vol 7: Notes
2004
18 January
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: Transfinite field theory DB 56]
[Sunday 18 January 2004 - Saturday 24 January 2004]
Sunday 18 January 2004
Monday 19 January 2004
Tuesday 20 January 2004
Wednesday 21 January 2004
Thursday 22 January 2004
Friday 23 January 2004
Saturday 24 January 2004
Science founds the theology of natural religion. Religion yields selective advantage most richly in the military realm, where a small advantage eventually leads to total domination and the 'plundering' of people (mothers, slaves) property and territory. We still see this process in operation around the world, the Christian religion, armed with modern weapons having enforced itself around large parts of the world
[page 35]
and moving strategically to take over as much as possible of the remainder. There will not be peace on earth until one overarching religion dominates all. This does not mean the dead hand of extinction characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church. A better paradigm is the pre-Christian attitude of the Roman empire to the religions that it overran. The Roman were more interested in physical rather than spiritual values. Hence we see a niche for a physical theology and a physical religion which regulates the physical side of the human world, leaving people to manage the spiritual how they will. This requires the basic agreement of everybody on earth that ourselves and our planet are one organism. This holism, coupled with physical experience and the notion of consistency places necessary and sufficient constraints on the physical outcomes of any spiritual system. Through consistency this constrains spiritual systems also. By founding ourselves on physics, we hope to show how to construct a consistent spirituality which, because of its very consistency can lead to an explosion of variation of human spiritual visions, allowing us to burst the chains of ancient religion that are the source of so much misery,
Nevertheless, we must build on history, so a lot of delicate surgery will be required to eliminate the constricting elements of historical religious messages (like that of Augustine) while preserving the life and richness that have brought us from the wild animals to what we are (still wild animals, but living in an environment more of our own construction than in the old days). Augustine, Brown.
natural religion = inclusive religion.
The ancient churches maintain (or attempt to maintain) physical control, through thought control based on a 'transcendental' (non-physical) message
[page 36]
from the source of religious authority claimed by each particular religion. This tends to lead to closed points of view by saying that which is on high is closed. This we claim is not so. The universe is closed at the physical end, not the spiritual: it has a beginning and no end, like the Cantor Universe.
God sees and controls all is, in the light of Cantor, Goedel, Chaitin etc, a proposition with 1/aleph(n) chance of being correct.
Adaptation: we begin with Aristotle's seal in wax and expand it to the way children develop and learn from egg on to fit into their environment in a way which yields survival and more.
A normalized market: one in which the money supply (energy supply?) is fixed. In the real market the value created by rising prices is used to secure the loan of more money from the bank of the world. This is a metaphysical (not necessarily normalized) process.
In the Cantor universe everything is names and every name is a combination (cardinal number) or permutation (ordinal number) of its antecedents (Aristotle: material cause).
For us prime matter [logically includes] natural numbers, ie prime matter is a set of elements which can be combined and permuted to produce complex systems.
Babysitting three toddlers: this is the physical end of the universe. No wonder our spiritual fathers fled domesticity and confined themselves to childless (but hardly sexless) monasticism. As their writings show, many
[page 37]
monks have been obsessed with sex. Here is the opposite side of the coin, no sex and heaps of children, the harem rather than the monastery.
Philip Gourevitch: We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. Gourevitch.
Gourevitch page 6: 'In Rwanda, a year before I [visited], the government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in the country's Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. The government and an astounding number of its subjects imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people, they could make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed.'
Ideas to action; we forbid the action, though leave people free to have the idea. This is a small risk that some people will be inclined to put the idea into action. We can only cope with this by physical restraint, or by attaching an inseparable tag to the idea 'not for execution, contemplation only'.'
Dominican Order thought it had a pretty good plan: action (preaching) and contemplation (thinking up sermons). Action also included fundraising, in cash or kind (including patronage).
page 6 (continued): All at once, it seemed, something we have only imagined was upon us - and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence, the peculiar necessity of imagining what is in fact real. '
Ie knowledge mediated through image. Image goes into action, so that some people did actually kill, hacking their neighbours to bits.
A disastrous course of action motivated by a system of
[page 38]
false (inconsistent with reality) concepts. Was the place really better off after the milling? Even if this was so, did such an end justify such a means. What about the 'moral damage' to the killers?
Further reading
Books
| Brown, Peter Robert Lamont , Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, University of California Press 2000 Amazon book description: 'This classic biography was first published thirty years ago and has since established itself as the standard account of Saint Augustine's life and teaching. The remarkable discovery recently of a considerable number of letters and sermons by Augustine has thrown fresh light on the first and last decades of his experience as a bishop. These circumstantial texts have led Peter Brown to reconsider some of his judgments on Augustine, both as the author of the Confessions and as the elderly bishop preaching and writing in the last years of Roman rule in north Africa. Brown's reflections on the significance of these exciting new documents are contained in two chapters of a substantial Epilogue to his biography (the text of which is unaltered). He also reviews the changes in scholarship about Augustine since the 1960s. A personal as well as a scholarly fascination infuse the book-length epilogue and notes that Brown has added to his acclaimed portrait of the bishop of Hippo.' Amazon back |
| Gourevitch, Philip, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, Picador USA 1999 Amazon Book Description: (Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction) 'In April 1994, the Rwandan government called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill each member of the Tutsi minority, and over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis perished in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the war in Rwanda, a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath. One of the most acclaimed books of the year, this account will endure as a chilling document of our time.' Amazon back |
Links
| Augustine Church Fathers: Home Browse to Augustine of Hippo for a list of Augustine's works online. back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
