The media and society in general seem to be very eager to tell us who we should admire. Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, various actors and actresses, national and international public figures… the list goes on and on. There are some people out there who truly deserve the title of “hero”, but for the most part I’m getting sick of other people telling me who is and isn’t a hero or a celebrity who should be adored for every waking moment by everyone that even hears the utterance of their names. It’s stupid, and it completely devalues the meaning of the word “hero” to something that seems to be tossed about with careless abandon.

Where’s the sense of someone trying to impose values on something that, by all accounts, can be totally subjective? And when did celebrities become equivalent to having “hero” status, anyway? I’m beginning to think that they are more highly valued than heroes judging by how the media tends to fawn over every movement and every moment they ever make or spend?

What about the people who continually risk their lives for reasons other than to save themselves  or for personal gain? What about the soldiers and other people in the military who are currently serving their countries around the world (and for some, paying the ultimate price for their country)? What about emergency personnel who risk their lives to save others? And the doctors and medical teams who try their hardest to save lives through their professions? Are we really supposed to believe that a person is socially more valuable than someone else just because they happen to be good at a sport or they are a recognized actor or actress?

And on the subject on heroes, isn’t it logical to assume that one person’s hero can be another person’s villain? I’m pretty sure there are examples where that is true (just think about any of the major wars humanity has suffered through).

As I said, I’m tired of being told who to admire and who to consider a hero or heroine. It’s a subjective topic and it’s pointless for other people to pin their opinions on others. Pushing your heroes onto others and proclaiming random people as heroes only cheapens the meaning of the word.

The self-identity of “postmodern biblical criticism” depends on setting up a long list of binary oppositions between postmodernism and its fantastic Other, historical criticism. As with all such attempts, it results in a simplistic caricature which is a convenient object of polemic and self-construction, but which oversimplifies the amorphous and diverse forms of criticism which have been carried out under the heading “historical criticism”.

It is a commonplace that historical critics conceived of their work as “objective”. But what does this mean? Objectivity is itself a slippery term; it can range in meaning from an assertion about (ontological) realism to one’s (epistemological) scientific basis for conclusions to a claim about lack of personal bias (of the subject). The accusation that historical critics claimed objectivity suffers from this ambiguity, which has been rhetorically useful when it is employed as an accusation by a system of thought which valorizes the personal and subjective.

But objectively (and I mean, in fact) did historical critics ever claim to be “objective” in the sense of complete absence of bias? Or when they talked about “objectivity”, was this not in a context of historical opposition to those biblical scholars who proceeded on theological and dogmatic assumptions? Is the attack on the false “objectivity” of the past due more to the increased importance presently afforded to one’s personal situation than to any (objective) facts about the history of scholarship?

“It has often been argued that attempts at ‘objective’ work involved the illusion of standing outside the stream of time and producing a result wholly independent of one’s own modern opinion. This argument is often used to discredit historical-critical studies. It is one of the many myths thought up by the fertile imaginations of anti-historical writers. For, of course, it is entirely untrue that the great historical critics like Harnack, or the great theorists of critical theory like Troeltsch, had any such idea of themselves.”

(James Barr, The concept of biblical theology: an Old Testament perspective, 206)

On the other hand, it is true that you are much more likely to find explicit contemplation of one’s subjective situatedness in contemporary biblical scholarship. Navel gazing has become much more accepted in biblical studies and in some cases an obsessive preoccupation. But it is this very trend towards subjectivism in biblical studies that casts suspicion on the current tendency of “postmodern biblical scholars” to paint previous generations of biblical scholars as their mirror opposites.

An Avocado ...

is an Avocado ...

except ...

When an Avocado is Two Avocados .

Avocados aside, perspective is paramount to how we understand the world around us, it is for me in any event.

I was in the kitchen this morning, getting ready to make coffee and I looked up and saw the first avocado and thought, “I thought we had two avocados, that’s weird.” I got hung-up for a little moment on where the heck the other avocado went. It didn’t really matter, I just wanted to know. I continued to think about the avocado as I retrieved milk from the fridge and moved toward my waiting coffee. I continued to look at the avocado as I went and noticed that there were, in fact, still two avocados and that they had lined up in such a way, or rather, I had aligned myself in such a way as to be able to see only one of them.

The real significance of this, is that it is impressively easy to become caught up in my own point of view, or in one point of view and to be convinced that what I think I am seeing is the whole picture. This is true whether it is about organization and how much stuff I have (good, bad, or indifferent), what kind of progress I am making in  particular area, and just generally an important reminder about (my) ability to perceive my own part of the whole including where and how I fit in it. It is important to remember that I am not omniscient or all seeing and not just as a reminder of my own failings, but of my humanity. I can only do what I can do, work with what I am aware of and have faith it is is the right thing and move forward.

That’s it for now, other than to say that I needed A reminder of why I decided to write this blog, to out myself in a public way. I need and want to keep plugging along and doing what I can do, as that is, truly, all I can do. For now, this will be be more meta-cognitive and less active than it had been as I am, necessarily,  more more meta-cognitive and less active than I had been.

Hi Guys! :3 What’s up?

I was planning on writing this last week but I had Midterms (and well, for computers, it’s a final). @n@ I didn’t like the subjective ones, but the objective ones ( D:> Those are the ones that are multiple choice right?!) are easy so far

I’m sorta sick though. Starting on Friday, I began to be very hot but I was cold. Now I get to the point were I’m freezing. Also, when I walk or sometimes even sit, I get dizzy and it feels like in I’m walking on a cloud. I also get massive headaches, and my throat hurts a little. But I’m feeling better today <: )

Urgg, I change from computers to P.E next year. Well, it’ll do me good XD But some guys that will be in P.E are so ugh >:C  (They’re in Comps too, our small period will all go to P.E DX ). Computers is so much fun :’C and the teacher rocks too! (~=3=)~ Music is going good too. We had Christmas shows last week . I have to say, for kids that have been playing only 2 months, we ROCKED! 8D Gahaha, I play my trombone a lot better now I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL XMAS! XD  Gahhh!!!! I LOVE XMAS!  Only 12 more days!

Okay, well, bye!

We live in the post-modern age. An age defined by pluralism and relativism. Countless perspectives and worldviews coexisting, and unlike the modern age, with its ideology of progress and assimilation, none of these perspectives is officially or holistically accepted as the societal norm. This is due to the dissolution of metanarrative.

Metanarrative can be defined as any story told to justify another narrative story, though it doesn’t have to be stories it can be a perspective, context, revelation or truth used to justify ethics, morals, views… On a more complex level metanarrative is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge or, Post-modern thought is renown for its dismissal of metanarrative’s validity.

No-one can contend the historical existence of metanarrative; it’s evident in any culture ethically defined by religion. For example: any society grounded in Judaeo-Christian ethics has, at some point, been governed by the biblical metanarrative of ethical and moral compliance as a means of salvation.

Without metanarrative new schools of thought emerge, schools of thought that don’t involve an overarching philosophy. An example of this can be found in the increasing prevalence of secular humanism, where instead of relying on metanarrative to define acceptable action, there is an assumption that mankind desires benevolence and that this benevolence is best achieved through objective rationality. This assumption, while appealing to many people, is somewhat flawed in that no-one is accountable to any absolute. Everything is relative and therefore anything can be ethically justified.

We can still state that we believe something or somebody is evil or wrong, but in the absence of absolutes we can’t state these opinions as fact, they remain exactly that; opinion. This weakens the ethical infrastructure of society as even the most heinous acts can be justified in the absence of absolutes. Under this system we cannot truly condemn acts we know to be wrong because any act can be justified by subjective truth or cultural context or personal beliefs. The absence of metanarrative confuses people’s ability to decide a unified ethical code.

A pertinent example of this sort of quandary is the topical issue of abortion. Some people contend that it is a woman’s right to choose whether or not she carries a child to full term, others believe that the abortion of a child is murder. The issue has come to an argumentative stalemate; there is no absolute truth for people to turn to.

Some quote the bible; others cite the rights of Man (and Woman) to maintain personal autonomy within the constraints of common law. But none of these truths is universally accepted and so the debate goes nowhere. (Just a little disclaimer, I don’t believe that any man can truly hold a valid opinion on this issue, it’s just too far removed from our personal experiences. I’m not presenting an opinion just using the ethical context as an example.)

Some of the moral inadequacies of post-modern philosophy are also evident as one examines the relatively recent Rwandan genocides. This was the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by the Hutu dominated government under the Hutu Power ideology. Most people can agree that what took place was wrong, however some dissident individuals expressed an attitude that this sort of conflict should be allowed as it is the natural expression of traditional cultural tensions and that any attempt to interfere would be outside the jurisdiction of federal and international authorities.

Here lies our problem, we can recognise this suggestion as absurd but we can’t dismiss it completely for fear of being accused of adhering to some sort of bigoted idea derived from a blacklisted metanarrative. Any potency in governmental condemnation is completely lost when a government attempts to appeal to and fit into every individual’s version of the truth. This attitude manifests in weak reactive policy that inadvertently led to the death of 800,000-1,000,000 innocent Rwandans.

The obvious point of contrast here is (and I’m sorry for the cliché) the American liberation of Jews confined to Concentration camps during world war two. This liberation took place well within the modernist era known for its adage of progress and assimilation. This attitude is reflected in the Americans actions as they went in and liberated the Jews without regard for the social tensions that might arise from these actions. They could do this because, in terms of the modern metanarrative, this could be seen as the definitively right thing to do.

The post-modern perspective and the death of metanarrative has led to the prevalent belief that morality is a social construct, this assumption is flawed.  Morals are not arbitrary.

The vast areas of agreement between moral codes of different societies throughout the ages and throughout the world suggests otherwise. It could be assumed these moral norms were discovered in light of an unchanging and objective set of moral principles that find their source in the realities of human existence, but that would be speculation and I wont go into too much depth there.

I’m not saying that relativism is a bad thing in a holistic sense, just that it’s worth thinking about where the overzealous propagation of ideas of relative morality and subjective truth might take us.

Truth is subjective/relative.
The truth we all accept as objective is offered by a society/science/culture.
If the leaders of society/science/culture change,
truth changes with them.
So if you believe in something, let it someone else know.
If you make lots of  people believe in your ideas, your personal view,
your truth will become objective.
So you cannot believe in something wrong, nor do mistake.

If you believe in suffer, harm and pain,
it’s not wrong nor right.
It is destructive and will cause a change,
attract more suffer and disappears soon.

So there is an objective truth, as long as we believe in it.
Truth is what you believe in.

Believe in positive and constructive things and they will happen to you and others.

I was reading what is now a rather old post at Guide for my Perplexity entitled Wasteland…there’s actually quite a bit I could address here (it’s all so good!), but I think I want to address some comments from LDS Anarchist in that discussion. In his first comment, he says:

I also believe that there is a way out of the predicament that you find yourself in. I wish I could give you the “key” that would solve everything, but I can’t. The main problem that I see is that you are doubting the spiritual experiences you have had. I don’t know what experiences those were, but whatever they are, if you are doubting their veracity, then you have a real crisis of faith on your hands. Spiritual experiences are the anchor of faith.

As I read, I begin to gloss over…Spiritual experiences…they aren’t something I can grab on to…Anchor of faith…what a trite expression…

but then my eyes stop glossing, and I begin to think about commonality.A thought struck me…what if ‘faith’ is just a narrative? In this case, spiritual experiences are a tool that supports (and perhaps even anchors) that narrative. But spiritual experiences aren’t the only tools, and faith isn’t the only narrative. Instead of getting caught up on the one narrative, I should recognize the broader message of such narrative. I have tried to write similar thoughts in response to Seth’s guest post at LDS & Evangelical Conversations (which I probably should get to writing more about that too).

What are narratives? There are plenty of good links about them (ok, there are more than two links…but I never keep track of these.) Quite simply, though, narratives are the ways we are inclined to view the world and make sense of things in the world…I guess you could call them a part of worldviews as well, then.

When I thought about narratives (and some conversations I’ve had relating…even if tenuously, to the concept), I thought about a rather insightful video game quote (don’t judge me; video games rock.) I’ll tweak it just a bit.

Narratives are the key to telepathy. The mind wraps its secrets in narratives; when we discover the narratives that shape our colleague’s thought, we can penetrate the vault of his mind.

Right? As I’ve tried to express so many times recently…we get into these pissing matches…seeing past each other…we try to lob rhetorical grenades in order to puff up our position, our narrative, our worldview…when lobbing grenades will do nothing but invite grenades back. On the other hand, if we were to step away from our position and try to learn the other person’s narrative, we could, if we truly wanted, do much more damage than we ever thought possible. (Although I imagine that if we truly learned the other person’s narrative, it would defuse us completely.)

So, what about narrative…

I think narratives still need to be anchored…Narratives tie in well, I think, with my comments about authenticity. I think crises…such as crises of faith (or other narratives)…are when we realize that our authenticity is in danger…suddenly, every comfort we had about who we are and what we are about is cast into doubt…

So, what about narrative and spiritual experiences..?! It was in something LDS Anarchist had said:

I’ve gone through times when information has been presented to me that has led to temptations of doubt, but then I’ve always looked over the one type of experience in my life that was vastly different than the others: spiritual manifestations, and the re-analyzation of those experiences always brings me to the same conclusion: I can’t deny or doubt that they really happened. Those experiences are the foundation of my personal existence, meaning that those manifestations are more real to me than anything else I’ve experienced.

I glazed over his description of spiritual manifestations again (sorry!), but there was a line that I took heart to. “Those experiences are the foundation of my personal existence, meaning that those manifestations are more real to me than anything else I’ve experienced.” I don’t need to glaze at implications of objective existence to see an applicable, sincere subjective foundation.

And though the particulars may vary, I realize that I have experiences — though I don’t dare call them spiritual – that reach down to my core in the same way. I’ve seen it from inauthenticity…that’s allowed me to recognize what is authentic to me. I’ve seen it from the alienation, the doubt, the despair, the anguish…and that’s made me recognize what is not alienation, what is not doubted, what is not despaired, and what is not suffered in anguish. Though the universe, the world, and everything and every one may fail, these experiences cannot. They are etched in my existence, I can say. I can hardly share them with others without others wondering what’s wrong with me.

And then I realize.

Do I not do the same? Have my eyes not glazed over? Have they not rolled at others’ narratives being born so openly? Yet I DARE to lament when others have done the same to the foundation, the anchor of my narrative.

…I still don’t know how to bridge the gap though. I know that narratives are the key to telepathy, so to speak, but still, I am unversed in any other narrative but my own, and I don’t know how to begin to truly learn the second language without either immediately cheapening it or without irreparably changing the relationship with my first and native tongue.

If I were in a conscious state but unable to communicate, resist outside forces, or assist in my own care… and if I had spent more than half my life lying in a hospital bed, listening and thinking… and if someone finally noticed that I was actually awake… and if I regained my ability to “speak” through the assistance of a physical therapist and modern technology… I’m pretty sure my first words would be, “Jesus, get me a fucking cheeseburger. And tell that turd-chewing brother of mine that I heard everything he said about ‘pulling the plug.’ Oh, and hey… don’t tell that redheaded nurse that I’m awake. Something tells me she’d stop coming in at night and giving herself the bowling-ball grab. Good thing she wasn’t looking for ’signs of life’ if you know what I mean!”

According to the medical community, this highlights the difference between a vegetative state and a consciousness disorder. According to this guy, whom I have no reason to believe, the line between tomato and minimally-aware tomato is the presence of intermittent responses that appear to be responses to stimuli (and not just a reflex). Now, I’ve seen a chicken play tic-tac-toe, and I’m guessing that the distinction is completely subjective.

But that’s not the thorn behind my balls. No, it’s the idea that a minimally-aware state constitutes life that has me scratching at my bleeding taint. This guy lived inside his head – and probably on the public dime – for 23 years. Weigh that against actual death after the ‘83 crash that started all this shit. It’s like Gianna Jessen. Yeah, she survived abortion, but only so she could struggle with cerebral palsy, multiple surgeries and lifelong reliance on others because she can’t do basic math. Sure, she can speak, but she can’t put buttons in a row. Plus, she’s part of the monotheistic fear machine that pushes for quantity over quality. Better off in a steel pan? I’ll let you decide… but if your decision is “no,” I’m breaking your jaw like the guy from the Reach commercials and mounting a toilet seat to your teeth.

Surviving solely to serve as an inspiration to others is bullshit. Do you really think anyone wants to be the guy that everyone points at and says, “thank god I’m not that poor bastard”? It’s the PC equivalent of a freak show. The only way to ensure that everyone gets to maintain their dignity, both in life and death, is to accept that there is such a thing as “technically alive, but totally not worth it.” Smash them in the head, turn off their ventilators, herd them into meat grinders, send a Sandman to track them down. Whatever. Just leave the living to the people who can actually live.

Caveat: Before you yank the feeding tube from my gut, make sure my 3 life goals are fulfilled. I want to meet David Bowie and listen to him play Bewlay Brothers and The Gang. Then I want to eat seven entire cheesecakes in a variety of tasty flavors. And lastly, I want to be the wrinkled, unresponsive track upon which the longest gang bang train in the history of humanity rides, each one signing a ledger as he drags his flaccid bloodbag from my overflowing knothole so that Guinness can verify the record. Then play Taps on a kazoo and light a match. Believe me; with all the booze I drink, the cremation will be short and sweet.

The way that some Christians try to argue suggests that they think the fact that they believe something is somehow evidence for that belief. I will respond to this with a quote from Medawar directed to students who want to become scientists: “The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not”. Until your beliefs are confirmed how much you believe in them means nothing.

Christians seem to like to retreat and argue backwards in order to get their beliefs any footing. Some even slip into solipsism, but mostly they put value into subjective experience. That they and others have had some experiences or feelings that incline them towards the supernatural is supposed to mean something. They fail to understand the basic definition for subjective which is that something that is subjective may be seen differently by different people.

However, what Christians and many other people see truth as is something that is objective and not subject to personal biases. Truth is generally regarded as something that should be true for anybody and everybody. For Christians to believe that there are a plurality of truths would undermine their claim of ultimate truth. And generally they don’t. So, playing the “subjective experience” card accomplishes nothing.

The reason Christians have to do so much of this mental gymnastics is because they start from a presumed conclusion. All the evidence needs to support this conclusion. But, of course much of the evidence is to the contrary. So, they for lack of a better metaphor are always in the process of trying to hammer in puzzle pieces into places where they don’t fit. This is in fact the basis for all of Christian apologetics.

Truth’s validity is dependent on objectiveness.

Objectiveness is defined by others’ perceptions.

Perceptions are individual, plural and subjective. 

Truth by nature is contradictive; ultimately nonexistant.

An assertion of truth, damned by its explanation  ;-)

I could write a lot about this, so I’ll just try to provide a brief insight. I should probably put up a poll to see what my regular readers are more interested in: 1) news or 2) apologetics and mentoring.

A word of warning

One thing I’ve noticed about women is that they like it when men treat their mothers nicely and what they mean by that is never judging or disagreeing with their mothers, and never trying to change their mothers. This view of love is, of course, false. I want my mother to go to Heaven and to know and love God, so I have to talk to her about these things and disagree if she is wrong about them. So I think that disagreeing with her about spiritual things is being nice to her. But read on and judge for yourself.

The plan

My plan for my mother is not to begin by convincing her that Christianity is true. Instead, I begin by convincing her to approach religious issues just as she would approach any other area of knowledge, such as investing, or nutrition. If she agrees to treat religion as any other area of of knowledge, then I think that she will eventually conclude that Christianity is true. Currently, she is forming her beliefs about God’s existence, character and what he wants from her, using subjective mechanisms, i.e. – intuitions and experience. I want her to try a different method.

Goals

My goal for my mother, as with anyone else, is to try to get her to accept Christianity as objectively true, based on arguments and evidence. I don’t think that a person can be an authentic Christian if Christianity is just wish-fulfillment. I don’t think that a person will stick with Christianity when it goes against their own self-interest, unless their belief is anchored on arguments and facts. People act on what they really believe is true, when stressed by reality.

So, what I need to do is to argue for a method of discovery that is not dependent on emotions and intuitions, but is more rigorous. I need to offer my mother tools, such as the laws of logic, historical analysis and the scientific method. These tools can be used to investigate whether God exists, and what he is really like, and what he wants from her. By using these tools instead of intuition and experience, my hope is that I will be able to get her to arrive at a view of God as he really is.

Questions

The first question to ask her is “Does a Creator and Designer of the Universe exist independently of whether anyone thinks so or not?”. And then I ask the immediate follow-up question “How do you know that?”.

The second question to ask her is “What is the Creator/Designer’s character like?”. And again, the immediate follow-up question is “How do you know that?”.

The third question to ask her is “How does the Creator/Designer expect you to act?”. Once again, immediately follow up with “How do you know that?”.

Discussion

And the results of the inquiry were as follows: 1) she thinks that God is exactly like her and approves of everything she does, and more importantly, 2) her method of investigating religion is basically to invent “God” using her own feelings and experiences. Her method of arriving at these conclusions was by using intuition and experience, and she was resistant to the idea of using logic, science and history to find out the truth about God, his existence, his character, and what he wanted.

The next thing I did was to argue that her method of arriving at her religious beliefs was subjective and unreliable, and that she would never use that method of determining truth in any other area of life. I made a list of everything she cares about and started approaching each topic using her subjective method of determining truth, in order to expose the disastrous consequences that would occur if she made decisions in these other areas using intuition and experience.

For example, I explained my theories on how watching TV produces university degrees, how chocolate causes weight loss, how fruits and vegetables cause cancer, etc. All of this to show that subjectivism is not a reliable method of arriving at truth in any area of knowledge, especially in religion. The desire for happiness should not drive the search for religious truth. People need to avoid inventing a self-serving view of God, just because it gives them a feeling of security without any moral demands.

Finally, I introduce a reliable method of arriving at the truth in any area, including religion. I’m sure that you all already know about the concepts of propositional truth, the correspondence theory of truth, and the test for truth (logical consistency, empirical validation, experiential relevance). And you all know about how to use science/history/logic to confirm/disconfirm religious claims, etc. If necessary, I would apply these methods to other areas to show how they produce real knowledge.

A useful thing to do is to show how well-accepted facts like the origin of the universe from nothing and the crucifixion of Jesus falsify various world religions. This helps to make the point that a lot of people believe things that are false. That way, you motivate the question – “am I interested in knowing what is really true or am I interested in engaging in wish-fulfillment and projection in order to make myself feel better about my own selfishness and insecurity?”.

Some things I found out

I found that engaging in these discussions brought out some very interesting data that reminded me of what I see in the church. Each of these is worth a post, so I’ll just throw them out there in point form.

• She viewed my efforts to get her to employ logic and evidence to determine her views as being critical of her
• She felt “constrained” by allowing logic and evidence to override her “freedom” to invent a self-serving God
• She didn’t want to know about the laws of logic, or how religions make conflicting truth claims
• She didn’t want to know about what science and history could confirm/disprove religious truth claims
• She thought that it was better to let everyone believe anything they wanted to believe
• She thought that religion was mostly for making people believe things that made them feel happy and secure
• She didn’t think that God expected her to act morally if it didn’t make her feel happy to do so
• She didn’t care to find out the truth about whether God exists, what he was like, and what he wanted from her

Note: we didn’t get into any fights over this, it was just a friendly discussion, although I could sense her resistance.

My biggest concern about this view is that if it were a common view among Christians, it would increase the incidence of several non-Christian ideas, like moral relativism, inclusivism, postmodernism, pluralistic salvation, the non-reality of Hell, etc. And I think that if a lot of Christians believe Christianity is self-serving, then we will be perceived as being hypocritical by non-Christians when we don’t do the difficult things we are supposed to be doing. Non-Christians want to see some consistency between out actions and what the Bible says.

In a poll of my friends I did a while back, I found that people thought that talking to relatives about Christianity was the most difficult thing to do, higher than talking to people at work. So I’d be curious for readers to share their experiences about who is harder to talk to, and what you found in talking to people.

Mentoring

• the importance of being able to argue both sides of a question
• why does talking about religion make people uncomfortable?
• how to talk to your co-workers about your faith

Apologetics advocacy

• does the Bible teach that faith is opposed to logic and evidence?
• the six enemies of apologetic engagement
• why men flee the feminized church
• why won’t Christians defend their faith in public?

And here are some lectures that got me interested in apologetics.

When someone says “you are such a fag” we view this as a very offensive type of insult. What exactly makes it worse than say, “you are such a loser.” And is this insult always worse than a more generic insult like “you are such a loser.”

An answer will depend on how we insult people. I see three ways.

The first way involves comparing them to something objectively bad or undesirable. Something like “you are such a nazi” functions by equating the person to something that really is bad.

Another way to insult someone is to claim that they have betrayed their fundamental principles or have become something that they, by their own lights, would like not to be. We might say to the starving bohemian artist “you are so bourgeois.” The sting of this insult comes from claiming that this artist has betrayed his principles and has become something he does not want to be.

A third way of insulting someone is to claim that they are something that society frowns upon, though it may not be bad in itself. I think “you’re such a fag” falls into this category. We think that this insult is wrong because it relies on a misstaken public judgment to the effect that there is something being wrong with being gay. Unlike the nazi case, there seems to be no reason other than prejudice to claim a fault with being gay. So, the insult then is a mischaracterization of an acceptable and in some cases desirable way of life.

There is much more to be said on this topic, but my point is that calling some gay in an accusatory way may sometimes function in mode 3 above. In other words, you could be claiming that the person is something that they do not want to be. We could imagine a gay person saying to another gay person “you are so straight” and mean this as an insult in the context, as implying that the person is somehow not being true to who they are. In some cases, I do think that such identity based insults are meant in this way, to attract attention to a betrayal of principles, and this seems much less offensive. The claim is merely that the person is something that they do not wish to be, and even though, as I belive, there is nothing wrong with being gay, one is free not to be gay, and so may feel insulted by being labeled what he does not wish to be.

I’m not certain that this is right, and as I said before, there may be more that needs to be said. For example, the insulted person may have no reason not to want to be gay, and so again, the insult may take its force merely from prejudice.

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?

Many years ago, I consistently blogged and recorded my thoughts online. Since then, I’ve developed new personal policies off transparency of character, but diverged from establishing my own subjective truth in a permanent record. For the past 4 years, I have existed primarily as second and third hand histories, a smattering of myths, but always primarily as legend. I am no such great character, and as such if anyone will record a sense of my life it ought to be me. Additionally, I myself can only believe in the mythology as I am a person who relies on evidence to create truths. I have no truth of myself other than what I can receive through words and stories. In other words, to reclaim my life I need both to record and to publicize it. If there is an audience I feel compelled to speak truth and weave it intricately. For myself, I have no such dedication.

So my goal here is dissect myself, to turn myself inside out and back again, and to shine a flashlight on as muich of that as possible. Unfortunately, because I’ve become a coward, no specific markings or information about names or locations will be given, apart from cities at the most specific.

To truly begin, I have to catch up with myself however, which may take some time. Hopefully the record will serve to push me from the very start…

Homogenous Christianity will be death of the church if it continues

Plumblines. Coloring in the lines. The white lines on the road. The yellow line down the middle. The fences that separate us from our neighbours. We live in a world divided. The way we live our lives tend be to be divided, and we have become so accustomed to it we don’t even realize it.

We get used to things really easy.

We are creatures of habit as someone once said. We get used to our surroundings, ideas, and beliefs. And if something or someone comes from the outside to challenge those beliefs (like Jesus), we assume before they’ve even opened their mouth that they are wrong, destructive and might even be a heretic. In that regard, we let our safety rule what we do, say and believe. the danger is that when we do this, we then let stagnation settle in. if you think of our beliefs as a carton of milk, then over time if we don’t change the milk, it curdles and becomes useless unless you prefer homemade cottage cheese!! I am not saying that we should scrap all of our beliefs. What am I suggesting is to see that our beliefs were never the point. The carton of milk isn’t the point, the milk is to pour over the cereal, the cereal is what helps keep us alive. The milk carton points to life, but isn’t the life-giver.

There is a danger if we become alike, because there is divinity in our differences. God is in the rainbow as well as the all-blue sky.

Homogeneity doesn’t breed diversity.

If you notice anything in scripture, it is the diversity of those whom God chooses.

Again, this does not mean that we should throw away all the things we believe, but it does mean we should not be scared to ask questions or to seek answers that might even lead us out of the boundaries we have made for ourselves. We have to remember that most of our theology has been framed by our environment, history, upbringing and worldviews. We can’t get away from the reality that we are subjective beings trying to understand God who is outside of our subjectivity. So our beliefs by nature have some sort of influence from our subjective way of being and seeing the world. But it is the differences that creates other differences, and those differences breed even more differences. And differences aren’t right or wrong, they just are. Differences invites discussion rather than repel it. Diversity invites us to see that truth, God, love and other ideologies were and are bigger than Christianity. They are bigger than a system of beliefs. They are things that helped order the cosmos. These ideas are part of a microcosm we all call home. Diversity invites change. Change invites growth. Growth invites movement. And movement invites transformation.

Even speed dating can feel like it’s going in slow motion. Sigh…

(Posted with permission from Feeding the Puppy.)

I’ve come to observe over a period of time, that opinions are mostly an expression of my ego. It is a compulsion of wanting to make a point, even though that point is generally biased, and this bias comes from a lack of understanding and objectivity. Looking back through my past I realize that my opinions were an extension of my ignorance, and very possibly, arrogance. My giving of an opinion has always been subjective.

My observations, on the other hand, come from a state of slowing down — and quietly observing over a period of time — the cause of a consistent series of effects, both, within myself and in the external world. I’m now at a stage in life where I prefer to state an observation, over an opinion. I also find that people sometimes misunderstand my observations, cos instead of stepping back and understanding the essence of it, they choose to react to the observation with an opinion.