“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling” (Ephesians 4: 4).

   One of the more egregious errors of Preterist theology is its treatment of the canonical New Testament writings as purely human documents.  Utilizing a “critical-historical” method of interpretation, Preterists come to the conclusion that most, if not all, of eschatological passages were fulfilled in the Jewish War of A.D. 67-70. 

   Of course, such a view amounts to little more than rationalistic nonsense, as we have labored for the past three years to show.  Did Christ never speak of His second coming?  According to Preterists, He certainly did not, but was more concerned about an A.D. 70 ‘judgment coming,’ at which the nation of Israel would be destroyed.  This, too, in the face of Paul’s inspired teaching that the the Redeemer will come out of Sion to turn transgression from Jacob (Romans 11: 26-29).

   I thank God every day that Preterism is not a Biblical doctrine.  Nor is it historical.  This latter fact can be established when we note that virtually every post-apostolic writer prior to the  16th-century placed the appearance of Antichrist prior to the second advent of Christ, which is of course, yet future.  True, men graced with a tad of book-learning have been known to discern Preteristic ‘elements‘ in the writings of church fathers.  But Preterism as a system just isn’t there.  It can only be built by a process of “theological cookery” whereby ingredients from 2,000 years of Christian teaching, selected at the discretion of the chef, are mixed together to produce a Preterist system. 

   Preterists must not be too dismayed, however, if we reject their method.  We prefer to believe saints such as Irenaeus, Papias, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Polycarp, Lactantius, Commodian, Hippolytus, and countless others who taught a literal, physical, and future return of Christ, at which the Kingdom will be set up in glory upon the earth.  Away with Preteristic jargon that teaches the exact opposite!

   We cannot deny that Preterism results in a bifurcated view of the Body of Christ, in which the church of the first century is treated as a distinctly different company from the church of today, and as possessing a distinctly different hope.  Such a view runs contrary to Paul’s declaration that there is but one faith, one hope, and one body.  Since Ephesians was written prior to A.D. 70, a Preterist cannot consistently say he/she is a member of the same ‘body’ without also confessing that he/she is bound by the same ‘faith’ and the same ‘hope.’  It is a matter of consistency.

  Addressing saved Gentiles of the “one body,” Paul declared that we are “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God: and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2: 19-21).

  Note the temple is “fitly framed together.”  It is not lying in pieces.  The cornerstone is not detatched from the foundation, nor is the superstructure left hanging in mid-air.  We are not to break the cohesion of the body (see Eph. 4: 16) by positing two classes of Christians, pre-A.D. 70 and post-A.D. 70.  The church is still growing, through the accession of sons who are saved and sanctified by the blood of Christ.  If the church is still growing as it did when Paul first penned his epistle, then A.D. 70 cannot be seen as a terminal point in any analysis. 

  What does Preterism produce?  The end result of their doctrine is the proliferation of loud-mouthed teachers who boast a “biblical worldview,” but whose teachings resemble nothing like those found in the epistles of Peter, Paul, James, and John –  who ministered (as they still do) to the ever-growing Body of Christ.

   While Preterists claim that the church is Israel, they forget that Israel was formed as a nation only after corporate deliverance through the Red Sea.  The church has not yet been delivered, but is still being conformed to the image of Christ, through patience and tribulation in this present evil age.  There is a road of “grace to glory” which we all must walk (Romans 8: 29-30).  Our triumph is not now, but will be realized at the Lord’s second coming, when we stand before the judgment seat of Christ.

   Preterism reverses all these truths and claims that the eschatological hope of the church (which is connected with the consummation of our redemption) was realized at the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.  Preterists say that now the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of Christ (see Rev. 11: 15), there is nothing left for us to do but “take charge” of this messed-up world in His name, and “engage the culture.”  Unfortunately, all too often the culture ends up engaging them, due to their refusal to heed John’s admonition:

   “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.  If any man love not the world, the love of the Father is not in them” (1 John 2: 15).

   It would seem that in many cases, Preterists believe that this precept only applied to a pre-A.D. 70 time frame, and that since the destruction of Herod’s temple it is ok to love the world.  Well, it is certainly love of the world, or at least of man’s wisdom and his pompous ‘learning,’ that causes so many of them to reject the canon of Scripture and its inspired teachings, and to posit a two-tongued ecclesiology, thus breaking the seven-fold unity of the Spirit (Eph. 4: 4-6).

(my translation from German):

“There is no man which is deprived of any moral sentiment, since a total insensibility towards this feeling would mark his moral death, and if (to speak in medical terms) the ethical vital force were not any more able to produce this sentiment, humanity (for a chemical law, so to say) would disperse itself in mere animality e would merge without remedy with the mass of all the other natural beings” (Metaphysics of Morals, p. 400)

David Hume was definitely less extreme: at his best, he wrote that “there never was sny nation of the world, nor any single person in any nation, who was utterly depriv’d of them [the moral sentiments] [...] These sentiments - the moral ones – are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, ‘tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them” (Treatise of Human Nature, 474).

A morally insensible person, for Hume, is a mad person. For Kant is a dead human agent. Who is the sentimentalist?

What is destiny of man? Or what is the destiny of humanity? There are several answers suggested by philosophers but very few could answer it correctly. Philosophies of infinity declare that man’s destiny should not be less than his absolute freedom. Freedom not in relative term rather freedom from all relative phenomena. These philosophies did not meditated from the point of being as ‘desiring being’ rather from the point of being as ‘pure and eternal’. Man’s destiny thus is not to satisfy only desires rather there are some more important truths to be realized. But philosophies of modern age declare another truth and decided another destination for humanity to achieve and it was desire. Desire became the sacred philosophical truth which bore the seed of modernity. And the epistemology that narrated the philosophy of desire was rationalism. Reason which is always contradictory became man’s light. It dismantled very thing which did not supported reason. Thus all religions and religious philosophies became obscure, irrational, speculations, though rationalism itself started speculating. Started with Rene Descartes to till now, these philosophers are speculating. Science too which is based on the rationalist philosophy speculated not less and is still speculating though they declare that their theories are solely based on concrete observations. For example the concept of atom when propagated by Vaisheshik philosophy it was just speculation but the same thing when invented later by Dolton it became science. Though Dolton could not provided any proof other than a speculative hypothesis that there is a smallest particle in the matter called atom which later declared wrong since there were uncountable particles. Till today science is speculating about the root of the matter, recently they have speculated that there is a phenomenon in the heart of the matter and thus cosmos, called string; on which every thing is based. And this string is floating in time and space, it is both outside and inside, it is a kind of absolute element from which everything is formed or which forms every thing. But a symbolic expression of philosophies of infinity in this regard is useless and just an irrational idea. Einstein in his hypothetical journey once speculated that ‘ presence of mass ‘ curves space’ gravity is a property of space’ but before his death he declared that ‘ space has devoured ether and time; it seems to be on the point of swallowing up also the field and corpuscles, so that it alone remains as the vehicle of reality’. But when a Vedanta philosopher says that space is primary element in the material phenomena it becomes sheer speculation.

The rational philosophy which is solely based on rational categorization of things, on sign system, on system of unity destroyed human endeavor to jump in the truth infinite. System of knowledge which was earlier free wandering in the matter of things became so rational that it lost its inner voice.  Rationalism’s sole concern was not to take any flight rather to structuralize things, situations, events etc in order to hold power. Its major philosophical concern was to exploit people in the name of progress. In all this progress of science and society man’ was no where only there were concepts in which man’s destiny was captured. Man’s consciousness which he brought with him became a subject to be governed and all this was done with the political concept of ‘common’ of the rationalists. Man was bolted in the mechanism of ‘common’; beyond it he has no individuality. Man is man through the ‘common’. The day this concept of ‘common’ came into existence man lost his very freedom to think and meditate. It was Hobbs who formulated it first. He was the first rational political philosopher who said that, ‘in the beginning, before the formation of society there was war (and it was for sex and material gain) to get rid of this bloody situation of war in which each was against each one; they came to form a ‘common’ a contract that from now on we are bounded by a law of ‘common’. Of which king became head in which absolute sovereignty resided, no one could transcend his absolute sovereign power of law making and enforcing. Since than, the theory of ‘common’ is in practice, no political theory raised any question on the metaphysics of ‘common’ in which man is destined to suffer. Since Hobbs, all the political theories only upgraded his theory, only refined it and made it more and more complex. Even most acclaimed revolutionary political theory of Marx too could not go beyond Hobbs.  ‘Common’ which was formed as a system of law, in its later phase of evolution was transformed in to a mechanism, of which there was a goal. This goal, which was attributed to the ‘common’, was not of people who formed it rather of those who got hold on production mechanism. Thus the ‘common’ got a goal that in its later development became universal. The goal which was set forth for the ‘common’ was not any ideal or any virtue or any higher goal like liberation or moksha rather to ‘produce’. Production of materials and things related to materialism became the highest goal of ‘common’ other than this what ever was existed became irrelevant. There is no pursuit of truth, if there is; it should be productive to the mechanism of production. This mechanism of production which is a movement of consciousness of self-interested rationalists, in which comes industrialists, many philosophers, poets, cultural thinkers is solely based on metaphysics of desire. Desire is the moving force of the production mechanism, in which desire is produced, things of desire is produced even culture of desire is also produced. In this production of desire man is metamorphosized into a little beast; having lost his individuality, his freedom of consciousness he dreams nothing. This is the reason there is no philosophy of dream, no literature of solitude, no art which reveals mystery. All is bounded by desire; it is the soul of all living beings. It is the soul of art and culture which has come to an end. Man’s consciousness which have lost its freedom has become ‘common’ consciousness; the consciousness directed towards the goal to produce the humanity of beasts. Man’s consciousness in the movement of ‘common’ consciousness neither dances nor sings, if he dances and sings it is because of his business. Man has been dehumanized, objectified, and rationalized in the dynamic of materialist production. In the dynamic of production man is constructed, his subjectivity is defined and re-defined.  Through out history man’s subjectivity has always been displaced, located, shifted from one system of production mechanism to another.

Is there any option other than the dynamic of materialist production which has now become universal concept of progress, in which man does not exist? When will man find his natural dwelling? When the set meaning of being in the world will change? Is being in the world is being through dynamic of materialist production? Isn’t Heidegger’s suggestion is relevant in this regard, that man should find an authentic condition of his existence in order to achieve the ideal of being authentically oneself. The ideal of being authentically oneself is what the ideal of Vedanta philosophy is.  And later Vedanta as taught in Bhagvata Gita provides complete authentic condition for man to achieve his goal, which he can achieve without losing anything. Karma yoga opens highway for humanity to reach its goal but without any accident, without any suffering.  Rationalists think that there is no philosophy other than objective rationalism in which desire finds its eminence. All philosophies of infinite turn there face towards asceticism but these western thinkers never come across the theory of karma yoga and Indian tantrik philosophies in which desire is not discarded rather is being put in a proper plane of idealist discourse.  Desire is considered divine in Gita, the teacher of Gita says, ‘desire is myself’ i.e. of the nature of truth itself; but only that desire which does not violate the law of Rit -the dharma underlying all phenomena.(dharma viruddhokamosmi). In Buddhist Mahayana tantricism desire and passion is being considered as a path to realization of ultimate truth-Sunyata. In Indian philosophies desire has been regarded most important aspect of life and it was never repressed as in the case of Christianity. In Christianity it is sin because of which man has fallen from the heaven but in Hindu philosophies it is desire when raised spiritually brings liberation.
But real question of materialist philosophers is not that that desire is not finding its eminence rather how desire could find a proper plane in their discourse of exploitation. Rationalist discourses on life never provided any solution for man. What they provided throughout the ages is ‘the discourses of exploitations’; this that how man could be enchained. How man’s dignity and freedom of consciousness could be placed in the proper plane of materialist production machinery but not in materialist discourse since they know it can take a leap. And in this they succeeded but since man can not live with bread only, every time they face problem from man’s inner fluttering for liberation. This is why they go on philosophizing, creating bunch of philosophies. Capitalist production machinery is spending a lot of money to produce a solution to the basic human problem of freedom but under the mechanism of ‘common’ only. But they don’t understand that reason can not provide any solution to humanity since it is divided and confused. Reason can not see the complete truth in its entirety. This is the reason that throughout its history it has a tendency to return back to theologies for support. Reason has destroyed all possibilities of man’s leaping into unknown realities. It has destroyed the tradition of philosophizing “the questioning of extra ordinary’ as Nietzsche have said. The philosophies of reason have always organized things, made arrangements, fitted man in a situation from where he could not escape. The whole history of rationalism shows that it has never had any holy purpose; it was vicious from the very outset since than when it rejected the very tendency of people asking questions about infinity. It rejected man’s quest for timeless value, a timeless truth not from the rational point of view rather from the sake of rejecting itself since it never fully took the systematic rational approach.  For instance, the approach of scientific experimentation is based on the ‘to see the truth’ in the laboratory through physical means only, if any said truth is not tested in laboratory or through any physical testing mechanism it is bluntly declared false. Truth must be seen in microscope since only than it could be utilized, could be usable, could be made for production. Everything sublime was thus destroyed for the sake of materialist production. Though these philosophies of infinity were always helpful in providing humanity some immortal values as for as humanity as such is concerned. For materialist production mechanism only these philosophies had been useful throughout the ages and still it is, but now some postmodernist want to destroy the remaining ties too. Because they want to make humanity utterly material, the materially refined man, a man-machine even they want to open factories where subjectivities would be produced. To produce mechanical subjectivities culture would play most important play as it played in history. Marx some where has said, ‘…………..’ it is still valid; Marxists have used it in their struggle against capitalism. This question of culture is most important regarding the society of control and on this issue Theodore Adorno fought most remarkable war against capitalist ideologues. He being materialist was always in favor of autonomy of culture since he wanted to save man’s ‘being’: pure and authentic. When he was invited by an American researcher of ‘American Traditions of Applied Social Research’ Mr. Paul Lazaesfeld to help in his research on the relations between culture and policy, he refuted his request remarking that, ‘culture is opposed to administration. Culture would like to be higher and more pure, something untouchable which can not be tailored according to any tactical or technical considerations. In educated language, this line of thought makes reference to the autonomy of culture. Popular opinion even takes pleasure in associating the concept of personality with it. Culture is viewed as the manifestation of pure humanity without regard for its functional relationships within society.’ Against his approach to culture Researcher Mr. Paul reacted that ‘ Adorno should aspire to greater empirical precision, that ‘ culture might be precisely that condition that excludes a mentality capable of measuring it’. Thus the capitalist intellectuals want to exclude people from the field of culture in order to control them through the culture itself. New destiny of man is machine and he is becoming. All philosophies which advocate man’s freedom through a system are administrative philosophies and are aspiring towards power therefore are against man. When most sublime aspect of humanity is structured, becomes organizational, territorial, productive, and mechanical than know that man is dead. In this dark age of mechanical production of man’s consciousness there is only light i.e. to raise questions and wage a war against those criminals of humanity, who having lost all hopes in life’s play want to play the game of war and sex.

Se lo dice un nobel per la fisica che stimo come Rubbia qualche motivo in più di perplessità circa il nucleare ci deve essere eccome…
Consiglio a tutti ma soprattutto ai difensori del nucleare a oltranza di leggersi l’articolo e di studiare un po’

http://www.repubblica.it/2009/04/sezioni/ambiente/nucleare3/rubbia-intervista/rubbia-intervista.html

1. Rejection of God’s revealed program for humanity.

2. Hatred of Israel.

3. Use of rationalistic and liberalistic arguments to undermine the Word of God.

4. Supreme contempt for those who take God at His word.

5. Naturalistic outlook on life.

6. Hostile and argumentative attitude.

7. Evolutionary view of human institutions and affairs.

8. Refusal to accept the dictates of common sense and reason.

9. Snobbish elitism.

10. Urgent need to proselytize.

There is something that most religious parents who indoctrinate their children into their own religion have in common. These parents usually teach their children that fictional characters such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are real. This kind of parenting can only be characterized as sub-standard.

If parents should teach their children anything it should be critical thinking. Children need to learn how to properly evaluate the things they encounter in life. They need to know how to ask the right questions and be able to analyze information to come to rational conclusions. Teaching them that imaginary characters are real will only make them more susceptible to unfounded claims in the future.

There is also the problem of lying to children. Teaching them something which you personally know isn’t true is morally wrong. And for you Christians, it violates the 9th commandment. There is also an element of idol worship involved (violation of the 2nd commandment), especially for Santa Claus whom children basically pray to for presents.

The Santa Claus myth also promotes doing good for the sake of reward and avoid doing wrong out of fear for punishment (i.e. coal) because you are being watched by an omniscient supernatural being (sounds familiar). This teaches children an unjust system of morality. Children should learn that good has intrinsic value and should be done for its own sake.

Moreover, for many of these myths the child’s belief of the supernatural entity involved is required in order for them to receive the reward. This teaches children that it is okay to believe in something without proper evidence. And even when children begin to ask questions parents will continue to lie to them in order to keep them believing in the myths as long as possible (to not spoil their fun). The result is the discouragement of healthy skepticism.

Nevertheless, it seems like teaching kids about these more softer versions of religion makes it easier to push the hardcore religion down their throats. The step from Santa Claus to Jesus is not that far. I guess it is all just part of the religious program of indoctrination.

Ok. It’s a bad word. Please keep reading. Ontology is a terrible word. Rings of something incredibly complicated. (see comments on philosophers, edited out of previous version).

If you feel like writing. Here’s a question. If not, read on…

The question

The question you need to ask yourself is simply this. What is real? What is reality like? If you had to describe it objectively, capturing everything, what would you say?

Scientists are a clever bunch. All my criticism is of science applied to the wrong things, not science as used in the right way.

The problem, in an impossibly abstract sense, is that scientists work on an incoherent ontology. It is not scientists fault in a way. They are by definition not interested in a conceptual argument.

In the most basic sense an ontology is just an abstract conceptual description of what is real. Science does deal with defining what is real, but only after you have decided what kind of questions you need answering, and what importance the answers have.

It is not in the interest of science to question the conceptual system in which their investigation takes place. The inevitable answer is that science does not provide the whole answer.

Scientists themselves don’t seem to believe that they have all the answers. They happily use concepts that lie outside of scientific investigation – the purpose of the investigation, for example. Because the ontology is everything it obviously decides the importance of everything, thats all.

Language does not comply to the laws of physics

Ontologies can be really easy.

I’ll try an ontology from the most coherent materialist angle possible:

Everything that happens is made of matter. Matter can be explained by the rules of physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology.

One part of the material world is brains and nervous systems in humans.

Living brains and nervous systems in humans generate a complex, communal form of life, experienced by each living and awake human.

Every fact about the world only matters to us insomuch as it is part of the brain-created, conscious, conceptually organized life we live. This life takes place in the material world, but a material world overlayed with a complex network of interconnected concepts which are shared by massive groups, cultures, societies and populations of humans. You obviously cannot see these in the normal sense.

Of course everything real is a concept that is made of something. But tell me how where a concept is, is the most useful part of the explanation?

Lets try one. The concept of the novel. All the paper and ink in books and led and computer chip as well, on which they are being written. And add the interconnected neurons of novelists – the ones that do the thinking, and the writing, and the history and criticism of novels and the great novelists, and all the reading.

The question is, so what? I know what a novel is. There is no scientific discovery about paper or LEDs that will help me explain what a novel is.

And here we hit the sticky point. We get confused talking about our own brains. There are discoveries about the brain that are obviously yet to be made. The question is the most useful explanation of how the neurons are connected.

I would argue that the scientific explanation is not very useful in conceptual matters. The best, and most comprehensive possible answer of what the neurons are doing, the organisation of the atoms, is the description of the practice of reading and writing novels. This is inevitably an expansive inquiry based on finding out about the connected concepts, practices and ideas – the grammar of our form of life, to put it in Wittgenstein’s terms.

You explain what a novel is by explaining what reading and writing are, you explain narrative and characterization, the history of novelists, the science of printing and of neurobiology, the anthropology of  storytelling. All these things and more give the best, most complete explanation of the novel. (the words explanation and description here mean the same thing).

How can you say that life is not real?

It makes no sense to say that life is not real, but that is exactly what many people seem to believe.

Basically, we all bloody well know that we are conscious. That we are all living lives.

There is all this debate about the science of consciousness. We discovered consciousness long ago, but have yet failed to comprehend the implications of the discovery.

We know that our brains do subjectivity, that this is “what it is like to be your brain and nervous system”. We have known the ontology for a long time. But who would herald the discovery of something they were already plainly aware of.

No. We found out that conscious life took place in the brain, and not for example, the lungs. But we were not particularly interested. The logical conclusions are still sinking in.

These thoughts are so far from the scientist’s interests that it is clearly possible to discount them entirely.

The scientist’s question – “how do I find out what is real?”
The scientist’s answer – “it’s what I do”.

1.What is real? Come on you scientists and atheists and rationalists of all shapes and sizes. For the sake of nothing but inquiry and curiosity, indulge me in this trivial matter. What do you think, in the most abstract terms you can face using, is real? What ontology are you working from? Do it in 140 if you like.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. – Spinoza, The Ethics, closing line

Spinoza (1634–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness. – Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy.

To the extent we believe in the most dangerous of all modern illusions, that of Progress, we may mistake the specific mode of cumulative advances in scientific knowledge, in which the superseded theories of the distant past, like phrenology and the phlogiston theory, retain only a quaint antiquarian interest reserved to scholars, for a more general mode obtaining across the disciplines of the mind generally, and adopt the belief that the only way to “keep up” with the higher cerebrations of our species is to follow slavishly the latest headlines in a given sphere. The belief that “we moderns”, standing proverbially after Newton “on the shoulders of giants”, have along our stretch of the historical escalator absorbed into our latter-day theory and practice all that was good and sound in the work of our distant forebears, de-fragmented it, added to it software upgrades of our own before releasing them to a complacent world such that all previous operating systems might be safely recycled, dies hard. We think that simply because even the humblest among us today may access tools and technologies that would set an envious King Midas in reverse moodwise, that so too, our collective conceptual apparatus, as expressed in words, must needs be of an articulacy, of an unprecedented elaboration and refinement capable of casting searching light over a range of infinitely subdividing present challenges, of a sort of which the presumably cruder and more rudimentary minds of the past, through no cognitive or character failings of their own save those arising from birth on steps lower on time’s escalator, could only dream.

Many a humanist has hoped that such fond illlusions born of “presentism” might be dispelled under direct exposure, however fleeting in or out of school, to one example or another of the great literature of the past, that in a reading of The Death of Ivan Ilyich or the Phaedo of Plato, on the death of Socrates, we might still catch sparks capable of fanning to blaze on the question of how best we might after our divers fashions live, and how best we might face death, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”, as Hamlet would have it. As we press on in our study, we find articulated at any point over the last three thousand years questions and attempted answers to problems of perspective and insight and judgment we still face every day with fresh puzzlement, set down often enough in soaring language of a sort that no school of creative writing of today could possibly teach, available everywhere in paperback and requiring as prerequisite to profit no advanced degree, or degrees of any kind. One can only speculate as to the sheer amount of enjoyment and self-improvement via the training of the mind that have been foregone in the mistaken belief that learning is only for the professionally learned.

This capacity of true literature to become “news that stays news”, as Pound had it, is true no less of the works of the great philosophers, and of none among the latter more than Benedict (né Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-1677), the Dutch rationalist and excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, born of a lineage of Sephardic Jews driven from Spain and Portugal under the Inquisition and into Holland. Young Baruch’s mind by age 24 had proven too restless to contain itself within the bounds of Hebraic orthodoxy, and the stern anathemas of the synagogue elders were not long in coming (for just how stern, see bottom of post); from a 2006 comment of ours:

As for Hebraic orthodoxy within the C17 Netherlands proper, every philosophy major has read of how the Pharisees among Dutch Jewry Amsterdamned their fledgling philosopher-immortal-to-be as a heretic, declaring their Tabernacle a no-Spinozone layer unto eternity (…worldly redemption came soon enough, though, as the ostracized Baruch/Benedict moved downtown and formed the indie lute-distortion band Sophic Youth…)

Thanks to a growing circle of learned friends and the stipends resulting offered him, allied to an extraordinarily frugal and modest mode of life, Benedict (his chosen Latinate version of Baruch after excommunication) devoted the remaining twenty years of the forty-four that would prove his allotment to unceasing metaphysical, ethical and political speculation, supplementing his stipends through the grinding and polishing of lenses, whose dust may have hastened his death at 44 in 1677.

Wikipedia: Textbooks and encyclopedias often depict Spinoza as a solitary soul who eked out a living as a lens grinder; in reality, he had many friends but kept his needs to a minimum. One reviewer noted “No one has ever come nearer to the ideal life of the philosopher than Spinoza.” Another wrote: “As a teacher of reality, he practiced his own wisdom, and was surely one of the most exemplary human beings ever to have lived.” “In outward appearance he was unpretending, but not careless. His way of living was exceedingly modest and retired; often he did not leave his room for many days together. He was likewise almost incredibly frugal; his expenses sometimes amounted only to a few pence a day.” “He appears to have had no sexual life.”

The twin terrestrial sources from which his thought, much of it unpublished while he was alive, would blaze across the night sky like a comet, were the Jewish rabbinical tradition on the one hand, and the new mathematical philosophy whose bold figurehead was the Frenchman René Descartes, on the other. But where Descartes had sought an unassailable certainty, attained with inescapable mathematical checkmate, Spinoza sought other rewards, as a leading C19 translator has noted:

In the fragment on the Improvement of the Understanding, Spinoza sets forth the causes which prompted him to turn to philosophy. It is worthy of note that they are not speculative but practical. He did not seek, like Descartes, “to walk with certainty,” but to find a happiness beyond the reach of change for himself and his fellow-men. With a fervour that reminds one of Christian fleeing from the City of Destruction, he dilates on the vanity of men’s ordinary ambitions, riches, fame, and the pleasures of sense, and on the necessity of looking for some more worthy object for their desires. Such an object he finds in the knowledge of truth, as obtainable through clear and distinct ideas, bearing in themselves the evidence of their own veracity.

Of the several works of Spinoza, it was the Ethics that would stand for all time as his summa, the one work in which the unity of all the universe and and of his own system would be at one.

i just finished the ethics again – my second reading – a couple of months ago.  my plan is to start it again in the fall. it is incredibly fruitful. – reader Jeff S., Letter to DSL., July 26, 2005

In its special “Books of the Millennium” symposium in 1999, The Times Literary Supplement of London asked several dozen leading humanists across England, Europe and North America to nominate one work or several fitting the brief. The distinguished French novelist Michel Tournier, who had lived for several decades in a converted village presbytery and whose most famous work expounded Crusovian themes,  chose the Ethics of Spinoza:

Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) was of Jewish Portuguese origin, but was born and lived in Holland. The sum of his learning is contained in the Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata, which was published shortly after his death. Other great philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Kant, etc – can undoubtedly stand comparison with him. But none of them incorporated his whole doctrine into a single book. This is what makes the Ethics a unique monument in the history of thought.

Other paradoxical qualities help to make this treatise an incomparable work. It is a mathematically rigorous system in which are demonstrated all the elements of humanity: God, nature, man, knowledge, ignorance, passions, misery and happiness find their place as in a gigantic, sublime machine. But the Ethics is equally rich in profoundly human thoughts and admirable wisdom: “la joie que nous eprouvons a voir souffrir notre ennemi n’est pas une joie pure, car il s’y mele toujours une secrete tristesse.”*

*The joy that we feel in seeing the suffering of our enemies is not a pure joy, for it mingles with it a secret sadness; for a graphic take on Spinoza on the suffering of one’s enemies, see action-figure at bottom of post.

The article on Spinoza in The Columbia Encyclopedia summarizes nicely the many attractions of the Ethics, suggesting to readers in an age like ours, long known for its desire to unmask the hidden logic and meaning of our thoughts and actions, and to expose the ubiquity of fundamental drives and the will to power,

The first and only foundation of virtue, or the rule of right living, is seeking one’s own true interest. - The Ethics.

the better to overcome illusion and neurosis, the perennial late-modern import for us of this towering thinker from the early-modern era of the C17:

Spinoza’s ethics proceed from a premise similar to that of Hobbes-that men call “good” whatever gives them pleasure-but they reach very different conclusions. Human beings, indeed all of Nature, share a common drive for self-preservation, the conatus sese conservandi. By this drive all individuals seek to maintain the power of their being, and in this sense virtue and power are one. But in Spinoza’s system power is discovered to be a knowledge of necessity. Powerful, or virtuous, persons act because they understand why they must; others act because they cannot help themselves.

To be free is to be guided by the law of one’s own nature (which in Spinoza’s rational universe is never at variance with the law of another nature); bondage consists in being moved by causes of which we are unaware because our ideas are confused. Another important feature of Spinoza’s ethical system is his view of the intellect as active. He rejects the distinction between reason and will that assumes that ideas can be passively entertained. All thinking is action, and all action has its accompaniment in thought. What accounts for action is not an agency (the will) beyond the intellect, but ideas. Ideas are active and move us to act; an absence of action may be accounted an absence of insight: knowledge, virtue, and power are one.

As those two powerful paragraphs alone suggest, it is small wonder that Spinoza would, if not in his own lifetime – he declined to publish much under his own name, and friends published more after his death – soon enough in the fullness of  historical time, come to captivate a dazzling galaxy of not just other philosophers, but poets, dramatists, playwrights, artists, scientists, critics and psychologists, most notably in the early instance among leading writers both German (Goethe, Schelling, and the lion’s share of other rising idealists and Romantics), and English (Coleridge, Shelley, and George Eliot, who translated the Ethics). Small wonder as well that in our own day, a distinguished neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, seeking to overcome the Cartesian mind-body dualism that has plagued us these last four hundred years, devoted a 2003 book (Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain) to the fruitful implications to be harvested in re-examining, in pursuit of deeper truths in our own day about the connections between the body and the mind, – two attributes of one substance, as the master would say – that noblest of modern philosophers whose works will, as they have earlier readers these last three hundred years, outlive us all.

Ian Vandewalker on the action figure:

Baruch Spinoza
1632-1677
Nationality: Jewish/Portugese/Dutch

Group Alliances:
“Contumelious” Continental Rationalists
“Destructive” Determinists
“Pernicious” Pantheists

AKA: Spinoza the Bulldoza
Spinoza Spins Over Ya
Throws Ya Spinoza
Benedictus de Spinoza

Powers: knowledge of the infinite intellect of God, invisibility

Weaknesses: geometric method, excommunication

From The Super Spinoza Haters’ Page, the text of the 1656 excommunication of Spinoza:

“Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lieth down, and cursed be he when he riseth up; cursed be he when he goeth out and cursed be he when he cometh in; the Lord will not pardon him; the wrath and fury of the Lord will be kindled against this man, and bring down upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law; and the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens; and, to his undoing, the Lord will cut him off from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law; but ye that cleave unto the Lord God live all of you this day! We ordain that no one may communicate with him verbally or in writing, nor show him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor be within four cubits of him, nor read anything composed or written by him.” -Spinoza’s excommunication

PLG’s comment: this excommunication is hardcore! I think the “cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night” covers the bases–he’s damned all the time. But these guys don’t seem content to stop there–they include some mundane activities, as well. I’m not sure why they’d have to list going out and coming back as extra-special occasions on which Spinoza should be damned. Why not list getting a haircut, eating pancakes, or break dancing? Also, what happens “if the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens”? Then whom do we know the excommuncation concerns? “Damned be that one guy whose name we cannot speak.” “Which guy?” “Spin… arrrrgghhhh!”

Madame Sophistry, the clever whore

Martin Luther

CNN-IBN ( CNN-India Broadcast News) is an English language Indian TV news channel lauched in 2005. The network is a partnership between Global Broadcast News (GBN) and Turner International (Turner) in India. Rajdeep Sardesai is the Editor-in-Chief of the network.

One may comment:  What debate?!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO ON-LINE
if unavailable, click here

Source:  CNN-IBN TV interviews: “Debate – Sai Baba a Godsend?”

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See Topics posted at ‘Call For Media and Government Investigation’:  Sathya Sai Baba Birthday 2009

Sathya Sai Baba 84th Birthday Celebrations. Will 21st Century India Tolerate The Shame That Is Puttaparthi?

Golden Throne of India’s Sathya Sai Baba. He says he will Rule the world soon

Sathya Sai Baba Birthday. Brian Steel Examines Birthdate Issue

For earlier birthday events at Puttaparthi:

Sai Baba’s Birthday. Vast, Costly Pomp and Ceremony

Sai Baba’s Imperial 83rd Birthday Celebrations Photo, Puttaparthi, India

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Barry Pittard’s comments in regard to the Public Petition) -:

Petition For Official Investigation Into Sathya Sai Baba Cult

                           ————————————————————————

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

There is a Spanish version available:

PETICIÓN PÚBLICA PARA ”INVESTIGACIONES OFICIALES DE SATHYA SAI BABA Y SU ORGANIZACIÓN A NIVEL MUNDIAL

We are so close. We have an almost complete picture of reality. There is just one more step to go.

We know that the world we experience, that we share with everyone else, is a world made inside our head. We know that the world exists, we know that our senses perceive it, and we know our brain’s recreate that same world – adding in loads of really complicated stuff as it goes.

Our problem is that this argument still looks like one for some form of solipsism. Our entire argument is deformed by the fact that we do not have the values right in the picture.

For our enquiry started out trying to explain this world in which we all live. It ended up saying this world was not the real one.

The discovery that consciousness took place in the brain and the subsequent feeling that this changed the inquiry, is not the same as doing an operation for a broken bone and finding cancer. It is like the doctor becoming disinterested in surgery because of something he found while operating and turning his hand to carpentry.

The leap we must make is to flip our value system, our judgement system, our entire conceptual structure, to reflect the fact that the stuff that happens in all of our heads is the only thing of value to us, and that it is also a shared phenomena.

The conceptual pop happens when you see that consciousness might be a sometimes inaccurate virtual reality of our shared world. But it is all we have. We have to call it reality, we just have to, its all we’ve got. But it helps to think of it like virtual reality, so I’ll call it (v)R.

The difficulty is that the rules of the investigation change massively when you pop. No longer is it a clear-cut matter as to what is real. Ambiguity and shifting cultural sands lie all around. No longer is there a reductive system of investigation by which reality is pinned down. The conceptual system that explains our (in brain) reality is utterly expansive and interconnected.

Reality now conforms, not to the rules of causation, but to the rules of narrative, the rules of grammar.

The fall out from the pop is to accept that the human sciences – human evolution, psychology and sociology, are in a different bracket of investigations to those whose subject matter is outside the reality. Of course they do talk about material facts – the glands of emotion, the genes of gangs.

But they also have to try and generalize the narratives of living humans. How to you generalize stories? Clearly in a different way to averaging data.

I find it hard not to get waylaid in these thoughts. So many confusions come from our inability to clear our ears at this altitude. If you make the pop and start calling THIS reality, you’ll start to see the oddness of putting all the truth into natural science.

When you pop out into the organized, conceptual, interconnected and narrative brain-created human-reality that we all call home, you’ll see that everything that has meaning and value is completely different in kind to the facts of matter. The truths are based on certainty and action, the concepts are based on stories, and everywhere we tread disconnects and reconnects the connections in new and different ways.

We must stop wishing that science could understand this massively complex shared (v)R world from the outside, and get on with figuring it out from where we are.

It is such a simple picture. The world – my head – our world. Such a simple picture – shared virtual reality. Why isn’t it obvious?

“Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24, 1632.  His parents were Portuguese Jews who had escaped from the persecution they suffered in their homeland.  Sadly, his mother died when Baruch was only six.

He received a religious education, but his father instructed him in various secular subjects in the hopes that Baruch would take on a business career.  Baruch became fluent in many languages, and had a particular love for math, especially geometry.  His father died in 1654, when Baruch was 22.

Discussing his beliefs with his friends, he admitted to doubting many of their religious traditional beliefs, such as life after death.  They reported him to the synagogue soon after.  After trying to persuade him to keep his opinions to himself, the rabbis excommunicated him in 1656.  At that time, excommunication (Jewish or Christian) including the practice of shunning — i.e. no one in the community was to speak or correspond with him in any fashion.

But Baruch — now called Benedictus (“blessed,” the Latin for the Hebrew baruch) — had many friends outside the Jewish community, and they would protect him all his life.  Nevertheless, he was forced to move to Rijnsburg, a small town, in 1660 after a death threat, and again in 1663 to Voorburg near the Hague, and finally to the Hague itself.

He supported himself throughout as a lens-maker.  At this time, that occupation included not only the making of glasses, but of lenses for telescopes and microscopes — the latest thing in technology!  He conducted a variety of experiments as well.  Unfortunately, the constant exposure to glass dust was to take a toll on Benedictus’ lungs.

He published, anonymously, the Treatise on Theology and Politics in 1670.  This was a devastating critique of Biblical literalism, and was immediately condemned by the religious community of Holland.

His most important work, Ethics, was begun all the way back in 1662.  He tried to publish it in 1675, but was frightened off by rumors that his life would be in jeopardy if he did so.  He died of tuberculosis two years later, February 20, 1677, at the age of 45.  His friends published Ethics and other unpublished works in his honor in that same year.

The full title of the book was Ethics, Demonstrated in the Fashion of Geometry, because he laid out his arguments in the same way that a mathematician might lay out a geometric proof.  This is certainly a rigorous way of writing philosophy, but it does make it hard to read.  (Dagobert Runes edited The Ethics of Spinoza in 1957 so that it would be more readable for modern students.)

According to Spinoza, Substance (that which underlies all reality, also known as Existence or Being) has two attributes (sides or aspects).  If we look at reality from one angle, thru the senses, we see it as matter.  But if we look at it within ourselves, we see it as thought.  He suggested that there were an infinite number of aspects, but those two are the only ones evident to human beings.

So, the body (or brain) and the mind (or soul) are one and the same thing seen from two different perspectives.  Where there is material activity, there is thought.  Where there is thought, there is material activity.  Not all thought is available to what I perceive as myself:  Much of it remains unconscious.  But it goes on nonetheless.

This “double-aspectism” sounds great, but it does bring us to panpsychism.  Panpsychism is the idea that every material thing has a mental side to it (and vice versa).  People have minds, animals have minds, plants have minds, even rocks and houses have minds.  The earth itself has a mind.  Of course, as we move away from people, those minds are increasingly unconscious and lacking in a sense of self, but still….

It also leads to Spinoza’s most famous concept, the one he actually based the rest of his theory upon:  God and Nature are one and the same, and identical with all of Existence, mental and physical.  God is the mind of the universe; the universe is the body of God.  This is often called pantheism — God is everywhere and in everything — but in his day, it was called atheism.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza is a mechanist.  He believes only in determinism, not free will.  For us as humans, this determinism comes in the form of desires, which derive from our need to survive.  All things, he says, have the motive of self-preservation, all things are “selfish.”

He says that we strive to increase our power, that is, our capacity to preserve ourselves.  Then he identifies this power with virtue!  So the good is defined as what is useful to us, and the bad as what is damaging to us. Good advances our well-being, bad decreases our well-being.  Good we perceive as pleasure, bad is perceived as pain.

But, we have many desires.  Usually, one outweighs the others and we do what we desire most. But often they conflict.  This conflict itself decreases our well-being and so is painful.  What do we do to make our lives less painful then?

Society helps to some extent.  By providing rewards and punishments, praise and blame, it adds new items to our list of desires that may outweigh certain desires and support others.  Ultimately, society instills a conscience in most of us.  Spinoza saw conscience as learned, not innate.

Ultimately, we must rely on ourselves:  First, Spinoza says, we have to gain some control over our desires.  When they are out of our control, when they instead control us, he calls them passions.  They are out of our control because they operate unconsciously and so are not available to reason.  By getting a “clear idea” of them, we turn them into simple emotions, which are amenable to reason.  Freud would say, three centuries later, that we must “make the unconscious conscious!”

One way to turn a passion into an emotion, incidentally, is to trace its roots.  If you can see where it came from, its operations become clear — conscious — and you can better deal with it.

Another way to deal with passions is to see the necessity of things.  Nature is what it is, God wills what he wills, and no one can change that. Surrender to the inevitable, and you will be much more peaceful, at least.  A wise person, for example, sees that getting angry at unpleasant people isn’t going to change them.  In fact, it only hurts you.  Being kind to others, on the other hand, is usually rewarded, and it takes much less out of you.  Along with Buddha and Jesus, Spinoza said that love can conquer hate.

He also said that wise people “desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind” (Ethics, iv, 48).  This presages Kant’s categorical imperative by a century.

But only an emotion can overcome another emotion.  Therefore, reason must itself become an emotion — a powerful one — in order that it may outweigh others.  He calls this powerful emotion “the intellectual love of God,”  which of course means love of nature as well.  It also includes the acceptance of God’s will — or natural law.  Knowledge of God/Nature is the ultimate virtue, and the ultimate pleasure!

Dismissed by the English as an atheist and by the French as too religious, Spinoza would have great influence on upcoming German philosophers, including Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.  And it is in Germany where psychology was to flourish.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

Among many attempts to awaken India to the great danger posed by chronic addiction to swamis, gurus and the like, India’s foremost rationalist the late B.Premanand tried to arouse government, media, legal  and public accountability. The odds he faced were utterly formidable. See my in memoriam tribute to Premanand, with whom I kept in touch over the years:

Basava Premanand. Vale. A fighter for truth who lived what others preach

One might have thought that key Indian religious organizations, were they to have had guts, decency and nothing to hide, would, in effect, have said something like this:  Yes, we agree that horrible oppressions in the name of religion exist. We disagree with you Premanand in regard to deism and disbelief.  However, we are at one with you in wishing to stop exploitation, and we too will speak out very clearly, and do our best to ensure that you are not a voice crying in the wilderness.

And why not? – for indeed, in India, among the well-informed, there is a very long precedent where respect is held for reasoned belief and non-belief. India has evinced strong traditions of a ‘live and let live’ standard. But the case is vexed – as witness casteism and communalism. Nonetheless, non-deistic systems have long survived in India and recognized in a broad ‘hinduism’ – Charvaka, Jainism and Buddhism and the philosophical system known as Mimamsa. One might have wished there were enough forces for fertile and practical cooperation on at least common grounds between the deistic and non-deistic forces in India. But, at this pragmatic level, wherever one travelled, there was a sense that the forces of corruption, reinforced by nepotism, were in far too powerful control for any form of genuine democracy to flourish. It is difficult to imagine any greater reinforcement for the old attitudes of fatalism.

Nor has Sathya Sai Baba kept his promise to “clean (his) own back yard (India), before going to other countries, as I, among others, have chronicled:

Sathya Sai Baba Continues To Ail

When Disasters Overtake S. Sai Baba’s Promises

‘World Avatar’ Sathya Sai Baba’s Troubled Trail

With regard to the unwillingness of Hindu temple organizations to come forth regarding Sathya Sai Baba, see my article:

Sathya Sai Baba: ‘Considerable Concern’ In Wider Hindu Community

I here quoted from an email from a very notable Hindu leader (with an important government remit) with whom, at various times, I have privately corresponded.  Beneath the Premanand quote below, I quote the Hindu leader’s note.

It is well-known that Mahatma Gandhi would in no uncertain terms berate those of his fellow Indians who showed signs of cowardice and its stinky bedmate hypocrisy. One of my well-wishers along my pilgrim way, an Indian swami close to the late Sri Anandamayi Ma, told me that he had witnessed Gandhi delivering himself of a tremendous rebuke when those around him failed to live up to the high standards to which they gave lip service.

As anyone can see, across the years of issues of, for example, his newsletter ‘The Indian Skeptic‘, it was one Premanand’s methods to press governments for accountability. He would carefully register his letters so that a signature was required by any official addressed. His frequent experience was the officials’ very serious obscurantism and inaction, and their replies unwittingly revealed these abysmal qualities to any half alert reader of Premanand’s various publications.

Of course, one of the difficulties was that they regarded him as a ‘nastika’ (an unbeliever). But the problem lay deeper than this. It was that the corruption and its cover up were so endemic, and many terribly courageous Indians have fought against it. In our networked group, there have been, too,  cries of upset that anyone of us should deal with Premanand. Glen Meloy and I, and subsequently Robert Priddy too, had a mutually respectful interface with Premanand, which included matters of internationally coordinating credible witnesses for the BBC in the making of ”The Secret Swami’.  See:

Glen Meloy (“Standing up for truth and goodness”) – In Memoriam

Of Glen, Premanand wrote to me:

“Glen’s death was a great shock. I wanted him to live till Sai Baba was arrested … I am missing a great loving friend whom I came to know from the BBC film production.”

Fortunately, given the breadth of educated viewpoints among networked former devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, this antipathy towards any contact with Premanand, though strenuously put, was in a minority. As I see it, two of the real questions are:

• does one believe in speaking forthrightly when facts are being profoundly covered up – facts  that no ethical system of any major faith or rationalist or humanist standpoint would in the least espouse? And

• does one believe that labelling others is often a great harm, and one of the greatest obstacles to mutual respect of persons as persons?

Undemocratic Non-Response: A Typical Case of Indian Government Cover Up of Sathya Sai Baba and His Cult

See, the article:

Basava Premanana challenges Ex-PM Vajpayee to come clean

Text below taken from the Indian Skeptic, November 2006:

To, The Director and CPIO,
Prime Minister Office,
South Block New Delhi 110 001 Under the Right to Information Act – 2005.

Dear Sir, 24.8.2006

Ref: Statement of Mr. A.B.Vajpayee the Ex. Prime Minister of India along with the two retired Chief Justices Of India Mr.P.N.Bhagwathi and Mr.Ranganath Mishra, published on internet
http/www.sri sathyasai.org.uk/homepage/default.htm.

At last, thank you for your letter No.RTI/26/2006-PMA, dated 17.8′2006 received by me on 22.8.2006 regarding my letter to The Hon Prime Minister Of India dated 13.3.2006 which was received on 16.3.2006 after a long merry- go-round for five months from one ministry to another.

The question was a very simple one “As the Indian Prime Minister and the two retired Chief Justices of India would not give such statements without proper investigation.

To provide me with the certified copy ot the investigation on the sexual abuse of youth by Sathya Sai Baba.

Though you have confirmed that no papers related to such investigation are available in the Prime Minister Office, you have not been courageous enough to seek explanation from Mr. Vajpayee as the statement mentioned in the reference was made by him when he was the. Prime Minister of India.

You have also not acknowledged the memo dated 9.8.2006 from the Ministry of Home Affairs No. MHA ID No.24013/11/2006 – CSR III with the copy of my letter dated 17.7,2006 asking to get information from Mr.Vajpayee whether the statement signed by him and the two .retired Chief Justices Of India was after ascertaining the true facts.

I would be thankful to you if you will kindly write to Mr.Vajpayee and provide me with the information sought for.

I have the greatest regard for one present Prime Minister who has after Mrs. lndira Gandhi added the duties of Indian Citizens in the constitution which even her father dared not, now Mr. Manmohan Singh by promulgation the Rights of information Act 2005 making his Government a transparent one. This needs a lot of courage as the majority of the politicians and bureaucrats would hate this law.

Though not necessary, I am enclosing herewith a Postal Order No.43 E 787592 for Rs. 107- made in your name and I hope to get the information within 30 days of receipt of this letter under section 7 (i) of the RTI Act
Thanking you

Yours Sincerely
(B. Premanand)

The posting by the Indian PM and colleagues was posted here earlier – SEE here

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From an email to me from a notable Hindu leader

“There is considerable concern among the Hindu Community, especially among the educated. It is very hard to get any action from the temples as they do not wish to cause difficulties with the Sathya Sai Baba groups. People are starting to distance themselves from Sathya Sai Baba. It’s going to be gradual process of education. The biggest impact it appears was the ‘The Secret Swami’ … it seems it has had a tremendous negative effect on Sathya Sai Baba”.

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Premanand Responds to Infamy

V.P.B. Nair. B.Premanand. R.Priddy: Sai Baba Bedroom Killings

Massive sabotage try by Sai. Org person foiled

Gurubusting Sathya Sai Baba

“Murders in Sai Baba’s Bedroom” by B. Premanand. Price India Rs. 400/-, Overseas US $40/- (free postage). Publ. by B. Premanand. 11/7 Chettipalayam Road, Podnadur. 641 023 Tamil Nadu, India

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Barry Pittard’s comments in regard to the Public Petition) -:

Petition For Official Investigation Into Sathya Sai Baba Cult

————————————————————————-

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

There is a Spanish version available:

PETICIÓN PÚBLICA PARA ”INVESTIGACIONES OFICIALES DE SATHYA SAI BABA Y SU ORGANIZACIÓN A NIVEL MUNDIAL

“Rationalism and empiricism don’t really have to remain antagonistic, and in fact they haven’t.  It could even be said that science is a very well balanced blend of the two, where each serves, like the branches of government, as a check and balance to the other.

The traditional, ideal picture of science looks like this:  Let’s start with a theory about how the world works.  From this theory we deduce, using our best logic, a hypothesis, a guess, regarding what we will find in the world of our senses, moving from the general to the specific.  This is rationalism.  Then, when we observe what happens in the world of our senses, we take that information and inductively support or alter our theory, moving from the specific to the general.  This is empiricism.  And then we start again around the circle.  So science combines empiricism and rationalism into a cycle of progressive knowledge.

Now notice some of the problems science runs into:  If my theory is true then my hypothesis will be supported by observation and/or experiment.  But notice:  If my hypothesis is supported that does not mean that my theory is true.  It just means that my theory is not necessarily wrong!  On the other hand, if my hypothesis is not supported, that does in fact mean that my theory is wrong (assuming everything else is right and proper).  So, in science, we never have a theory we can say is unequivocally true.  We only have theories that have stood the test of time.  They haven’t been shown to be false… yet!

This is one of the things that most people don’t seem to understand about science.  For example, people who prefer creationism over evolution will say that, since evolution is “only a theory,” then creationism is just as legitimate.  But evolution has been tested again and again and again, and the observations scientists have made since Darwin have held up tremendously well.  It’s like saying that a thoroughbred race horse is “just a horse,” and therefore any old nag is just as good!

On the other hand, creationism fails quickly and easily.  Carbon dating shows that the world is far older than creationists suggest.  There are fossils of species that no longer exist.  There is a notable lack of fossils of human beings during the dinosaur age. There are intermediate fossils that show connections between species.  There are examples of species changing right before our eyes. There is a vast body of related knowledge concerning genetics.  But with every piece of evidence shown to the creationists, they respond with what the logicians call an ad hoc argument.

An ad hoc argument is one that is created after the fact, in an attempt to deal with an unforeseen problem, instead of being a part of the theory from the beginning.  So, if there is a rock that is too old, or a fossil that shouldn’t be, the creationist might respond with “well, God put that there in order to test our faith,” or “the days in Genesis were actually millions of years long” or “mysterious are the ways of the Lord.”  Obviously, creationism is based on faith, not science.

Science is always a work in progress.  No one believes in evolution, or the theory of relativity, or the laws of thermodynamics, the same way that someone believes in God, angels, or the Bible.  Rather, we accept evolution (etc.) as the best explanation available for now, the one that has the best reasoning working for it, the one that fits best with the evidence we have.  Science is not a matter of faith.

Science is, of course, embedded in society and influenced by culture and, like any human endeavor, it can be warped by greed and pride and simple incompetence.  Scientists may be corrupt, scientific organizations may be dominated by some special interest group or another, experimental results may be falsified, studies may be poorly constructed, scientific results may be used to support bad policy decisions, and on and on.  But science is really just this method of gaining knowledge — not knowledge we can necessarily be certain about, but knowledge that we can rely upon and use with some confidence.  For all the negatives, it has been the most successful method we have tried.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

“Epistemology is that part of philosophy that asks “what can we know?” “What can we be sure of?” “How do we get beyond mere opinion to real knowledge?”

Traditionally, there are two approaches to epistemology:  rationalism, which says we gain knowledge through reasoning, and empiricism, which says we gain knowledge through sensory experience.  Although there are a few extremist philosophers, generally most agree that both these approaches to knowledge are needed, and that to some extent they support and correct each other. More on that in a moment.

Rationalists focus on what they call necessary truth.  By that they mean that certain things are necessarily true, always, universally.  Another term that means the same thing is a priori truth. A priori is Latin for “beforehand,” so a priori truth is something you know must be true before you even start looking at the world the senses reveal to us.

The most basic form of necessary truth is the self-evident truth.  Self-evident means you don’t really even have to think about it.  It has to be true.  The truths of mathematics, for example, are often thought of as self-evident.  One plus one equals two.  You don’t need to go all over the world counting things to prove this.  In fact, one plus one equals two is something you need to believe before you can count at all!

(One of the criticisms that empiricists would put forth is that “one plus one is two” is trivial.  It is tautological, meaning it is true, sure, but not because it is self-evident:  It is true because we made it that way.  One plus one is the definition of two, and so with the rest of mathematics.  We created math in such a way that it works consistently for us!)

Other self-evident truths that have been put forth over the years include “you can’t be in two places at once,” “something either is or it isn’t,” “everything exists.”  These are pretty good candidates, don’t you think?  But often, what is self-evident to one person is not self-evident to another.  “God exists” is perhaps the most obvious one — some people disagree with it quite vigorously.  Or “the universe had to have a beginning” — some people believe it has always been.  A familiar use of the phrase “self-evident” is Thomas Jefferson’s use of it in the Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident:  That all men are created equal….”  But it is pretty obvious to most that this is not, really, true.  Instead, it is a rhetorical device, that is, it sounds good to put it that way!

In order to reason our way to more complex knowledge, we have to add deduction (also known as analytic truth) to the picture.  This is what we usually think of when we think of thinking:  With the rules of logic, we can discover what truths follow from other truths.  The basic form of this is the syllogism, a pattern invented by Aristotle which has continued to be the foundation of logic to the present day.

The traditional example is this one, called modus ponens: “Men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.”  If x, then y (if you are human, then you are mortal).  X (you are human).  Therefore, y (you are mortal).  This result will always be true, if the first two parts are true.  So we can create whole systems of knowledge by using more and more of these logical deductions!

Another syllogism that always works is in the form “If x, then y.  Not y.  Therefore not x.”  If you are human, then you are mortal.  You are not mortal.  Therefore, you are not human.  If the first two parts are true, then the last one is necessarily true.  This one is called modus tollens.

On the other hand, there are two examples that don’t work, even though they sound an awful lot like the ones I just showed you:  If x, then y.  Not x.  Therefore not y.  If you are human, then you are mortal.  You are not human.  Therefore you are not mortal.  That, of course, would come as a big surprise to animals!  Or look at this example:  “If God would show himself to me personally, that would prove the truth of religion.  But he hasn’t done so.  Therefore, religion is false.” It sounds like a reasonable argument, but it is not.  (This is called denial of the antecedent.)

Another goes like this:  If x, then y.  Y.  Therefore x.  If you are human, then you are mortal.  You are mortal.  Therefore you are human.  Or try this one:  “If God created the universe, we would see order in nature.  We do in fact see order in the universe — the laws of nature!  Therefore, God must have created the universe.” It sounds good, doesn’t it?  But it is not at all logical:  The order in the universe could have another cause.  (This is called affirmation of the consequent.)

There are many types of rationalism, and we usually refer to them by their creators.  The best known, of course, is Plato’s (and Socrates’).  Aristotle, although he pretty much invented modern logic, is not entirely a rationalist — he was also interested in the truths of the senses.  The most magnificent example of rationalism is Benedict Spinoza’s.  In a book called Ethics, he began with one self-evident truth:  God exists.  By God, he meant the entire universe, both physical and spiritual, so his truth does seem pretty self-evident:  Everything that is, is!  But from that truth, he carefully, step by step, reasons his way to a very sophisticated system of metaphysics, ethics, and psychology.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

One of the most frustrating things about taking an introduction to SLA course is the overabundance of often contradictory theories and the lack of consensus among researchers on what the research questions of interest are, on what is to be measured, and how it is to be measured. Indeed, the very relevance of empirical data to SLA and the nature of SLA as a scientific field have been called into question by some!

Geoff Jordan has set out to put at end to this state of affairs. His book, Theory Construction in Second Language Acquisition (2004, John Benjamins), is what I’m reading at the moment, and after 4 chapters it is certainly the most entertaining and clearly written book on SLA and methodology that I have ever read.

The book begins with description of the problem in SLA as Jordan sees it. The field is divided into two camps with radically different epistemological approaches. There is a rationalist camp, of which Jordan himself is a proud member, and a relativist camp, occupied by the likes of James Lantolf and David Block. The relativists, says Jordan, have latched onto a post-structuralist, post-modern epistemology which declares the relativity of all knowledge and denies an objective outside world to be observed and measured. In this epistemology, science is nothing more than a social construction, and it’s discoveries are only “true” relative to itself. This radical subjectivity and solipsism arises, says Jordan, from a misapplication and over-interpretation of Hume’s problem of induction.

To make a long story short, Jordan is calling for a rejection of relativist approaches to the study of SLA and a renewed focus on theory building, using empirical measurement as a crucial tool.

I find this approach refreshing. We spend a lot of time in class arguing across purposes. It is highly desirable to agree on our research questions and the methods of inquiry that are likely to be fruitful. Moreover, I think that the post-structuralist, post-modern, constructivist movements do nothing but muddy the waters of human knowledge. They wantonly and arrogantly dismiss the collective efforts of 4 centuries of science as nothing but social construction lacking any claims to objective truth. How, pray tell, did that social construction lacking any claim to objective truth accomplish the invention of the automobile? The confirmed predictions of Newtonian mechanics? The harnessing of the power of the atom? Relativism quickly disintegrates into absurdity and nihilism, ignoring the experience of everyday life and rejecting all claims to truth.

I’ve only finished 4 chapters, so I will be posting more on Jordan. Coming up: Jordan evaluates current theories in SLA for their adherence to a rationalist epistemology.

’til next time…

“Brother, I believe we are in trouble” was the assessment of a tenured pastor of a Southern Baptist congregation in Texas. That was a summary statement after a discussion of issues, attitudes, and challenges facing the Bride of Christ in the 21st century.

In my own conversations, I have heard stories of dysfunction within congregations that are amazing. Some seem to have the ability to do things to people in the world of religion that are unconscionable in the world of Scripture, and sometimes even illegal according to the laws of the land.

Perhaps you have experienced some of those things. Pastors and staff members tend to pick up and move on, all the time smiling but inside dying. And the collateral damage is usually the wife and children.

I recall an expression from my childhood: “If God will keep him anointed, we will keep him humbled.” Many have used this and perhaps the first time it was said someone just made it up as an example of how some were treated. However, I have heard it verbalized, usually around the time to consider salary.

Dr. Ray C. Stedman’s “Spiritual Warfare” is an older book about winning the daily battle. I would encourage you to click on the link and order the book. Stedman brought Biblical balance to Ephesians 6:10-13. Later in this post I will borrow from him to offer some suggestions for winning this battle and hopefully whet your appetite to read Stedman.

“God is not interested in religion, but he is tremendously interested in life. I am deeply convinced that we can only understand life when we see it as the Bible sees it.” Stedman is on target here and should encourage those of us who believe Scripture to be the inerrant word of the living God.

We minister after several hundred years of the effect of the movement called Rationalism. This gave rise to what we know as Modernity. This was a movement elevating reason above revelation. It rejected absolute truth and sought to find meaning in reason and the solitary individual. It has affected all of the structures of Western society, including the Church and its institutions. It has resulted in a breakdown of morality, personhood, and community. Sarcasm is the humor of choice. Even conservative movements in church and politics have not escaped the results of reason that trumps revelation.

Here is the rub. We minister weekly to wonderful people who want to love God with their whole heart. But their worldview is affected by all of the influences around them that value reason over revelation. Therefore, Scripture becomes a big evangelistic tract, and not the truth of the living God. You have heard, “Well, as long as they are saved. That’s what counts, and they made a decision ….”. You know the thought process.

These are those with a worldly world view where reason trumps revelation. And they are in our pews. The key for them is that we continue to love them unconditionally and preach/teach the truth of Scripture. But how do we survive the onslaught of the reason of the world expressed through people whose talk is prefaced by “I think…”?

Stedman offers some help in a chapter entitled “Advice When Attacked”.

First is to put on the armor of God – the whole armor. This is essentially done in our thought life.

Second is to pray. Stedman does a masterful job of showing how the armor and prayer belong together.

“Our problem with life is that we do not see it as it is; we suffer from strange illusions. This is why we desperately need and must have the revelation of the facts of Scripture. Life is what God has declared it to be.” – Stedman, p. 130.

Third, Stedman points out that we must do more than think; we must bring our thoughts into fulfillment.

We can summarize God’s helps to winning the daily battle by putting on God’s armor, praying, and acting. In the text of Ephesians 6:10-18, that is the order. The result of reversing these is impotence in prayer and a lack of success in the spiritual battle.

There is so much more as Stedman fills in the relationship of armor, prayer, and doing. Good reading and may you and your family win the daily battle! Sundays are much better when we win Monday through Saturday!

By Anthony D Jacques

The other day I was talking with some folks about my personal experiences growing up within Evangelical Christianity. I must have offended a couple of the believers present because they instantly demanded empirical data to back up my “so-called truth claims.” It quickly became clear that there was nothing I could say to convince them that I was not speaking about religion in general, nor was I quoting statistics or research. I was merely talking about my own experience.

A little more recently, I was on a blog discussing Christianity with some internet folks, and the moment I mentioned personal experiences that were negative (though not when I mentioned the good times I’d had, mind you) one of the Christians present said my opinion was obviously jaded and I was clearly not in the position to speak about Christianity at large.

And once again, nothing I could say could convince the other party that I wasn’t speaking about Christianity at large. They got mad, and I just left. (I am learning, slow as it may be.)

I’ve been thinking about all this, trying to come up with a parallel. I suppose if a Christian were to say they had felt the presence of God and I demanded numbers or data to back up their “so-called truth claim” they would be offended. After all, that’s the difference between evidence and experience.

Or is that difference an illusion?

1957 Bel Air

If I said I like the ‘57 Bel Air better than the ‘56 or ‘58, I certainly shouldn’t need statistics to support that. If I said it was the best car ever designed, I’d still need no evidence to support this claim. But that’s only an opinion.

If I claimed the ‘57 Bel Air would save your soul and you should believe in it and hail it as the ultimate automobile, you might want a few more reasons why. If I said this “fact” simply must be accepted on faith alone, you’d likely stop stifling the laughter you’d been holding back and, if you’re nice, simply walk away, leaving what’s left of my dignity intact.

The difference is that most people don’t just laugh in the face of Christians who say they must blindly believe certain propositions on faith alone. We are tolerant, but because of that tolerance, I think a good many silly ideas remain intact within religion to this day.

And the moment you find a facet of someone’s belief that cannot be supported with evidence or data in any real sense, they back into the “highly nuanced” corner of “mystery” and “theology” and other such nonsense. Thus, all manner of silliness continues outside the realm of rational critique. This is the problem with separating evidence and experience and pretending they shouldn’t depend on each other.

Case in point: Magicians and illusionists rely on convincing you that something which is, by definition, impossible, is actually happening. You certainly experiencethat woman getting cut in half, or the Statue of Liberty disappearing, but you never fully allow yourself to believe it because you know it’s a magic show. After the trick, the woman walks back on stage fully restored, and the Statue of Liberty is “back where it belongs,” as it were. Of course, if you’ve watched any TV during the last five years, you know how both these illusions are achieved.

If the magician is good, then your eyes and brain are both taken in by the experience.That’s what makes it fun. But there would be trouble brewing if you took a magic show as evidence. Ifyou started believing people can really catch bullets in their teeth and walk on water, or worse, if you thought maybe you could as well, then you might find yourself in a world of pain.

Alright, next time we’ll dig a little deeper into the realm of evidence, but for now, enjoy this video of Criss Angel walking on water.

387334     เหตุผลนิยม     Rationalism

วิธีการและความคิดที่สำคัญของลัทธิเหตุผลนิยมตั้งแต่เริ่มแรกจนถึงปัจจุบัน

(Methods and important ideas of rationalism from its beginning to the present time.)

(387334 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

By Anthony D Jacques

The other day I was talking with some folks about my personal experiences growing up within Evangelical Christianity. I must have offended a couple of the believers present because they instantly demanded empirical data to back up my “so-called truth claims.” It quickly became clear that there was nothing I could say to convince them that I was not speaking about Christianity at large, or even most Christians’ experience, nor was I quoting statistics or even budding research.

This morning I was thinking about this, trying to come up with a parallel. I suppose if a Christian were to say they had felt the presence of God and I demanded numbers or data to back up their “so-called truth claims” they would be offended. And they should be. I mean, isn’t that the difference between evidence and experience?

The more I think about this, however, the more I think this dichotomy gets abused when Christians defend their faith.

Evidence

About eight years ago, when I was in my first year at Bible college, I read about a study that showed Christians did better in school and had less disciplinary problems than non Christians. I found the study flimsy and couldn’t see the purpose in trying to show that religion makes for better students. This upset many of my classmates who thought the study was just one more proof that religion is good for society at large.

Then it was discovered that the study was skewed because it relied on the variation in nomenclature of disciplinary procedures between public and private (Christian) schools. For instance, if public schools used the word “detention,” the study grabbed statistics from private schools that didn’t use the word “detention” in their disciplinary system, thereby stating that public school children got X-number more detentions than private school children in such and such city. (I wish I remembered the source, I’d love to quote both the study and the evidence proving its falsity).

My Christian classmates were miffed, to be sure, but many stuck to their guns, essentially claiming that even though that particular study was flawed, they still believed its results were true and some study, someday, would prove that.