God and morality

[Immanuel Can]

I'm stable. I know exactly what I doing and saying.

Then you have agency. You can change things in your life. At the very worst, you can make them just a little less insufferable for yourself than now. At most, you can change the trajectory of your life.

I'm rooting for you. Phyllo says you cannot do it. Prove one of us wrong.

So no shame. It's OK for you to be a hypocrite. You have no problem with it.

I have no idea what you're going on about Gary. This is about you.

Either you change things, or you don't. It's that simple. Either I'm right, or Phyllo is.

You decide.

[Alexis Jacobi]

On this earth we truly wander, and are as it were lost; so that were it not for the glorious figure of Christ before us, we should perish utterly … Much on earth is hidden from us, but there is given us in recompense the secret conviction of our living bond with another world, a celestial and loftier world: and the very roots of our thoughts and sensations are not here but there, in other worlds. And that is why the philosophers say that on earth it is impossible to know the essence of things.

—Father Zossima’s discourse in The Brothers Karamazov

It does indeed seem to me that in our present all historical tensions and increasing echoes of calamity present their knife-points from every direction. In at least one sense it hardly seems to matter if one is adamantly and super-reasonably atheistically minded, or devoutly & piously given to religious conviction: the world heats up, madness creeps in, and it all proceeds according to movements and motions outside of any capacity to grasp or comprehend. Why does it all seem so inevitable?

One is forced to interpret, as if by an act of interpretation one might avail oneself of a handle by which one could grasp it and dominate it somehow.

I cannot help but be rather amazed by the sheer contempt for the figure of Christ that I encounter — here certainly — but in truth as a common mood at least in some intellectual circles. And yet in reviewing art and poetry — poetry especially — when thoughtful men are dwelling on the very essences of their sense of what life is about, it always circles around the transcendental figure and prospect. And if one pays attention to common cultural currents everywhere there are signs of the renewal of faith. Seeking out substantial bases & platforms within metaphysical domains.

It is so far woven into the inner parts of Occidental man that the meanings there far transcend any vulgar representation of Christian figures which tend to excite the modern, atheistic and reason-based mind to that acidic contempt so frequent on these pages.

[Greatest I am]

God has to learn morality from us.

Morality is only needed when there is another entity to think about.

We have others of us, and that condition is what creates the need for ethics to guide our actions and interactions.

Morals are love driven. A lone God, in a beginning, has nothing to love except itself.

The Bible is clear where it indicates that we who know good and evil are to create a God defined as our best possible ideal, and follow it's dictates.

One of the Jesus' in the Bible tells us this, but most don't read that better God.

[Immanuel Can]

...to create a God defined as our best possible ideal, and follow it's dictates.

If we created it, why do we have to follow it? What duty do we have to our fantasies?

[Greatest I am]

...to create a God defined as our best possible ideal, and follow it's dictates.

If we created it, why do we have to follow it? What duty do we have to our fantasies?

If you build a left side driving car, will you sit on the right and expect to find a steering wheel?

Fantasies are quite handy and useful to our thinking.

Supernatural beliefs just render inquisitions and jihads.

Can you name another fantasy that has cost the world so many innocent lives?

I did not thing so.

Go Gnostic or stay in the immoral camp.

[Impenitent]

...Go Gnostic...

I said the same thing to a beaver once

-Imp

[Immanuel Can]

Can you name another fantasy that has cost the world so many innocent lives?

Socialism. It's cost the world far, far more.

But you didn't answer: why has anybody got a duty to obey a fantasy?

[Alexis Jacobi]

...to create a God defined as our best possible ideal, and follow it's dictates.

If we created it, why do we have to follow it? What duty do we have to our fantasies?

True Gnosticism is a complex and labyrinthine belief-system which is parallel to the edifice of Christian belief. It would I think and from the perspective of one like GIM who seems to say that the God we worship is our creation, it would have also to be dismissed as a construct. Or perhaps he means that Gnosticism as a construct is a better one?

Also, gnosis as “special knowledge” is distinct from Gnosticism. I personally think that the only way that an honest modern can approach a strongly mythic religion, as Christianity is, is by way of application of “special knowledge”. That is to say that even to continue to refer to the Christian structures and many of its stories you have to perform an intricate mental manoeuvre of interpretation. It all seems to turn out to be what it means and not necessarily what the literal story claims of itself.

For example, I mentioned the foundational belief in “a world to come”. It is presented as a literalism. Literally, the physical world, the biological world, will be reconfigured. It is, on that level, a phantasy. A projection of the imagination. Unless of course you can, or you choose to, hold to it as a literal future event. But to do so you have to allow a fantasticism. I just can’t imagine why anyone would bother to ordain that a lion will lie down with the lambs. Why not just create a completely new planet in a dimension beyond the laws and dictates of the Cosmos we are in? Why not just an entire world in God’s imagination?

But the real point is not whether that world of deathlessness and immortality will descend at some point, and has everything to do how men choose to live now, and what world is being constructed. Essentially what law and outline they will agree to live under.

In fact it all hinges on applied gnosis. There is so much information that has been released that the choices of what to accept and believe with all the force of one’s will is completely overwhelming.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Supernatural beliefs just render inquisitions and jihads.

One way or the other there will be “imposition of belief” and a more or less accepted metaphysics. But you are right that a metaphysical belief-system — as Catholicism/Christianity is — requires force. I.e. many different decisions, and many different points where defined truths have been translated into rules of conduct. There is no system where there is not a defining authority. Though “Liberalism” has indeed attempted a rulership system in which law protects various groups and their strains of belief under a protective umbrella.

Even “supernaturalism” cannot be avoided since Ideas and concepts are rather supernatural. They do not exist in nature, do they? They have no substance. And yet they have profound, determining effect.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The Bible is clear where it indicates that we who know good and evil are to create a God defined as our best possible ideal, and follow it's dictates.

I think I missed that part. Can you direct me to it?

[Immanuel Can]

...to create a God defined as our best possible ideal, and follow it's dictates.

If we created it, why do we have to follow it? What duty do we have to our fantasies?

True Gnosticism is a complex and labyrinthine belief-system...

Blah, blah, blah.

I know Gnosticism. Want me to read your texts to you? I have them.

Just answer the question, please.

[Alexis Jacobi]

You confused me for “the other guy”.

[Alexis Jacobi]

True Gnosticism is a complex and labyrinthine belief-system which is parallel to the edifice of Christian belief.

This is not a controversial statement by any means.

Gnosticism — its essences, its basic suppositions and if you will its doctrines — arose in competition with Catholic concepts. The texts of Gnosticism (those I tried to read) are extremely knotty and not very clear. It is easier to rely on encapsulations or restatements by scholars of Gnosticism, which is likely the case for most people’s grasp of what Gnosticism is.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Either I'm right, or Phyllo is.

Here it is again: You and Phyllo are right in some ways and wrong in others. It must be stated again: Only Alexis Jacobi can be understood as possessing the capability of making genuinely truth-laden statements.

Why is this? Or better put How is this possible? Does Alexis have some super-organizing capability that others lack? Some ultra-developed discriminatory power?!

Frankly, these are questions I ask myself all the time! How is it that I manage to pull off balanced, intelligent perspectives that always ALWAYS exceed and confound those whose purpose is “bickering”?

[Alexis Jacobi]

What is interesting to ponder is two things:

1) The degree to which an atheistic metaphysics has become powerful in determining how people see and understand themselves within the Earth, within life.

2) The degree to which their beliefs deviate from Standard Orthodoxy and incorporate, quite literally, Gnostic ideas, practices and modes of understanding. This happens without really understanding that it has happened. This leads to various results, some negative and some positive. Kind of hard to sort through it …