AJ: By 'doing this' I meant taking an open and, say, an appreciative stance toward different religious and ethical systems.
Immanuel: Which system informed you that "taking an open stance, avoiding condemnatory stances,...etc." was moral? Which system of meta-ethics told you it was more "moral," say, then simply finding the truth and staying with it?
This does not seem to me to be the right question to ask. Obviously, you have already made determinations about the *supreme* ethical system. So it follows that everything that you say will contain a priori the bias that is so strongly noticed in you. My effort is not so much to battle you over this question -- your primary activity, futile as it seems to be, is to wage battles with those who won't or can't accept your recommendation to *convert* -- but to make use of you by helping me to clarify sound, sane, reasoned and intelligible choices.
So I start by repeating what I have said before: Judaism and Hebraism begins very strongly in Hebrew idea-imperialism. I have already gone over, numerous times, the basic defect of the belief that one people has been *chosen* and all other people are to *be led*. I have also made it clear that Yahweh when quoted saying thus-and-such is not 'the voice of God' but a voice of
ventriloquy. Who speaks then? A priest-class that 'handles narratives'. Right here, right at the beginning, you can recognize how manipulation of the multitude takes place. But the primary victim is the believing Jew himself. Yet at a point the *victim* also becomes a *perpetrator*. The idea of 'God's chosen people' is, then, an utterly perverse idea. Especially and obviously when that idea negates the validity of another person or another people to conceive of, to live within, and to develop freely within their own systems of understanding.
So right here I must take issue with the basic impetus of Hebraism which also comes very strongly through Christianity and Islam. The idea, of course, is that all other god-concepts, and sometimes the people who hold those concepts, must be wiped out must be seen for what it is. But this is not a simple affair because it ramifies in so many different areas. But here I am obligated to state that the sort of *seeing* I am proposing is certainly not for everyone. I am therefore recommending developing a *private stance* which is, essentially, philosophical. I cannot recommend that any other person see things as I do. And indeed there is a problem which is exposed: If someone does *see things as I see them* it might undermine their 'faith-position' and, as a result, bring them into existential confusion. People need their *structures*, and people also need *organizing systems* in order to make sense of life, so that they have a type of base or platform through which to live. So I guess I must then say that *philosophy is dangerous* -- definitely to *faith* but this also means *to illusion*.
Now I fully understand that you have accepted and internalized a religious system that is tightly bound up in these *illusions*. And here I must introduce another idea and one that does complicate things even more. It is that the Christian system has developed a social ethics system that is a compendium of (what I regard as generally) sound ideas. These are social *rules & regulations* that when they are considered make sense. The problem arises when, and indeed this does happen, the phantasy-system through which Christianity explains itself collapses, and can no longer be believed, that simultaneously this puts intense pressure on the ethical system that developed concurrently with the larger metaphysical system that, shall we say, encases it.
So average people who do not have the time, skill or inclination to carefully sort things out, and do not have the skills of a 'master metaphysician' who can help them in this process,
fall out of an encasing and ensconcing system which, like a house or a structure to live in provided a foundation and indeed a *way of seeing*, sets them loose into a 'liberty' for which they are not prepared. I assert that
most men cannot handle liberty. It is a primary assertion around which a great deal of my personal views and philosophy revolves. Men need structures. (And this is what I have tried to communicate with Lacewing who seems to propose
structurelessness).
Many know, though certainly not all (Harbal is a chemically pure example of one who does not know in an absolute and rather extreme manner), that when average ill-equipped men lose the ground under their feet that they fall into crises of different forms and different manifestations. The general term is 'nihilism'. Those who can succeed in avoiding superficial thinking realize that *the loss of horizon* (the loss of a containing picture through which life is explained) is an extremely serious affair. The superficial
fail their responsibility when they do not see this. And one major area, though not the sole area, which is highly problematic is when the ethical system developed over centuries is abandoned or is seen as *outmoded* that men who cannot responsibly handle freedom and liberty fall into conditions of decadence.
But in my view -- and all I do is talk about this! -- every religious system is presented through a *picture*. The picture developed
in conditions of explanation that no longer apply. Take the simplest example: creation myths. Gardens of Eden and all the rest.
It no longer functions. I am not going to even bother to explain what must be obvious to anyone who thinks about these things. The point? The picture is just a container, a ways and a means through which certain
IDEAS are communicated. It does not matter so much what the picture is, or was, what matters is the ideas. So in fact it is possible that the *picture* explode, or is erased, but something fundamental
still remains. And I locate what is fundamental within metaphysics. At my present state I cannot conceive of life without those "metaphysical principles" that animate our life.
So what do I do then? I return to the quest, as it were, to *see again*, to *recover*, to *re-explain* a metaphysical order. Where am I within that task? Not as far along as I'd hope. And that is simply an honest statement. But note that what I propose is I think 'genuinely alarming' to many people. Why? That requires more explanation. When they fall away from *agreed-upon order* (a metaphysics that makes sense to them) into what do they fall? They fall into 'freedom'. They fall into
license. They fall into
whatever. They fall into an existence not within
Being but in
Becoming. They fall into the world of mutability and the farther this proceeds the less can they define a 'ground' under their feet. What (according to me) is the end result?
Nescience.
The fact of the matter is that if you cannot *explain* your world, you really have no base of power within your world. You exist, that is true, but everything is provisional, and it is all subject to mutability and mutation. Can one *recover ground* within that circumstance? Yes, to varying degrees. One can *pretend* that one has found *real structure* but, often, these are extremely superficial examples of
strategy. To avoid the realization of the ramifications of the condition in a sort of *existential perdition*. I employed a silly example: Extreme Ironing. I do not mean to
seriously imply that extreme ironing really becomes man's surrogate for life lived within sound meaning & value. But it is a metaphor for the range of decisions that people make, indeed must make, in postmodern confusion. You gotta do
something, right?
So what is 'nescience'? In my view it is a condition of having lost, at the most fundamental and foundational level,
the knowledge of who one is, where one is, what this place is, why one is here in it, and what is to be done here.
If you cannot answer those questions -- and no one writing here really does have any sort of an answer because they are all outcomes of those decadent processes that inform us all -- then the realization of one's condition is the first step on a road to *recovery*.
Which system informed you that "taking an open stance, avoiding condemnatory stances,...etc." was moral? Which system of meta-ethics told you it was more "moral," say, then simply finding the truth and staying with it?
Now I must comment on both
you at a personal level and also the 'belief-system' that you are here pimping for. And I circle back to my opening paragraphs. See?
In no sense am I *opposed* to defining
The World and man's place in it. If you are not doing this you are not really responding to the demands of the time. If you go to sleep, if you choose to lose yourself in becoming and mutability that is certainly an option, but is it the *right* option? Who determines what is right? How does what is *right* appear in our world? Because certainly such admonitions involve ethical conceptions.
Is 'morality' a 'command'? Unlike some I'd myself answer that the admonition (the *command if you wish) to take stock of who one is and where one is is inherent in the manifestation itself! I could even quote Lacewing who declares that it is already there inside of us. It has to be uncovered and realized.
What you do, Immanuel, is try to corral people into the *System*
that you front for. You answer all the *questions* that I have posed with ready-made answers. You offer intense conventions. And you have no choice but to present your sense of truth and right through outmoded pictures. You speak from within a crumbled building (as it were). And you gain no traction at all.
