logic of an agnostic pantheist

"This is what God said: 'I promise that never again will all people and animals be destroyed by a flood. I am putting my rainbow in the clouds. And when the rainbow appears, I will see it and remember this promise of mine.'"

for despite all claims to an omniscient God, God in fact has something of a bad, or at least imperfect, memory. it is a memory that needs reminders of promises, the promise alone unable to substantiate itself. God needs aids as we need them. this imperfect memory defeats, first of all, assumptions of omniscience, knowledge being only sustained memories, and complete knowledge entailing a working memory of anything and everything, alpha and omega, first and final cause. the act of forgetting -- Forgetting being actually inherent to everything -- could not be a possibility were it a true case of omniscience. so, God does not know all (and indeed CANNOT know all anyway, as a thorough study of prophecy would show).

secondly, God's imperfect memory begets an altogether different reading of the scriptures, if they are indeed supposed to be God's Word. the bible is no less a historical telling by way of selective memory than the histories of humankind produced by its own imperfect collective memories. were we even to propose that God would be at least less inclined to error in his telling than humans, it would no more depreciate the weight, the heavy burdenous weight, of the condition of a possibility (and therefore SOME probability) for error; nor can it stave off the more immense problem that with limited memory (of any sort!) there is inherently, indispensibly, a perspective, a point-of-view, and necessarily, simultaneously, a bias in what is Told. alternate histories must therefore have alternate Gods, differentiated and distributed by people (or, the more likely case, pre-differentiated and pre-distributed by something human but unconscious or subconscious), people who themselves have points of view and biases. God(s) must be pluralistic. monotheism in its strong form then can only exist emically, in those cases of violent (abridging, omitting) isolationism, in self-limiting; in its weak form, monotheism must equate itself with pluralism of a sort, a closet monolatrism, whereby, just like "Love", only the name and the act of signification itself of SOMETHING (always something different) can serve a base for union.

approaching meta-physics

to avoid the essentialism of conventional universalist or relativist labels -- that is, the essentialist universality of both: universalists claiming that we're all essentially the same while relativists claim a different universal that we are all irredeemably different -- to avoid this, it seems best to me to approach meta-ethics in cultural theory through respective emical or etical analyses; respective of multiplicities of contexts (i.e., cultures and histories). in any case, it requires a vocabulary devoid of the essentialist underpinnings of the former two terms.

Walking away

thinking

of what I said

disappointing

eyes

that I impose

on their faces

in contrast to

those imprinted

along nerve endings

the face of a better me

better to me

of course

but dare I ask

me to whom?

who stands the greater

of me as their object?

who waits for me

to evolve?

involving (of the) Super-fluous-

ego

in the next class

we'll demonstrate transitives

& intransitives

and the continuous form,

it's all a matter of pragmatics

.

reawakening alternatives for moral paradigms

China's thriving Confucian schools

By Jill McGivering BBC News

Parents believe studying Confucius benefits the whole of society

As soon as they walk into the tiny school, a converted apartment in a tower block, the children are bundled into grey cotton wraparound robes, fastened at the back with modern Velcro.

Flowing sleeves flap round their wrists, square black hats wedged on to their heads - some, too big, slip down over the eyes.

The children, from three to six years old, have come to special weekend classes to learn the teachings of China's ancient sage, Confucius.

Read more...

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

-- Thomas Paine

A person seeking inner development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one’s mind. They must be so incorporated into one’s being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never conclude anything inwardly about these truths.

-- Rudolf Steiner



whether or not this altering of the soul by one's "own will-power," this lifting oneself by one's bootstraps, is a metaphysical possibility is against the point. the power of self-discipline, in both the effects and process, is a remarkable thing. there is also, as is obvious here in steiner's last statement, an incredible amount of faith that is required that these things will come with time. but such is the importance of the means, the process, even sometimes over the ends.

"Teaching is only demonstrating

that it is possible. Learning is

making it possible for yourself."

-- Paulo Coelho

「指導というのはなにかの可能性を

学習者に示すことだ。そういう可能性から

できるようになれる行為は、学ぶといわれている。」

－パウロ・コエーリョ

(my translation)