Dubious wrote: ↑Fri Dec 09, 2022 1:25 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Dec 09, 2022 12:44 pm
Immanuel: re Dubious’ 4 foot post:
Oh dear! Your work has been cut out for you.
After all the times you've communicated with IC you should know by now that there is no input of any kind possible in a mind biblically lobotomized to all inconvenient reality. He will simply deny the whole thing as factual with a single and simple one or two sentence thrust from the keyboard and that will be that! It's a technique he invariably defaults to whenever an argument supersedes any attempt being argued against.
How often have you been on the receiving end of that? Who hasn't! I only quoted at length to once again give him the opportunity of disaffirming everything with a simple strident statement. It amuses me when he does that; I'm kind of perverse in that way and love to see a fundamentalist of his ilk mummify his brains even further with each denial.
Yes, and what interests me is just what you point out: an incredible resilience despite any proposal or evidence to the contrary that maintains one within a belief-set and dead-set on *taking on all comers* in defense of it.
So, it turns out then that the *thing believed* is far more crucial than any specific element through which the *thing believed* has been constructed. What is the *thing believed* then? That there is a God who exists and who communicates with the believer. I mean, that seems to be the essential core of it when you examine what many religious, and certainly Christians, actually do believe. They describe God as having 'entered their lives' in such ways that, for them, proves god exists. For many people this experience is that platform upon which a new life, a completely reorganized life, is built. And you could not ever take that away from them because the real evidence is in that. In what has become manifest in their life, in their own self. I could cite many instances of Christian believers who base their allegiance to Jesus Christ on *what Jesus did for them*. To insist that they move from that dedication amounts to a violation of the entire relationship. It would amount to betrayal. In most cases, or in many cases at least, the believer's dedication to the preaching mission is always based on sharing their own conversion process and history. It is rarely 'academic' or 'intellectual' it is always personal and necessarily emotional-sentimental. It does not just deal with hard and cold facts but rather with a sort of
quintessence.
I am reminded of what Immanuel said to me years back now. The gist was "I gave my life to Jesus Christ when at university. And Jesus has carried me all the way through to today". The sense in the statement is that an *anchor* was discovered which provided the foundation.
Now, I have (as you have gathered and even from what I just wrote) developed an *explanatory mode* to help non-believers -- those who have no capacity for nor interest in so-called 'spiritual life' or mystical life -- which is also an explanatory model through which the belief of believers (their core
experience -- can be preserved while the entire *construct* is dismissed. The long essay you quote from is an example of the "deconstruction" or "dismantling mode". It wrecks the *belief system* but from the position of 'rational evidence' and basically from an intellectual position. Having read it, having assimilated it, how can the Believer still maintain their belief? This is frustrating to no end to those, like yourself, like Sculptor, like the formidable Tillingborn, seem to have not an iota of 'spiritual life' or mystic life. I admit that their opposition to *the Christian belief-system* is a complex construct in itself. There are a dozen reasons,
all of which are sound, as to why they are *certain beyond certainty* that their critical position decimates 'belief'. And yet it doesn't!
The Christian, the committed Christian, will believe despite every anti-belief armament lobbed against dedicated belief.
They will tell you that their life depends on it.
What I gather you have noticed that I do -- I call it
a manoeuvre, an action that is carried out with an end in mind but which does, also, involve a sort of cunning creativity -- is the declare that *all pictures are only pictures*. It is not the *picture* that counts but rather something within what is believed, and what is encountered through belief, that matters. You have presented an essay which is a complete intellectual armament-system that if applied as the compiler of the essay desires will destroy the possibility
of belief. And though I cannot, personally, invest myself into any element of the story about things-believed that comprise the essay, I can and I do resort to asserting that when it comes to certain essential ideas, that these ideas *exist* in the realm of the metaphysical. So then, all that is *metaphysical* to life, to the mind, to thought, to the vision of what life is, most certainly *exists*, has effects, but which cannot ever be located within mere phenomena or, in this sense, within the world of Becoming.
No part of this do you, nor do I think
can you, accept. In post after post you have described why this is. And you have revealed a means-of-seeing; a sort of lens-of-seeing that explains why you see what you see, and also why you
cannot see what others, either unconsciously see but do not really understand, or still go on believing even when the *ladder* to the belief they hold has been grabbed away.
My view is, of course, that there is a *higher dimension* of mystical belief that can abandon the ladder entirely and can resolve to hold to *important essences* which only really have to do with
meaning & value. How can one get to that *higher dimension* then?
Purification of the seeing mechanism.
One problem, which I certainly admit, is that the god-believers that swarm in our present (let's say on the American scene) as Q-anon-style Christians, as deranged Evangelicals whose minds are overheated and whose hallucinatory Visions are more like externalized nightmares and topsy-turvy swamps of steaming phantasies that seem to *possess* their entire being, that these people have a tremendous amount of power in our present. Far too much power. We see, and without doubt, that they are
extremely dangerous. They seem, quite literally, edging the world toward some sort of externalization of their phantasies which they see as "predictions" and 'prophecy". They
invoke conflagrations.
And it is true that were we to encounter and talk to one of those that we would discover in them a disordered mind and a disordered perceptual system. And once we did point out to them that what they believe has a mad aspect they would then look back at us and *see* the Devil trying to convince them that what is *true* is not true. That they are dealing with a mental and spiritual derangement that, I think it fair to say, requires forms of psychological help.
How could they be brought back to Earth? And then
What is Earth?
My efforts here are to take the challenge to try and explain what is going on today. To look into things and to clarify what it is that we are seeing and why.
It's all for self-preservation over truth.