vol 7: Notes
2008
Sunday 7 September
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This site is part of the natural religion project The natural religion project A new theology A commentary on the Summa The theology company
Notes
[Sunday 7 September 2008 - Saturday 13 September 2008]
[Notebook: DB 64 Gravitation]
Sunday 7 September 2008
[page 95]
Monday 5 September 2008
Lost the thread again. Whatever their stance on evolution, religions themselves are subject to evolution. Religions evolve. The successful
[page 95]
ones spread. The others die. This prompts the question: why are the successful religions so weird? I know Christianity, and the Christian story is to me absurdly unrealistic. And I see hints that many of the other old religious traditions suffer form the same defect.
On religion. I have just read The Constant Gardener about a good drug prematurely promoted and the deaths that ensue. Le Carre The big loss is the loss of life. If it can be lost, it can be measured, and on the scale of 0 to 1, death is a 1.
Why is a species more successful? Because, in the given environment, its actions are more profitable to it. My aim in developing these religious ideas is primarily my own profit, and secondarily he profit of all those who yield some of their profit to me.
Here is the evolutionary rub. Whatever your morality the successful are successful, even if one may disagree with the method of their success. So the Constant Gardened. So Christianity succeeds as a story of creation, sin, redemption, paradise.
The real problem with Catholicism is the hypocrisy where one is inclined to believe one thing while going another. Hypocrisy arises because there is a contradiction between theory and reality. A true theory can tell it like it is and not require any suspensions of disbelief.
TRUTH SIMPLIFIES
FALSEHOOD COMPLEXIFIES. A is not B
[page 96]
Luxury: toast with butter and honey in front of the fire.
We seek authentic beauty and human happiness with a sustainable consumption of resources.
SUSTAINABLE = CLOSED (BALANCED as in books)
(PUBLIC PROFIT vs PRIVATE PROFIT) vs (PUBLIC = PRIVATE) [Adam Smith Smith]
Time division multiplexing: One way to measure the importance of an activity is the time spent doing it. This is obviously a crude measure since it does not differentiate between being in love and being in a chain gang.
I only take peoples money for things that I know I can do. There can be a temptation to claim greater than actual competence. One must suppress knowledge of the failures for most profitable results. Honesty is not necessarily as well rewarded as hype.
On the relative power of abstract and concrete representations of reality.
We know that reality may be considered as an immensely complex kinematic process formally represented as a communication network.
On the search for the holy grail. Many of us are looking for grails, holy or otherwise, and many already have one.
[page 97]
A recurrent theme in the Bible is the bad doing well and the good doing badly.
TRUTH = PEER
DECEPTION = NOT-PEER
The promoters of religion are looking for a successful formula, one that will profit them in some way or another. We all promote our own religion as an aid to common survival.
The ideal is commonwealth.
You're not on the scene if you do not have the resources to stay on the scene. A process only lives while it lives.
PEACE & BLANDNESS rule, because the majority like stability and only a minority want change for the sake of change. There seems to be an optimum mix of stability an innovation, ie an optimum rate of change, a local velocity of light.
Network protocols: chatting people ut; raping them; having an orderly conversation.
' ' '
Greed: more of the same; Creativity: something new.
The mystics are only doing it for the visions.
Enlightened self interest = cooperation.
[page 98]
Why does the 'mafia' have to kill people when other businesses run profitably without killing?
If you are not with us you are against us and we kill anybody who is against us.
Religion: Spiritual software for life.
There is no such thing as perpetual motion: quantum mechanics vs the heat death of the universe.
As denizens of the network we may be more inclined to see entropy as a communication resource rather than thermodynamic waste.
Tuesday 6 September 2008
Wednesday 7 September 2008
Thursday 8 September 2008
Friday 9 September 2008
Natural religion = (?) Wu wei (Needham II:68) Needham
Saturday 10 September 2008
Books
| Christie, Agatha, The Moving Finger: A Miss Marple Mystery, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers o ISBN-13: 978-1579126940 2007 Amazon product description: 'The placid village of Lymstock seems the perfect place for Jerry Burton to recuperate from his accident under the care of his sister, Joanna. But soon a series of vicious poison-pen letters destroys the village's quiet charm, eventually causing one recipient to commit suicide. The vicar, the doctor, the servants--all are on the verge of accusing one another when help arrives from an unexpected quarter. The vicar's houseguest happens to be none other than Jane Marple. Amazon back |
| Homer, and Alexander Pope (translator) Steve Schrankman (editor), The Iliad of Homer, Penguin USA 1996 Amazon Book Description: 'THE English version of The Iliad is Alexander Pope's. As Dr. Johnson said of Pope's rendition of the Odessey, it is, "certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen." This is the great Iliad of Homer, as cast into Engish by Alexander Pope, one of the giants of English poetry.' Amazon back |
| Kreyszig, Erwin, Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications, John Wiley and Sons 1989 Amazon: 'Kreyszig's "Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications", provides a great introduction to topics in real and functional analysis. This book is part of the Wiley Classics Library and is extremely well written, with plenty of examples to illustrate important concepts. It can provide you with a solid base in these subjects, before one takes on the likes of Rudin and Royden. I had purchased a copy of this book, when I was taking a graduate course on real analysis and can only strongly recommend it to anyone else.' Krishnan S. Kartik Amazon back |
| Le Carre, John, The Constant Gardener: A Novel, Scribner 2005 Amazon review: 'Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review British diplomat Justin Quayle, complacent raiser of freesias and doting husband of the stunning, much younger Tessa, has tended his own garden in Nairobi too long. Tessa is Justin's opposite, a fiery reformer, "that rarest thing, a lawyer who believes in justice," whose campaigns have earned her a nickname: "the Princess Diana of the African poor." But now Tessa has turned up naked, raped, and dead on a mysterious visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. Her traveling companion (and lover?), the handsome Congolese-Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, has vanished. So has Quayle's complacency. Tessa had been compiling data against a multinational drug company that uses helpless Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with unfortunately fatal side effects. Her report was destroyed by her husband's superiors; was she? It's all somehow connected to the sinister British firm House of ThreeBees, whose ad boasts that it's "buzzy for the health of Africa!" John le Carré symbolically associates ThreeBees with an ominous buzz in the Nairobi morgue: "Over [the corpses], in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note." The home office tries to take Quayle in out of the cold. He cleverly eludes their clammy embrace, turns spy, and takes off on a global chase to avenge Tessa and solve her murder. Le Carré has lost none of his gift for setting vivid scenes in far-flung places expertly described: London, Germany, Saskatchewan, Kenya. His sprinting thriller prose remains in great shape. And thanks to his 16 years in the British Foreign Office, his merciless send-up of its cutthroat intrigues and petty self-delusions is unbelievably good--or rather, believably so. This is global do-gooder satire on a literary par with Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark. But you want to know if The Constant Gardener is as good as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Very nearly. Africa's nightmare is more complex than the cold war chess match, and the world pharmaceutical circus is tougher to dramatize than the old spy-versus-spy-versus-spymaster game. Still, le Carré can write a smart, melancholy page-turner, and his moral outrage (the real subject of his books) burns as brightly as ever.' --Tim Appelo Amazon back |
| Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China (Volume 2) History of Scientific Thought, Cambridge UP 1956 Amazon back |
| Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes, Modern Library 1994 First published 1776. The eighteenth century classic that laid the foundation for modern political economy. Here Smith descibes the work of the 'invisible hand' which guides a group of people freely acting in accord with their human nature to form an orderly and coherent social structure. The bible of laissez faire (let it be) capitalism. Amazon back |
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Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
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