vol 7: Notes
1999
Sunday 21 February 1999
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Sunday 21 February 1999 - Saturday 27 February 1999]
[BOOK, DB 50]
[page 166]
Sunday 21 February
A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf. Woolf
A book is a product of a whole culture, not just the individual participant in the culture who writes it.
God is pure action / actuality
Not the same as the {fullness of being}
Each transfinite number is the Fullness of its predecessor.
Scale invariant = god's problems are the same as my problems.
HEAVEN = an asymptote = unattainable
[page 167]
It is not a crime to be tempted. Action is all that is actionable.
The measure of the university is the size of its library. [now the whole internet!]
RELIGION = OPERATING SYSTEM
Life is pure act: the question is what to do = where to go. The possibilities are always greater than the reality. THE GROWTH POTENTIAL OF BEING. We exist at a point in the growth of the universe.
To be tempted is not a crime.
Dynamic justice : Equal bandwidth for each position.
Monday 22 February
Tuesday 22 February
[page 168]
Wednesday 24 February
Age is making me aware of the struggle for existence experienced by those who make a living by physical work (perhaps ? % of our population). Tiredness is in effect the enemy. Also explains why men may have difficulties with putting women in positions of control since they fear the dissipation of hard earned capital.
Interest arises because of the production efficiencies brought about by capital investment. Some of the return on capital accrues to the moneylender, some to the person who uses the capital goods. My problem is I am not working in a market but in a fixed environment of poorish friends. Also high ambition to totally reform theological view of the world induces financial and psychological stress that would be absent if I could a) drop the ambition or b) recruit funds and people to help me with it. Perhaps this year will be both the most stressful of my life and also the darkest before the dawn.
ISLAM = SUBMISSION = WORK
MOTHERHOOD = bowing to reality.
[page 169]
The spirit of this site revolves around the physical symbol religion is the technology of peace. The meaning I give to this symbol is mooted in the history of this site and will be (hopefully) explicated in great detail in pages to come.
How do many become one? Why is the one many? The explication of peace revolves around these questions. Here we are doing science, where by science we mean expressing the life of the universe in our own words.,
Theology is the theory of peace, and religion is the industry associated with it.
Lourdes: people sufficiently empowered may work miracles upon themselves. Lourdes - Wikipedia
I set out many years ago to make a living from religion as an employee of the Roman Catholic Church but was dismissed for failing to toe the
[page 170]
official line. I have spent the last thirty years building houses and thinking about the relationship between religion and human habitat. Now I have decided to go into the religion business on my own account.
Quality control. The enemy of quality control is blind management cf. space shuttle. Space Shuttle Challenger disaster - Wikipedia There are no end of priesthoods that claim for one reason or another to be exempt from normal requirements of quality control. There are revolutionaries who feel that their cause is so important that they are licensed to kill indiscriminately.
Thursday 25 February
Friday 26 February
A blueprint for the religion industry:
1. We are all prophets (Spirit)
2. We are all divine (Son)
3. The world is god (Father)
[page 171]
On the religion industry,
Religion is big business. Department of Business, Economics, Statistics and Informatics at Örebro University
We define order using the membership relation, and then use ordering to define all permutations. The transfinite space of permutations defines al possible structures.
A language is a subspace of this space.
. . .
Order and Chaos: Genesis describes the development of order out of chaos. Genesis
Domestic definition of chaos: how much mess can you tolerate.
[page 172]
It is abut 30 years since I was first judged to have departed from Catholic (or at least Dominican) orthodoxy. www.op.org
The empirical foundation of the position promoted [on this site] is my personal experience of life enriched by communications of others.
Catholic theology is heavily constrained by the institutional requirements of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). The RCC is essentially a monarchy. If it were a democracy, we could say that its guiding light is the will of its people.
I could not bear this constraint and have been driven by the need to find a new religious position since I abandoned Catholicism.
The church position requires a number of counterintuitive positions which are summarized in the 24 theses. 24 Theses
Proof of god: this position remains unacceptable to me.
Saturday 27 February
The critical empirical fact that has imprinted itself on me in my religious journey is that religion (and the loss of religion) [is] associated [with] very powerful feelings. This led me to my fundamental hypothesis about religion, it is a force as strong as death (or life) which binds unrelated individuals into an organism which enhances the lives of at least some of the people within it.
If this is the case, religions, like genes, have a strong bearing on the fitness and survival of their members and we would expect some sort of natural selection among them. By this criterion, Christianity has been a very successful religion. I[t] has more than a billion adherents who tend to be found in the wealthier communities of the world.
The world enjoys a rich diversity of religions, each with different tone and temper. Christianity seems quite belligerent, to the degree that the
[page 174]
evolutionary step we call the Reformation spawned an era rich in religious wars,
My working definition of religion is best understood in the context of sociobiology. Wilson Sociobiology sets out to explain cooperative behaviour among living creatures. It has roots in 'neo Darwinism', one of whose staunch advocates is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins Dawkins sees genes as the rulers of life. Life as we know it is simply the genes' way of reproducing and improving themselves.
From this point of view, it only makes sense for one organism to cooperate with another f such cooperation results in increased prevalence of the cooperative genotypes in the gene pool. So bees die in defence of hive and queen.
Have needed to formulate a new religious view of the world, that is link myself to the world anew to give myself meaning and make life in the possible psychologically
[page 175]
viable. It follows from this than no person can exist as an island. We are individuals but our individual existence depends on communication with an environment comprising other people,m the natural world and human institutions including governments, churches, corporations of every sort, families, tribes etc etc.
A Religion in communication terms is a protocol for human existence.
My sanity gave me no choice but to fashion a new religion. The first requirement was security. Once bitten, twice shy.
As I contemplated my fate during the early despair dominated days after I left the church there was no comparison between the
[page 176]
[credibility of Catholic theology and science].
Theology is the science of personal experience.
Religion is the protocol of human organism, the technology of peace.
Science is the recursive use of mathematics not only to model the universe, but to estimate the probability that a given model does fit the observations.
The good news is that I have made it through hell without committing suicide (as many do) and found the possible land on the other side. I know now that work and pain are not punishment for some original sin, consequences of a nature rendered defective by some nebulous fault of its own in the face of a stern but loving god who sent his own son to redeem us and lead us into paradise IF we obey a set of rules laid down by a human organization we call a church, an embodiment of religion.
I know [and] feel that the Christian story is a poor approximation to reality, a yet remains
[page 177]
as a monument and reference point to a discernible stage in human evolution.
After a long opposition, the Church has succumbed to the power of the theory of evolution. . . .
30 year loop coming back to the starting point. My point of departure (and so last point of contact) was Bernard Lonergan's Insight. Lonergan Englishing Thomas Aquinas; showing [his] weakness.
Big contrast between transcendental method and static god.
Aleph(human)
My overall interest is to revisit the events of my transition in the cold light of academia.
Summarize my position in a series of propositions contrasting it with the Catholic position. These propositions represent my current beliefs but may be viewed as hypothetical by one who
[page 178]
stands by the standard Catholic Model.
[subject headings]
1. Theology
2. Religion
3. Genesis
4. Original sin and redemption
5. Pain, suffering and sin
6. Trinity
7. Jesus
8. Mystical body
9. Death
10. Real presence
11. Providence and prescience of god
12. Prayer and magic
[page 179]
13. Theory of everything
14. Prophecy
15. Language
16. Christianity is bigger than the Roman Catholic Church.
MA - exclude empirical residue
PhD - show that visible universe is all that is
MA based on
a) epistemological works of B J Lonergan, Verbum, Insight and Method
b) standard textbooks on set theory, logic, quantum mechanics, foundations of logic and mathematics, communication theory, cybernetics
c) personal experience of transition out of the Roman Catholic Church
Effect of MA and PhD is to make god + universe one, so that theology may be considered an empirical science and to global consensus reached and peace.
If this position can be defended it opens the way to the unification of religions because theology can become an empirical science, the union of all science and, so, like the other sciences, slowly converge on a unified transcription of the nature of the world.
Further reading
Books
| Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Penguin/Pelican 1996 Preface: '[Darwinism] is, indeed a remarkably simple theory; ... In essence it amounts simply to the idea that non-random reproduction where there is hereditary variation, has consequences that are far reaching if there is time for them to be cumulative ... ' Amazon back |
| Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene , Oxford UP 1976 Amazon: Editorial review: 'Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that "our" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.' Rob Lightner Amazon back |
| Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants"--a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.' Amazon back |
| Genesis, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.' (I, 1-2) Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, and Robert M. Doran, Frederick E. Crowe (eds), Verbum : Word and Idea in Aquinas (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan volume 2) , University of Toronto Press 1997 Jacket: 'Verbum is a product of Lonergan's eleven years of study of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The work is considered by many to be a breakthrough in the history of Lonergan's theology ... . Here he interprets aspects in the writing of Aquinas relevant to trinitarian theory and, as in most of Lonergan's work, one of the principal aims is to assist the reader in the search to understand the workings of the human mind.' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Method in Theology, University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute 1996 Introduction: 'A theology mediates between a cultural matrix and the signifcance and role of religion in that matrix. ... When the classicist notion of culture prevails, theology is conceived as a permanent achievement, and then one discourses on its nature. When culture is conceived empirically, theology is known to be an ongoing process, and then one writes on its method. Method ... is a framework for collaborative creativity.' Amazon back |
| Wilson, Edward Osborne, Sociobiology: The new synthesis, Harvard UP 1975 Chapter 1: '... the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can altruism, which by definition reduces personal fitness, possibly evolve by natural selection? The answer is kinship. ... Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour. ... It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis.' Amazon back |
| Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own, Granada 1977 Amazon back |
Links
| Department of Business, Economics, Statistics and Informatics at Örebro University EconPapers: Papers on Economics of Religion 'EconPapers use the RePEc bibliographic and author data, providing access to the largest collection of online Economics working papers and journal articles. The majority of the full text files are freely available, but some (typically journal articles) require that you or your organization subscribe to the service providing the full text file. RePEc is a distributed data set residing in over 400 archives operated by research organizations, academic departments and publishers. EconPapers would not be possible without the effort of the maintainers of these archives.' back |
| Lourdes - Wikipedia Lourdes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Lourdes (Occitan name Lorda) is a town and commune situated in the Southwest of the Hautes-Pyrénées department, lying in the first Pyrenean foothills, in southwestern France. , , , Lourdes was originally a small unremarkable market town lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees. At that time the most prominent feature was the fortified castle which rises up from the centre of the town on a rocky escarpment. Following the claims that there were apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, Lourdes has developed into a major place of Christian pilgrimage. Today Lourdes has a population of around 15,000 inhabitants but is able to take in some 5,000,000 pilgrims and tourists every season. Lourdes has the second greatest number of hotels in France after Paris with about 270 establishments.' back |
| Lourdes-france.org Lourdes france, le site officiel des Santuaires vous acceuille Site internet de Sanctuaires Notre-Dame de Lourdes back |
| Space Shuttle Challenger disaster - Wikipedia Space Shuttle Challenger disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred in the United States, over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 UTC) on January 28, 1986. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The seal failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it filled, allowing a flare to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent attachment hardware and external fuel tank. The SRB breach flare led to the separation of the right-hand SRB and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter. The shuttle was destroyed and all seven crew members were killed.' back |
| www.op.org Dopminicans : Order of Preachers, ... '... the official international Web site of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans). The branches of the Dominican family are multiple: brothers, contemplative nuns, congregations of contemplative and apostolic sisters, lay persons in fraternities or secular institutes, secular priests in fraternities.' back |
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Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
