Da Vinci's is the best known, but I like this depiction better.
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The longer this blog goes on, the less motivated I am to convince anyone of anything.
I’m all for sharing my ideas and assumptions or expounding on the ideas and assumptions of others, and I welcome comments that agree or disagree with all of that; however, I have become utterly uninterested in trying to convince anyone of the rightness or wrongness of my stated positions, opinions, beliefs, notions, or assumptions, not out of indifference or conceit but from my recent realization that the time for convincing anyone of anything has passed. Once again, this does not entail that I refuse to consider disagreements, new information, or other points of view, only that I do not want anyone to convince me. I do consider most of what people share here. It often helps me to expand my understanding or re-examine whatever idea I have shared. At the same time, I feel no desire to wade into drawn-out comment exchanges that hope to convince me. Conversely, I feel no impetus to hammer my thoughts into anyone else’s head. The etymology of convince may help shed some light on my aversion to convincing anyone of anything in this time and place. The word stems from the Latin con, meaning with, and vincere, to conquer. Thus, convincing is all about decisively overcoming and defeating someone else in an argument, to firmly persuade by argument, usually with the support of some kind of evidence. At its root, convince is a bellicose, fighting word, but convincing is not the kind of fight I want to have with anyone here and now. Dr. Charlton has written extensively on the primacy of assumptions, particularly metaphysical assumptions, and how those — not experience, not education, not facts, not evidence — fundamentally shape our relationship with the world. Assumptions are essentially unprovable beliefs, and it is these unprovable beliefs that provide the foundation for everything else a person accepts as real or unreal. And, yes, this extends well into the provable stuff, too. I don’t find the old argument-battle framework appealing anymore because my self-declared argument-opponents cannot grasp that we are on entirely different battlefields with no hope of meaningful engagement. The best anyone can hope to do now is to share ideas and assumptions unobtrusively and peaceably. Whoever wants to consider the ideas and assumptions will consider them, not by being overcome or conquered by decisive arguments but by thinking more deeply about his own ideas and assumptions... ...which is exactly what everyone should be doing in this time and place instead of yearning to conquer or be conquered with arguments. All I can say is I'm glad there was no Internet when I was a kid. Adding on to yesterday’s post contra the idea that evil is the product of human free will — a free will that God created into humans so that they could be “free” to choose good rather than simply being created good and having no choice in the matter — it occurred to me that if evil truly is the product of free will, then free will has no place in Heaven.
Since Heaven is without evil, entropy, or death, no force or motivation that could choose or produce evil, entropy, or death could enter Heaven. In other words, those desiring to Heaven would have to check their God-given, God-created free will at the gates because it will no longer be necessary. Without that free will, resurrected man would have no choice but to be good, which takes us back to square one. If God is good, why does he permit evil in mortal life but not resurrected life? Why bother with the whole free will journey in mortal life if that gift of God’s love and goodness must be checked at the door before entering Heaven? Why didn’t just God place us in Heaven to begin with? Because he wanted us to choose goodness and eternal life over evil and death. Okay, but in the end, we will have to surrender free will because that, apparently, is where the source of all evil lies. Something else must take the place of free will. God will have to grant us another kind of freedom in Heaven. Now, I suppose we could argue that free will in mortal life builds up to some greater, eternal freedom we will gain access to in Heaven, but if this is indeed the case, it seems like a roundabout way of going about things. Unless of course, freedom in mortal life extends far beyond a lifetime’s worth of free will choices. Freedom is not and cannot be necessity. Necessity is imposed externally. If freedom is externally imposed, it is not truly freedom. If God imposed free will upon us, that free will is not freedom but necessity. Under free will, we have no choice but to choose! Moreover, we are held completely accountable for the “products” of these necessary choices. That doesn’t sound very free. It sounds positively burdensome. Free will cannot be true spiritual freedom. If it were, it would have a place in Heaven, but it cannot because it is cited as the source of all evil. No...freedom, true spiritual freedom, must be something other than free will. It cannot reside in the realm of necessity. It cannot be something God gifts us when we begin mortal life. For freedom to be free, it must be outside of God, not something God creates. It must be something inherent in our being; something we bring into Creation; something God has little or no control over. It must also be capable of good and evil choices, but its ultimate purpose must exist far beyond the good-evil choice paradigm. Unlike free will, true spiritual freedom is not something we will have to surrender in Heaven. On the contrary, true spiritual freedom is one of the overarching reasons for Heaven. Having said all of that, I sense that it is extremely difficult to achieve true spiritual freedom in mortal life, at least on a consistent and permanent basis, and I sometimes wonder if we are even meant to attain such freedom in mortal life, again on a consistent, permanent basis. I sometimes think of freedom in the same way I think about sin. The flesh may be weak — we may not be able to rise above the free will choice level of freedom — but the spirit must be willing to aspire to a kind of freedom that transcends free will choosing. What I mean is that we must at least become aware of what true spiritual freedom is and work toward that in some manner, however intermittent and temporary our success may be. I think this is a better way of expressing freedom than using our "free will" to choose among predetermined, externally imposed choices. Also, as with sin, I think we should acknowledge whenever we fall short of using our innate freedom and fall back on "mere free will" instead of lauding our successful use of free will as some sort of major spiritual accomplishment that is guaranteed to reap eternal rewards. I sense that true spiritual freedom -- willing and creative alignment with God's purposes where we also add something to Creation, something God could not have added on his own -- is our state in Heaven. I say this because I can't imagine free will having any place in Heaven. Note: This post was sparked by a comment exchange with Laeth on yesterday's post. after the question mark comes the answer john.
More thought-provoking aphorisms by Laeth available here. Mostly irrelevant preface: When I was a kid, I used to chuckle at the notion that the United States was a politically free country because it granted its citizens the right to choose between two political parties, as opposed to the Soviet Union which offered only one real choice.
Many Christians continue to fall into the trap of defining evil as a “product” of the free will God granted or created into humanity — out of nothing, of course. This immediately begs the following question — if God knew man might use free will for evil, then why did He equip man with “free will?” Simple — because He did not wish to make man a slave of good, an automaton incapable of choosing anything but good. He wanted man to choose good over evil freely and willingly because -- morality. You see if God had not created free will — a doctrine that essentially boils down to being able to choose between good and evil — then there would be no morality. Nor spirituality. Nor anything beyond the physical/material. The problem with the doctrine of free will is simple – it is not about freedom at all. Free will is just an algorithm. If God grants man free will, then whatever freedom resides within it emanates from God, not man. Secondly, God determines the scope and range of choice to which free will may be applied. On the one side is the good choice to abide by God’s law and commands. On the other side, rejecting this law and embracing evil. Thus, the free will choice essentially boils down to obeying God’s law and commands . . . or else. Free will enslaves man to the necessity of choice. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound very moral or spiritual. Accountability is another problem with free will. The free will doctrine makes man accountable for his choices between good and evil within the context of God’s laws and commands. It places the onus of such choices on man while simultaneously exempting God from all accountability. The doctrine of free will provides man the “freedom” to be the offender while simultaneously relieving God of all responsibility for evil choices. Thus, man must own his choice for evil, but God is under no obligation to own His choice for giving man the power to choose. Man’s free will choice to be a transgressor of divine law also justifies God’s role as a punisher of divine law transgressions. The free will doctrine is God adopting a “my way or the highway” framework of freedom. Use the free will I provided to do what I command, and all will be well. Use the free will I provided to reject My commands, and all will be lost. Seen this way, the free will choice to obey God’s law and command becomes a matter of necessity. Man needs to choose the good option God has provided or face the consequences. The need to choose the Good – this necessity inherent within the free will choice – does not emanate from within man but is externally imposed by God. As such, it does little more than ask a man to adhere to or fulfill a given law or command, leaving no space for creativity or a creative act. The free will doctrine reduces man to a mere instrument in the fulfillment of God’s law. It lacks all spiritual dynamism and ultimately relegates freedom to the level of submission. True spiritual freedom does not reside within the framework of the free will doctrine. True spiritual freedom is not about choosing between good and evil but knowing what constitutes authentic creative alignment and harmony with God and Creation. True spiritual freedom can only exist if freedom is uncreated — if the freedom and agency of Beings in Creation are not of God. God is good because He has mastered freedom. God no longer needs to choose between good and evil. God knows what He must do and does it. Men and other Beings are capable of evil because they have not or refuse to master their freedom. True spiritual freedom liberates from the necessity of having to choose. Spiritual freedom is not about agonizing over externally imposed good and evil choices; it is about internally/spiritually knowing what good is and doing/thinking that. The need to choose never enters the picture. Freedom is not and cannot be reduced to the free will doctrine of merely choosing between external, given choices. If it is, it becomes an enslaving force — a burden that diminishes man to a level of “submitting to Good,” albeit with some limited say. Man is free when he doesn’t have to choose -- when he aligns with God and Creation. How does he know that what he is thinking and doing is good? When he applies his freedom to loving God, and it brings forth creativity. Note: This post is basically just a rehashing of ideas I have written about many times on this blog. This is basically another take on a phenomenon Dr. Charlton has noted many times on his blog.
The vast majority of people in the West remain seemingly oblivious to the increasing and accelerating destruction occurring all around them. Whenever they do sense it, they are quick to downplay it, contextualize it, or rationalize it as anything but actual destruction. You could chalk this up to some innate optimism or live-for-the-day mentality, but the extent of perceptible destruction in Western societies challenges such notions. I posit that modern Westerners cannot see Sorath for the Ahrimans. People are so wrapped up in the details and trivialities of what is unfolding that they cannot perceive, let alone grasp or accept, the situation as a whole. The source of the details and trivialities is Ahriman — the demon of bureaucracy possessing virtually all Western governments, companies, institutions, organizations, and committees. All aspects of this Ahrimanic bureaucracy now actively seek and implement programs of destruction; however, the masses tolerate the destruction precisely because it is being administered via impersonal bureaucratic programs. Since impersonal bureaucratic programs have become the lifeblood of what people perceive Western civilization as, they cannot accept that such programs would actively seek to destroy on a grand, civilizational scale, even when confronted by stark “evidence” of such destruction. As long as Ahriman is, Sorath cannot be. Such appears to be the reigning rationalization among the masses. Short answer — non-Omni God and pluralism.
I arrived at this conclusion after rereading the introduction to Berdyaev’s seminal work, The Meaning of the Creative Act, in which Berdyaev outlines the following: I know that I may be accused of a basic contradiction that tears apart all my sense of the world, all my world outlook. I shall be accused of the contradiction of combining an extreme religious dualism with an extreme religious monism. I accept such attacks in advance. The basic contradiction Berdyaev mentions is the demarcation line of virtually all Christian thinking. Is everything of God or are only some parts of God? However, this supposed line of demarcation is illusory. The Trinity tempers extreme religious monism in Christianity — an extreme sense of the oneness of reality. Nevertheless, Trinitarianism is still a form of monism, and it inevitably incorporates some aspects of dualism — a division of reality into two distinct parts — into its framework. In this sense, Berdyaev’s basic contradiction essentially serves as the foundation of most Christian thinking. I confess an almost Manichean dualism. So be it. “The world” is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, and overcome it completely: the world must be consumed; it is the nature Ahriman. Freedom from the world is the pathos of this book. There is an objective source of evil against which we must wage a heroic war. The necessity of the given world and the given world are of Ahriman. Berdyaev addresses the weakness of all Christian monism in the passage above. If God has indeed created everything and everything is essentially of God, then God is also the source of evil. Dualism solves this problem by separating light from darkness, which, on the surface, appears a useful approach to dealing with everything that cannot, by its very nature, be of God. If evil is not of God, then it has its own existence and must be overcome. Over and against this stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love life in the Pleroma. And I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine by its very nature. Man is, by his nature, divine. The world process is self-revelation of Divinity, it is taking place within Divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. There is no dualism of divine and extra-divine nature, of God’s absolute transcendence of the world and man. I am entirely conscious of this antinomy of dualism and monism, and I accept it as insurmountable in consciousness and inevitable in religious life. Religious consciousness is essentially antinomic. In our consciousness, there is no escape from the eternal antinomy of transcendent and immanent, of dualism and monism. Constructing one’s metaphysical assumptions — one’s deepest beliefs about the nature of reality — upon two contradictory principles or conclusions while accepting both as true hardly seems like a sound foundation upon which to base one’s religious thinking, yet this is exactly what Berdyaev admits to doing, primarily because he cannot conceive of any other option. He is hardly alone. Virtually all Christian thinking though the ages has amounted to little more than perpetual ping-pong between the antinomy of dualism and monism, with the underlying understanding that religious consciousness must accept the antimony for the simple reason that monism and dualism can both be obtained by correct reasoning. Since both can be reasoned correctly, neither is necessarily false. Since neither is necessarily false, both are true — even though they blatantly contradict in every imaginable way. This antinomy cannot be abolished, neither in conscience nor in reason, but in religious life, in the depth of religious experience itself. I agree with Berdyaev here. Only religious experience can abolish the antinomy of monism and dualism, and this religious experience is pluralism and the existence of a non-Omni God. Some of Berdyaev’s radical assumptions pointed in that direction, but for reasons I cannot understand, Berdyaev just could not take the pluralist plunge. I find this odd because pluralism would have provided a more than adequate “home” for nearly all of Berdyaev’s radical ideas, including:
and so forth. I note the above because I sense that the antimony of monism and dualism within Christian thinking has been stretched to its limits and is coming to an end. Christians who can find no escape from the eternal antinomy of transcendent and immanent, of dualism and monism in their religious experience will find it increasingly more difficult to remain Christian. The saying, “The Magyar is much too lazy to be bored,” is worth thinking about. Only the most subtle and active animals are capable of boredom. – A theme for a great poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.
The above ranks among my favorite Nietzsche aphorisms, and living in Hungary for nearly a decade has only increased my fondness for it. I suppose it has much to do with my Hungarian cultural background — not my ethnic background, though, which is German, but Nietzsche was also German, so there is that. Although the average Hungarian is far too lazy to be bored, I have never thought of God as lazy. Quite the opposite. I believe God remained active even on the seventh day — albeit in a subtle way. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that God is capable of boredom, at least when it comes to Man. He is waiting for us to answer His call to creativity, and I can’t help but imagine the ennui he experiences when we provide Him with anything and everything but an answer to that call. We are too spiritually lazy to feel bored. Now that is worth thinking about. It could also serve as theme for a great poet. What kind of world will we leave our children?
Many proclaim this to be the most pressing question of this time and place. Some counter this question with another. The most pressing question is not what kind of world we will leave our children but what kind of children we will leave the world. Both miss the mark. The question should be more directed towards the kind of children we will leave for eternity. Yet even that falls short because it neglects to mention that our children will have a tremendous say in whatever we leave them with. We could leave them an ideal world, and they could still seek death. Or we could leave them hell, and they could still seek Heaven. Of course, we all long to leave them the best possible world in which to commit to Heaven, but the best possible world cannot guarantee that commitment. Nor can the worst possible world. Ultimately, the world we leave them is far less significant than we vehemently assume. Such is the nature of freedom. We must believe that God loves our children even more than we do and will always leave paths to salvation open to them regardless of the world we leave them. And we must believe that our children will recognize these paths and commit to them. Such is the nature of faith. |
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March 2024
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