Harry Baird wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:39 pmYour own view here remains obscure and unclear to me. You ignored
the direct questions I put to you in this respect in the hope that, my having answered as best I could the direct questions that you'd put to me, you would as quid pro quo deign to answer the ones I put to you - but my hope appears to have been in vain.
No, I did not
ignore it. But yes I did not answer it
directly. The questions opens up into a very wide field. In so many different ways the dialog here turns essentially on the question.
That question was:
Given that you also recognise the design in nature, then my second sincere, direct question (riffing off yours above) is: Who or what (if not an objectively-existing God) stands behind the design of this world?
Well, I can do little else but *recognize* the design in nature. The more that it is examined, the more strange, unlikely and *impossible* it seems. Yet who dreamed it up? I cannot make sense out of it. And as you know -- I think it is plain and undeniable -- our world, the planetary world, the world of biology, is utterly cruel and simply without care or concern.
So, and I think you've noticed this, the 'ethics' that I sometimes refer to (this came up when discussing the White European conquest of the southern cone of Africa) is one that speaks of 'the way things are here' as a starting-point. The way things are (I wager, I suspect) will not ever change. It
cannot change in a way given that the nature of the world is as it is. If that is true then human affairs will always have the quality they seem to now.
With that said you can better understand why I resist what I sense is *extreme idealism* on your part.
The moral system, and the sense of moral guilt men feel -- that sense that everything man does is wrong and that something in man is dreadfully wrong -- is something I question in itself. Thus, I have used the term 'moral imposition' to refer to our moral systems.
And I think you know that I describe Christianity as a 'picture' through which an absolutely perfect and purely good god intrudes into the human world and demands that everything that makes it what it is (the design of things) be denied and resisted. When I did come to understand this I also turned my view to the older (ancient) Vedic view of things as a comparison point. They developed an unusual way of dealing with the nature of sin that is built into the world.
Who or what (if not an objectively-existing God) stands behind the design of this world?
I am just as unable to answer this question as you are. I am aware of tactics or strategies through which the question is answered. Take the Vaishnava one. They say that the place we are, this Earth, this realm, this aspect of manifestation, is taking place in "god's exterior energy". Implying, of course, that there is an "internal energy". We are captured by the external energy, but it has deadly features. We are then in a sort-of hell-realm. One mistake and we get even more mired. There are only a few ways 'out'. And that is defined through terms that are similar to our own 'intellectus'.
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.
So first, we have to realize and understand that we are in a marginal place with dangers on all sides. Second, we must hone our own consciousness since it is the platform of intellectus. How that is done is a wide topic. The cultivation of intellectus is what opens us to all higher dimensions of understanding and also knowledge. But *the world* itself tends to fight against, or perhaps to oppose, the development of the higher faculties.
