alignment with Divinity (in the sense of 'omen of divine possibility') and set to work to construct, ethically, a divine polity? Or do we rely on an inconceivable grace (charity in the Greek sense) to be 'saved' from the depth of impossibility of this world by a divine power outside of the world? Is not this contrast, this tension, a part of 'our problem' whether we recognize it or not?

[uwot]

Right. I have observed, in personal life and certainly on Internet forums, that if this is the primary desire with which one approaches conversation, if this is the spirit that moves one, that the whole point of conversing is negated right at the beginning. Usually, and I think this is so in your case, if 'animus' is strongly there, the understructure of the conversation is not really about the ideas, agreed on or disagreed on, but on something more elemental, often 'unconscious', but essentially destructive.

Any 'animus' is irrelevant. I asked that you explain what your bedrock is, on what axioms you have chosen to build your edifice. From what you say, you are aware of the weaknesses of your position.

So, I think I am going to decline the offer to engage with you, at least in this cut, paste and chop method.

Would you rather I used Harvard referencing? The beauty of 'this cut, paste and chop method' is that it immediately addresses the points raised. Given the above, it is no wonder you don't like it, but as you recognise, it suits my training.

I am not so sure that I would myself be content if my received education resulted only in the means to 'pick apart arguments'.

This is selective reading; further confirmation of confirmation bias. You have ignored this bit:

because now I have a wealth of 'authorities' I can use to support my claims

You may guess that I have the sense, a general and unconfirmed (vague if you wish) sense that, for many, and generally, intellectual tools when gained are used to 'pick apart', disassemble, atomize, and deflate not only specific ideas but in the final analysis to very structure of the self. I am not sure if this is the case in those sorts who originate the ideas, but it does seem to be the case when certain ideas filter out and get hold of 'average people'.

I'm quite happy with 'unconfirmed'. The thing is, if 'those sorts of people who originate the ideas' attach grotesque caricatures of people they have never met, they really ought to be certain that their ideas do in fact have some solid ground beneath them, otherwise, they will be picked apart. If any particular self cannot stand the scrutiny, it is better they keep their ideas to themselves.

My sense---I do not know how to 'prove' it but only to suggest it---is that this is part of a trend and a process that, despite rationalistic pomp, is not 'really' so.

I can't make any sense of the above.

My understanding thus far is that people get possessed by certain ideas (one could toss in the notion of 'spirit' in the specific sense of 'animus' here and link it to your anger actually to suggest a way this functions)

Which is your way of calling other people wankers.

but it is less the 'ideas' that are in possession of them but something else, something in fact 'irrational'.

Like I said, my contempt for your ideas has no bearing on their truth or error. I suspect, as do you, that if you were to present us with some actual predicates, they would be without foundation.

As you may guess this is the area I desire to explore though I am not unaware of the problematic nature of the territory.

I have no need to guess, you have given us ample evidence of what you desire to explore. What I'm not so clear about is whether you have discovered anything beyond your own prejudices.

You are somewhat wrong to conclude that I am a 'rationalist'. I see ratiocination as one part of what makes up a man. What I am getting at here is that we could put forward a whole group of men who we consider to be paragons of ratiocination and yet might find that, if they had to plan or undertake anything in the world, they might quickly demonstrate a more essential irrationalism that is there, at a more fundamental level.

Fair enough; so you are some breed of intuitionist.
You are right about what could happen. The paragons might also say 'Bugger this. Let's go to the pub.' or spontaneously break into the watusi. You can invent any reality that pleases you, or you can look at the one we've got.

I think this may be one of the reasons why I cannot abandon sheer and nearly absolute 'spiritual inspiration', or revelation, as forces or perhaps 'structures' that offer to man a more complete vision of Reality.

The problem is that gods tend to be picky about who they reveal themselves or their word to; it is rarely the sort of person I would reveal myself to, were I a god.

It seems to me that reason ('science', clear, ordered seeing, expository, etc.) does indeed enable men to see their surroundings with greater clarity, to see 'really'. But it does not and does not propose to offer an internal or 'intuitive' means to understand or to relate to 'the whole'.

No indeed. Science can only give you the facts, the empirical data to be precise, it takes a philosophy to make sense of it. Some philosophies insist that their 'truths' are more fundamental than anything science can discover; maybe so, but as you are aware, there is no proof. Any such philosophy is therefore subject to the whim of its adherents; if there is a lot of them, there is the potential for trouble.

And, as seems to be the case with you, mental skills that 'function like acid' and essentially dissolve away the possibility of a holistic, one could also say 'mystic', relationship with a sense of the Whole, in the end seem to function very much against the Individual.

You misunderstand. Perhaps you should re-read Skips post of Mon Oct 07, 2013 7:04 pm, page 8. It is entirely possible to look at things in minute detail and still be awestruck by the beauty and mystery of the whole.

You might say to me "Well, Gus, you ignorant wanker, I can prove to you that all parts of that are WRONG", and such things are done all the time, and with great 'certainty' too. It is there, in my case, though I am not exactly certain what to think about it (as a praxis), that one must become artful in evasion. Eluding.

There is no great art to evasion in these circumstances; the simplest means of eluding is not to stick your head above the trenches. Actually, it's enough to show a premise is unsound rather than wrong.

My impression is that, in some instances, people who are 'strong in idea' use that strength to break apart other people's 'certainties',

Good thing too, if those 'certainties' are ideas such as mass man. On the other hand I agree, there is nothing to commend bullying.

which are intuited, or felt, and which are supported by a sort of *absurd Euclidean geometry* through which their *meaning* is expressed, or encapsulated. I would in this instance link you, for the sake of this example, with one who imagined himself 'strong in idea', even to the point of referring to a credential.

I have no idea what you are on about.

And it is true that you can, and you did, and you will, use your idea-strength to 'pick apart' the illogical arguments of those linked to 'intuited understanding of the Universe' or their place in it.

By and large I leave people alone if they are just spouting nonsense, it's the ones with an agenda that piss me off.

And in a strict, or even in a loose, 'logical' sense it would al appear completely correct and would, to some observer, make sense. But I question this as an achievement.

Little wonder; you know you have no answer.

First, it is likely that 'someone did this to you'. You subjected yourself to it. So you learned about the Method first hand. And you then learned to participate in it.

Indeed I did. On a philosophy forum you should not be surprised to find trained philosophers; all of them, I would imagine, have read Descartes' Discourse. It is a tool, the use it is put to is dependent on the person in possession of it.

You see where I am going, naturally.

Not really; I am content to wait and find out.

I find this all rather curious and interesting.

Not so much as to risk it.

That ratiocination goes to work on symbolic and intuited structures and etches them down to their 'parts'. Once that is done it is easy to dismiss the parts. But there is something suspect in this.

When those symbolic and intuited structures are used to justify prejudices that, I would suggest, is a very good thing.

I do indeed mean this quite specifically when it has to do with the 'intuited faith' of a given person, just so you have it clear. I begin to think of it as a form of a 'game'. A game with serious consequences but a game nonetheless.

Indeed; by your own admission, Hide and Seek. It isn't much of a game if the 'intuited faith' of a given person causes them to insult most of humanity.

You may also take it as a sort of 'axiom ' that I do not believe that at the most fundamental level man is 'rational' in the sense you seem to desire to privilege.

Actually, I agree that man is not rational, how else to account for your sort? People choose their axioms and even their logic for essentially aesthetic reasons. Some people 'like' certainty in the form of maths, or their own intuition, others 'like' the fact that the world is mysterious and that the truth may always elude us.

And while I do not wish to join your view of the primacy of 'experience' with the following, I do suspect that in the final analysis, after science, after the '17th and 18th Centuries', and after everything and anything, the tool with which man approaches his being in this world (that is to say the tool of himself in totality), and the sense that he derives from the use of that 'tool', will be exactly and precisely a 'mystical' or 'intuited' understanding.

Who knows? That may well come to pass. There are good reasons to think and indeed hope not. In the meantime, it is worth keeping an open mind and not nailing yourself to a 'higher metaphysic' that only you believe in.

In this the 'intuited' trumps that rational. (Naturally, I am speaking on a meta level and not on a specific level. In the world of specifics it seems to me that 'science' can and does dominate the show, and this may only increase).

As long as it keeps delivering the goods. It probably will.
It's all well and good, if a bit dull, if everyone 'intuits' the same thing. They don't, but by an extraordinary coincidence, people in any given location 'intuit' pretty much what everyone else in that location. What are the chances? There is no evidence for this 'intuition' except in your own head and a few books by fringe writers that you call authorities. For all practical purposes, 'mass man' defines a genius as someone who agrees with them, in that respect you are no different to mass man.

I do find your insinuation that I (and by this you really do mean a whole class of persons) am part or will be part of an obscuring force or movement interesting. It is not an invalid assertion, not completely, as it pertains to structures of religiosity---'organized religion' as Skip says. It is very hard to say what brings destruction and destructive impulses into the world. But in your case when you got stuck on 'animus' as your primary motivator to engage here, I think you actually lost sight of 'me'.

What I have not lost sight of is your use of terms such as mass man; as I have said, on this forum you are your ideas. It is your contempt for your fellow human being that, if I were able, I would destroy. Your metaphysics, your intuitions, are only of interest to the extent that you use them to justify your ugly politics

What you are seeing is more an image you have cast up as me. And you are arguing against that in large part.

I don't really have an image of you. It's your words I am arguing with.

I do not know exactly what part of man's 'mystical' personality to save and preserve,

Not the bit that turns them into self-righteous you know whats. On a serious note, I see no discernible difference between the awe that mystical and scientific personalities experience, it's just what they put it down to.

and I am certainly not convinced that all eggs should be put in an irrational and 'religious' basket. It is just as I say it: I do not think that we should erase the connecting lines to our religious traditions. I think we should reexamine them, perhaps remodel them (the connecting lines), but in no sense do away with the content there.

Once again, you are not really saying anything.

What I am attempting to do here is to explore some strange and difficult territories and I do it with a general 'good faith' even if you desire to paint it differently or if some aspect of what I do angers you.

I've said it before, but since I have good reason to believe that you read my posts selectively, it is worth repeating: what angers me is your contempt for people you have not met.

When given an opportunity to expand on my thinking I will certainly take the opportunity to do so: in independent posts, as I have here. If you want to converse with me do the same, and eliminate the use of words such as 'wanker' and all other terms of insult.

And can you eliminate the use of such terms as 'average people'?

If your next post is a cut-up job, a 'picking apart', and if it contains one term such as the above, there will be no response from me. (Though I will certainly read what you write.)

Do as you wish; I shall certainly respond to the contemptible portions of your offerings.

[Harry Baird]

You might be surprised at the lightness and freedom of life without spooks.

Would it be particularly *naughty* of me to reorganise those sentiments as "I believe in materialism because it brings me comfort"? :-)

Just back-tracking a few posts:

I find it interesting that even with Harry's description of his friend's religious choice it seemed to have been a choice arrived at 'reasonably', in similar manner as one might research the best car to drive or sift through the language in a loan contract.

It's curious that you say that because it was decidedly *not* a choice made like those ones, it was not in any sense active, as in trying to discern what was best, it was entirely passive, simply accepting the faith of one's upbringing.

[Skip]

Would it be particularly *naughty* of me to reorganise those sentiments as "I believe in materialism because it brings me comfort"?

Be as naughty as you like. But the description certainly wouldn't fit me. I don't "believe in" materialism; I don't even use that word. I simply know what my receptors report to my brain, understand what my reason can grasp, deal with whatever connections and patterns I can discern in the world I inhabit. I didn't choose to inhabit this world: it's the one I was given. I don't choose to disbelieve the other kind: it's one I do not perceive and to profess any such faith would be insincere.

The world I do perceive does not bring me any more comfort than it does fear, any more peace than grief, any more satisfaction than frustration. But it does - because I have been fortunate, give me a great deal of beauty and sustenance, affection and fascination, animal pleasure and moments of transcendent joy. I certainly don't expect to live long enough to exhaust all of its possibilities or need anything more than it offers. (And I shall be sad to leave it. It would be nice to believe - it is nice to imagine - a continuation, another plane, a realm of reunions and reconciliations.)

[marjoramblues]

I don't "believe in" materialism; I don't even use that word. I simply know what my receptors report to my brain, understand what my reason can grasp, deal with whatever connections and patterns I can discern in the world I inhabit. I didn't choose to inhabit this world: it's the one I was given. I don't choose to disbelieve the other kind: it's one I do not perceive and to profess any such faith would be insincere.

The world I do perceive does not bring me any more comfort than it does fear, any more peace than grief, any more satisfaction than frustration. But it does - because I have been fortunate, give me a great deal of beauty and sustenance, affection and fascination, animal pleasure and moments of transcendent joy. I certainly don't expect to live long enough to exhaust all of its possibilities or need anything more than it offers. (And I shall be sad to leave it. It would be nice to believe - it is nice to imagine - a continuation, another plane, a realm of reunions and reconciliations.)

You see, this is the kind of writing that I would keep in an 'essays' corner of the PN forum.
See: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=11852
So many wonderful succinct contributions by excellent posters on a particular philosophical position.
Even if writing an 'essay', as such, is not anyone's intention, shiny stuff should be kept.
All in one place; to treasure.

[It would also mean that any Christian apologists might be encouraged to provide a 'one-off' piece. All the relevant points could then be readily identified, rather than umpteen dense pages to trawl through...]