Christianity

[Belinda]

The supernatural theme in the structure of Xianity has been progressively unbelievable since the scientific enlightenment and is now dysfunctional.

Fortunately for Christians the iconic Jesus of Nazareth is sufficiently strong as protagonist to continue to flourish after the demise of supernatural Christ.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Just not interested in responding to the path you are on. Your distortions and lack of understanding are too cumbersome to deal with. You seem to have no grasp of what can and does work outside of (and beyond) your way of seeing and thinking. Have fun with that.

Some observations

I think we need to establish that the Christian Path, in its chemically-pure form, is an élite path. In any case this is what I am coming to understand. By élite I mean 'for a very few'. The Christian path is 'world-renouncing' not 'world-affirming'. Those who define and explain this demanding path have no choice but to hold to a very strict outline. If I am right IC is one of those people. Yet he defines a specifically Protestant interpretation. There are other interpretations however. Greek Orthodox for example. Or Old School Roman Catholic. And also for example the monastic path. Are these people 'going into the world' or are they 'going out of the world'? It is an interesting question and it involves looking at the path carefully.

On the other side, or to put it somewhat differently, on other, lower rungs within the Christian possibility, are quasi- and semi-Christians -- or those Christianesque as I have termed them. It is as if they have one foot, or some part of a foot, within the renunciant's world but the other foot or some part of it in the *actual world*. I have been thinking about WB Yeats in this context. But many poets can be catalogued into such a grouping. You could not be a poet, like Yeats was a poet, without a deep love-relationship with the world.

Crazed through much child-bearing
The moon is staggering in the sky;
Moon-struck by the despairing
Glances of her wandering eye
We grope, and grope in vain,
For children born of her pain.

But here is the thing: the Christian commitment has been and I think will remain an 'anchor' and a foundation of the experience of Occidental man. Perhaps it can be seen like a well or a water-source. It demands a great deal but then it renders a great deal. You will note that I cannot examine the question from the perspective of a world-renouncer and, from the beginning, I have defined myself as one interested in *social reform* and *renovation*. I am certainly not a renunciant and make no claim whatever to any form of excellence, whatever that might be, in 'being' a Christian.

So in fact I am on a somewhat low rung among those in the second category I've defined.

Children dazed or dead!
When she in all her virginal pride
First trod on the mountain's head
What stir ran through the countryside
Where every foot obeyed her glance!
What manhood led the dance!

You are really quite wrong to suppose that I do not *understand* what you are trying to get at. In a nutshell you do not wish to live under those constraints, that much is certain, and your entire exposition is really solely about that. What point I think you miss is that there are multitudes who live within the penumbra of the world and who are only on the verge of the luminescence that Christian commitment presupposes. But then there are others who are more fully within the penumbra but tending to the point of full shade. So with that said I highly doubt that you are able to even consider what 'nihilism' actually means -- as a spiritual disease. You are not concerned about it in the slightest!

I definitely understand what 'working outside and beyond' the strict and constraining limitations that the more committed Christianity demands since, in fact, most of my life has been spent there. This does evoke a certain paradox and also contradiction.

Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands are bleached, our fingers seem
But slender needles of bone;
Bleached by that malicious dream
They are spread wide that each
May rend what comes within reach.

What I think is worthwhile to point out -- when the conversation is examined from some distance -- is the profound discord between different people's view & understanding of what is *right & good* or *good & proper*. In a way the more interesting thing is in noting (and perhaps lamenting) that agreements fall asunder and the binding glue unbinds.

Waldo Frank (in Re-Discovery of America) described the European body and a moribund body. It really can be seen as a dying entity. But he noted that there is nothing really dead in a dying body and every cell lights up as the death-processes take over. And what corresponds to each lit-up cell in this metaphor is each one of us. Oddly, those who are aware of the general moribundity seem only to look with a certain powerless horror on what results from within the dance of death. While those that are in it unconsciously celebrate.

[Nick_A]

John 15

18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you

The essence of Man has both higher parts with the potential for consciousness as well as lower animal parts having arisen from the earth as described by Plato. The higher part or the seed of the soul can receive the spirit and become born again.

The lower parts belong to the world or what Plato called the Cave. The lower parts must hate the energy exuded by the higher part since they don't understand their own potential nor the potential for turning towards the "light." It is curious that children are afraid of the dark while adults are afraid of the light and seek to destroy it. The world hates what it doesn't understand. It is conditioned to believe in the world so must hate those not of the world who have felt the Spirit. Jesus knew it so there was no sense in praying to the world. It belongs to the Prince of Darkness. However the future belongs to those few born again

[Alexis Jacobi]

From Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (Eugene Rose):

“The Nihilist disease is apparently to be left to “develop” to its very end; the goal of the Revolution, originally the hallucination of a few fevered minds, has now become the goal of humanity itself. Men have become weary; the Kingdom of God is too distant, the Orthodox Christian way is too narrow and arduous. The Revolution has captured the “spirit of the age,” and to go against this powerful current is more than modern men can do, for it requires precisely the two things most thoroughly annihilated by Nihilism: Truth and faith.”

The supernatural theme in the structure of Xianity has been progressively unbelievable since the scientific enlightenment and is now dysfunctional.

It is a curious proposition: to cleanse Christianity of the entirety of its metaphysics.

Oddly though you are right: it has become dysfunctional within a world that, with full will, chooses not to recognize the validity of the supernatural element (to use your term). (I would say transcendent which has a different inflection.)

Fortunately for Christians the iconic Jesus of Nazareth is sufficiently strong as protagonist to continue to flourish after the demise of supernatural Christ

Oh? Are you sure?

I must quote myself -- a reliable authority!

What I think is worthwhile to point out -- when the conversation is examined from some distance -- is the profound discord between different people's view & understanding of what is *right & good* or *good & proper*. In a way the more interesting thing is in noting (and perhaps lamenting) that agreements fall asunder and the binding glue unbinds.

[Nick_A]

Alexis

I'd like to better understand nihilism. Does this mean that there is no meaning in the world? But why should there be? perhaps nihilism is a natural conclusion to come to. Maybe the author of Ecclesiastes is right and there is no meaning under the sun? Perhaps meaning exists for Man above Plato's divided line but the world below it is meaningless. Then the seeker of meaning must search psychologically above the divided line through conscious contemplation and prayer to experience meaning and the reality of Christianity.

Ecclesiastes 1

1 The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:

2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
11 No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.

[Belinda]

From Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (Eugene Rose):

“The Nihilist disease is apparently to be left to “develop” to its very end; the goal of the Revolution, originally the hallucination of a few fevered minds, has now become the goal of humanity itself. Men have become weary; the Kingdom of God is too distant, the Orthodox Christian way is too narrow and arduous. The Revolution has captured the “spirit of the age,” and to go against this powerful current is more than modern men can do, for it requires precisely the two things most thoroughly annihilated by Nihilism: Truth and faith.”

The supernatural theme in the structure of Xianity has been progressively unbelievable since the scientific enlightenment and is now dysfunctional.

It is a curious proposition: to cleanse Christianity of the entirety of its metaphysics.

Oddly though you are right: it has become dysfunctional within a world that, with full will, chooses not to recognize the validity of the supernatural element (to use your term). (I would say transcendent which has a different inflection.)

Fortunately for Christians the iconic Jesus of Nazareth is sufficiently strong as protagonist to continue to flourish after the demise of supernatural Christ

Oh? Are you sure?

I must quote myself -- a reliable authority!

What I think is worthwhile to point out -- when the conversation is examined from some distance -- is the profound discord between different people's view & understanding of what is *right & good* or *good & proper*. In a way the more interesting thing is in noting (and perhaps lamenting) that agreements fall asunder and the binding glue unbinds.

I understand why you believe the supernatural Christ is necessary for Xianity. As a matter of fact there are many faithful Xians who are unhappy about miracles but who nevertheless love Xianity partly because its moral code works and partly because Jesus of Nazareth lived the life he did.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I'd like to better understand nihilism. Does this mean that there is no meaning in the world? But why should there be? perhaps nihilism is a natural conclusion to come to. Maybe the author of Ecclesiastes is right and there is no meaning under the sun? Perhaps meaning exists for Man above Plato's divided line but the world below it is meaningless. Then the seeker of meaning must search psychologically above the divided line through conscious contemplation and prayer to experience meaning and the reality of Christianity.

It is a good question and a worthwhile subject to look into.

I cannot be sure if the pessimism or perhaps existential fatigue expressed in Ecclesiastes qualifies as nihilism in the modern sense. My understanding of the modern sense is that a nihilistic perspective came about when a new analytical and interpretive system -- that of the physical sciences -- came on the scene and challenged and supplanted the late-Scholastic intellectual (intellectual-religious) intellectual culture. One can reduce it I think to something like this: the Scholastics pre-determined the nature and purpose of reality through intellectual processes that were, essentially, and as we might say today non-scientific and non-verifiable. With this *system-of-view* they then *imposed* their view on reality and zealously worked out all sorts of explanatory interpretations.

You have often made reference to 'the great chain of being' and that way of seeing reality is tightly bound-up in the Scholastic interpretation. The essence of the GCOB view is that all creation, the Cosmos, is a continuum of consciousness, from God's being and angelic being all the way down into the most dense material realms such as that of the Earth which was understood to be the place where everything condensed. It is pretty important -- crucial really -- to understand the Scholastic view of reality, of the manifest world, because there is not one of our most valued and cherished meanings that did not arise through this worldview.

Elizabethan psychology is a classificatory science, representing man as composed of three parts: body, soul, and “spirit'' or “spirits.” The soul it explains in terms of operations as the internal cause of life and motion, of sense and understanding. According to Batman's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum, the soul is a kind of spiritual and reasonable substance, which God makes of nothing to give life and perfection to man. Charron considers it a very subtle substance and attempts to distinguish between corporeality such as the soul possesses and materiality, but to this opinion the translator takes exception: a body, no matter how thin and subtle it may be, possesses a materiality which the soul does not possess. The difference is largely in terminology, for the soul was usually thought to be incorporeal in the ordinary sense of the word. If it were a body, John Davies of Hereford argues, it could not contain many impressions or at the same time receive two such contrary forms as black and white, fire and frost. By a strange process of sublimation, as we assimilate food, it turns bodies into spirits and from particular things abstracts universal qualities,

Which bodiless and immateriall are,
And can be lodg'd but surely in our minds. [(Sir John Davies, 1599)

After examining theories of pre-existence, transmigration, and traducianism [in Christian theology, traducianism is a doctrine about the origin of the soul or synonymously, spirit, holding that this immaterial aspect is transmitted through natural generation along with the body, the material aspect of human beings], writers usually agree that the soul owes its origin in the body to divine infusion. [from Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays, Ruth Anderson]

This is just one of a hundred varied examples of how a Scholastic and Medieval view-imposition can be recognized. The elements, tempers and humors are other notions that Scholasticism explains, as well as how diet and climate and of course *the stars* relate to the functions of the soul. The view of the GCOB has to do with seeing and defining the Microcosm in relation to the Macrocosm, but of course the Macrocosm, the very idea of it, was itself a projection onto the upper world -- literally the world of the revolving stars and the *substance* these were thought to be composed of.

Consider for a second a very recent popular song (Joni Mitchell Woodstock):

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

To say we are 'stardust' is to evoke the olden metaphysical system where a wide range of meanings is expressed. They are, to us now, whimsical and *poetic*, but at that time when the soul's relation to the stars was real and tangible it as not a metaphor but a description of how things really were. Now the curious thing is that in her song she also says

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

So what she does is to meld a modern notion -- billion year old carbon -- with the olden metaphysical notion of a 'golden' (solar) composition of the soul in a fallen world from which, she longingly states, we must find a way to escape.

Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning.

The notion of being trapped in a determined mechanism is what she means by 'cog' but what interests me most is the sentiment expressed with its clear metaphysical underpinning. The reason the son is powerful is because it hits all these *notes* of meaning which seem to be deeply impressed in us.

The notion of *the world* as The Devil's Kingdom is perhaps one of the outstanding traces and remnants of the Old Metaphysics. And it must be pointed out that in your own descriptions of the World

And here in this conversation (this thread) the entire idea of Jesus Christ and of course 'salvation' can only be understood if the entire Mediaeval structure and the tenets of Scholasticism expressed as The Great Chain of Being are grasped. I never would have imagined the intricacy of these former view-structures until I spent time reading those who examined them in depth. They are endlessly fascinating.

[Belinda]

The traditional supernatural underpinning of Christianity has been a plague of disinformation and
a cause of political and interpersonal injustice between people, and also supernaturalism denigrates the physical in order to elevate the 'spiritual'.

See the life and example of Socrates who in many respects is like a Greek Jesus. Socrates affirmed humanitarian values and was faithful to these values until his dying event.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Now let's jump a great deal forward as examine how Nietzsche sees and defines *the world*:

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Obviously (and those who have studied the history of thought know this) the view that Nietzsche is expressing came about when, and after, he overthrew and overcame the *shadow* and final traces of the Scholastic view. If we are going to speak about what nihilism is we cannot see it as something invented on a whim but rather as the necessary outcome of the *models* of reality that scientific and materialistic view has brought into view. So when Nietzsche talks about taking a sponge and 'wiping away the horizon' he means not that he did this but that it was done! The *horizon* is, of course, all the sense and all the meaning that was intuited (or invented and imposed if you wish) through let's say 1,000 years of dedicated thought. The world that is 'wiped away' is, let's be frank and direct, the world that religious Christians seek to hold to, to conserve.

The *battle*, as it were, is really & truly between two different and to a degree incommensurate metaphysical systems-of-view, explanation and interpretation. It seems to me fair and also necessary to state that if this is not understood, then one can only grasp the struggles going on in our present in a superficial sense.

Now, we will have to present and think about 'militant nihilism'. It is one thing to, let us say 'naturally', arrive at a position-of-view, a perceptual stance, that makes it impossible to *see* God (higher orders of non-physical being that determine the *real* working of the world) or angelic being, and of course cannot see or even conceive of *the soul* as it was formerly conceived. This is the 'dusk' that Nietzsche referred to through the metaphor of the twilight of the idols. Since that world of meaning can no longer be seen, and since *the horizon* of meaning and also value defined over a thousand years was *wiped away* and *erased*, one has no choice but to succumb to the 'dusk', the beginning of a terrible night.

So if one is looking for a definition of nihilism I think it must begin from this point: nihilism is the loss of the capacity to *see* and believe in the former structures that were understood to be the origin or cause of 'meaning and value'. And by referring to *meaning & value* I mean essentially meaning and value as interpretations based in and arising out of the former metaphysics.

Militant nihilism is a nihilistic perspective given revolutionary focus and impetuous. It is something more than having *naturally* arrived at the perspective which can honestly no longer *see* the outline of the old metaphysic as being *real* in any sense, and it becomes a creed and a commitment to 'overturn' through conscious undermining the pillars on which this Olden Metaphysics was built.

One becomes, as it were, a revolutionary termite!

Really, the very definition of *love* -- as it was in fact understood and defined, is undermined:

Love 'lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye;
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd;
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony."

Well, excuse these (ridiculous) flourishes but if we are in my view to understand nihilism I think we must begin to grasp what it means for an individual to have his *horizon* wiped away and to have *sense of meaning* an *sense of value* undermined. Effectively, that individual can no longer explain himself except in mechanistic terms. And any other sort of *higher* explanation cannot be seen in any sense as being real but is rather seen as being invented -- made up.

So true nihilism is a state of perception where one is cut off from everything that was (formerly) conceived of as coming to man from a 'higher dimension'. This gave meaning & purpose to life and to living. But in the nihilistic view that is all phantasy and projection. None of that is real.

Now here is another aspect. If the world really & truly is *a monster of energy* as Nietzsche says -- and in fact, and in accord with modern view it really & truly us just that and nothing more -- then it is right, proper and good to imitate 'the world' in this sense; to become also a monster. I do not mean this quite in the way it will be taken but I do mean that the systems of power and governance, if the world is really as they say it is, do best if they act also like 'controlling and determining monsters'. For how then will you define 'rights'? In the world defined by modern materialism man has no 'rights'. There is nothing 'golden' and angelical about him. And billion years-old carbon is as billion year-old carbon does. Humanism is an illusion really, a fore-stance to the full-on perception of what man really is. A nothing in a cosmos of nothingness or of such vast somethingness that man's being has no particular meaning nor sense.

And what definition of man can be given through the modern view, that view that Nietzsche expresses? Think it through and then turn your gaze out the window to the control-systems that are being devised. Man is solely a biological robot in a world where meaning and values have been invented but are not real in any substantial sense. Here a great transvaluation of values has been enacted and potentially completed.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Now there is one other aspect that I think has to be put out on the table. And that is that Nietzsche, as the harbinger of the nihilistic night and of the tremendous tumult that would result from the overturning of the old order of perception, proposed that since the old order of seeing had come to its end that

1) still the 'ghost' of God would linger on for hundreds of years, and

2) that a new value-system would have to be devised. Obviously, within a new world, which is to say a world that replaces the old world of shadows and 'the graveyard of meaning' (my own term).

And here, of course, he saw that 'overmen' who could withstand the terrible vision that he described in his 'monster energy-system' soliloquy would have no choice but to squarely face the dreadful thing that had happened and which only a few could really understand in depth and, in the face of it, still resolve to go on perhaps in the sense that Samuel Beckett expresses it ---

Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

You must go on.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

So, with all this said, I think it is interesting and productive to hold all this in the mind ... and then to take some steps back from this present conversation (this thread) ... and try to understand where each person, with their seemingly tendentious perspective that does not and will not coincide even with those perspectives with which it has real commonality, where each person is coming from.

'Coming from' really means where they are but moreover where they are going. Because even if, let's say, you are in reality half-dead or half-alive, which within the metaphors I have brought out, means sort of connected to *life* but not necessarily fully connected to life. It might be said that we live in either the dusk or the dawn, and these are metaphors that Nietzsche employed rather ingeniously I always thought.

So where is Lacewing coming from in this sense? Where does Uwot (the true philosopher's popinjay) come from and where is he going? How does Promethean, licking his socially-inflicted wounds that never can heal, enter into the picture? And what about Nick, IC, Belinda, Henry and of course myself?

The *current of the night* surrounds us all and it is a question of defining our relationship to that *night*. Thus in one way or the other it seems to be a question of reacting to the encroaching power of that night.

[Immanuel Can]

2) that a new value-system would have to be devised.

A "devised" value-system cannot work. It would only work if all values were compatible.

Absent God, there is nobody qualified to say what "values" ought to prevail. All we have, then, are what sociologists call "incommensurable conceptions of the good," meaning that we lack any master-values that enable us to arbitrate between conceptions of the good.

On this point, modern sociologists (Margolis, Bauman, et al.) seem quite unanimous, and agree that people like Dewey, who hoped that all values might one day boil down to the same thing were hopelessly naive about that, and simply lacked sufficient understanding of the range of value options that human beings can and do hold. Dewey needed to get out more.

Headhunting and pedophelia are reflective of values, and have been celebrated by some through a whole lifestyle or tradition. So are charity and non-violence: they, too, have quite a history.

Which is right? Who gets to say? And how do know we have a right to make "the right values" stick, when people choose other values?

[promethean75]

"How does Promethean, licking his socially-inflicted wounds that never can heal, enter into the picture?"

My principle article of faith is that one can only flourish among people who share the identical ideas and the identical will. I have no one. That... is my sickness.

It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being...

[Nick_A]

And here in this conversation (this thread) the entire idea of Jesus Christ and of course 'salvation' can only be understood if the entire Mediaeval structure and the tenets of Scholasticism expressed as The Great Chain of Being are grasped. I never would have imagined the intricacy of these former view-structures until I spent time reading those who examined them in depth. They are endlessly fascinating.

Yes, the GCoB and its division into cosmoses through levels of realty explains a lot of what seems absurd. Rebirth in Christianity can lead to a higher level of being along the GCoB.

Well, excuse these (ridiculous) flourishes but if we are in my view to understand nihilism I think we must begin to grasp what it means for an individual to have his *horizon* wiped away and to have *sense of meaning* an *sense of value* undermined. Effectively, that individual can no longer explain himself except in mechanistic terms. And any other sort of *higher* explanation cannot be seen in any sense as being real but is rather seen as being invented -- made up.

So true nihilism is a state of perception where one is cut off from everything that was (formerly) conceived of as coming to man from a 'higher dimension'. This gave meaning & purpose to life and to living. But in the nihilistic view that is all phantasy and projection. None of that is real.

If Nietzsche is right, the universe and Man within it is a machine. The meaning for a machine is revealed by what it serves. He can wipe away the horizon, but is there anything within the machine that can consciously evolve as suggested in the GCoB and did the Christ and his sacrifice bring the Spirit necessary to make it happen? If Man is dual natured, it is only the higher part originating from beyond the world that can return to its source. The animal or lower part can only serve the needs of the earth.

This is the struggle for the being of Man. The higher part is called to its source while the lower part remains an animal. St. Paul described the condition in him as being the Wretched Man. The being of Man is a plurality. The suggestion is that it can become One and be able to say "I Am" rather than we are.

But as you know the human psych and specifically its lower parts, is being attacked by fragmentation. It was easier to contemplate the whole in previous times. But now contemplation of the whole is lost to the fascination of its worldly parts. Humanity becomes enchanted with parts like the shadows on the wall. This leads to the war of opinions only increased through fragmentation.

There can be no meaning in this machine or creature of reaction. But the human heart is still attracted to its source Or GOD if you will.

So where is Lacewing coming from in this sense? Where does Uwot (the true philosopher's popinjay) come from and where is he going? How does Promethean, licking his socially-inflicted wounds that never can heal, enter into the picture? And what about Nick, IC, Belinda, Henry and of course myself?

The *current of the night* surrounds us all and it is a question of defining our relationship to that *night*. Thus in one way or the other it seems to be a question of reacting to the encroaching power of that night.

People are different. Some sense the reality of the GCoB and its levels of reality while others do not. There are those capable of the deductive logic who can feel the relationship between knowledge of the whole and its devolution into opinions created by fragmentation? We are like caterpillars who sense the evolution of becoming a butterfly

Basarab Nicolescu is a good example. He introduces us to the Law of the INCLUDED middle in contrast to the well known law of the EXCLUDED middle. It allows us to see the limitations of duality. My guess is that for some caught up in nihilism who for one reason or another experience the inner direction of the included middle, it provides the path to meaning. Man can evolve to be more than a machine. You seem open to experience the whole rather than being caught up in arguing parts so you will understand this link if interested. I do believe that understanding this may provide the door to appreciate the complimentary goals of science and religion. It may provide the direction those caught up in nihilism may be looking for.

https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/b ... /b12c3.php

[uwot]

Perhaps you should pity the fool who apologizes and insults in the same sentence.

Should anyone do such a thing, perhaps I will.

Good! I'm sorry for insinuating that you're a fool.

Fine; I pity you.

[uwot]

Let me stop you there Gus. No I am not. Quite why you struggle so is a mystery, but I have asserted many times that any story that cannot be proven wrong may be true. I have also made it clear that I like stories and have no axe to grind with anyone who chooses to believe them, but that I reserve my contempt for those who demand I too believe their preferred story. If that really is beyond your comprehension, I shall apologise for for every sleight and henceforth treat you with the pity your cerebral faculties deserve.

Though there are some aspects of your views that you often clarify -- thank you -- I think that I pretty well understand your position. So it is not that I struggle with some sort of *mystery* about what you declare, but rather that I do regard it as a mystery-of-sorts that so many work so hard to undermine the Christian religion. I shall not conceal from you that I see you as one deeply involved in this project.

And I have not concealed from you that I like stories and have no axe to grind with anyone who chooses to believe them. If you look carefully, it is in the very quote you cited.

And I shall not conceal from you that I regard this work, and thus your efforts here, as nefarious.

Nor have I concealed from you that I don't care if you refuse to take me at my word.

So what interests me more than pointing to any individual and making some statement about them, personally, is much more in seeing these activities, and your activities, in a critical light and as I have said *from a certain distance above and looking down*.

Well that's Dunning-Kruger for ya.

...I might suggest to you, and anyone who sees and thinks like you, that you would do well to consider the ramifications of the total undermining of what you call the 'story' at the metaphysical core of Christianity.

The story is that someone else being tortured and murdered absolves me of any crime, if only I believe it. What do you imagine would be the ramifications of telling people that they are responsible for their own actions?

Even if you are not a believer, and even if you cannot believe, it is possible that you might contribute positively to the community that discerns a need to hold to the metaphysics. The reason being is that, for Europe, Christianity has been the substantial building material, and also the binding glue, that made it possible and held it together.

Look Gus, I appreciate that you live on another continent, but even the most casual dip into European history will disavow you of your notion that Europe is some cohesive whole.