Godly Love and Godly Hate

God the Unconditional Lover is another nonexistent deity. Many non-thinkers trying to push their own social agenda again try to stop rational thought by invoking emotional responses with stupid questions like "what would Jesus do?" as though the answer is invariably "hug the ax murderer a little tighter." Hogwash. "When we love we're inviting the Spirit of God into our souls and when we hate we're expelling His Spirit from us." As a generalization, wrong.

Love does not equal good and hate does not equal bad. If our culture can convince us that love defines good (godly, righteous, virtuous, etc.) and then our culture redefines love (can we say 'hippie') then our culture has successfully blinded us from our fundamental understanding of what is good and why. And life becomes an aimless journey without meaning and without a destination (can we say 'Albert Camus').

David Call has summarized the skewed perspective as the preaching of Jesus, love and service. Any good principle out of context becomes a dangerous one. You start reasoning in reverse; your conclusions become your premises and when you find the original premises to be inconsistent (due to incorrect perspective) you choose to stop thinking. For instance, service is good only insofar as it increases the well-being and happiness of the doer of the service. The purpose, or final cause, of the service is to increase the happiness of the doer. The other good effects of acting on good principles are collateral damage. But if this perspective were lost and we started to believe service were good, period, then we would find ourselves serving 18 hours per day and still not feeling like we were doing enough; we would serve ourselves into perpetual misery. And the word 'good' has lost all relevant meaning to the individual.

In all true principles, the context that makes the principles true is that of primacy. The self has primacy over others. Reason has primacy over faith. Reality has primacy over God. Happiness has primacy over duty. And so on. Primacy doesn't mean that one is better than the other or anything like that. It simply means that one principle is dependent on another. The house of truth is a house of order. Primacy connects all true principles in a web of truth that shows how true principles are true and helps us understand the applications of true principles to ourselves.

God is love. As a generalization, false. If that were true in general, there would not be two separate words for the one concept. God and love are two words manifesting two different entities. In a particular and specific context, such as the one implied by John, saying God is love sheds light on both of the principles involved, love expands our understanding of God, and God expands our understanding of love. Context is obviously important, else it would be a circular and meaningless mental exercise like standing in a bucket and trying to lift the bucket.

God is hate. This is also true in some circumstances. God abhors unhappiness and misery. God hates falsehoods. We should be preaching godly hatred as much as we preach godly love. In a more generalized form, they are one and the same idea. Like the north pole of a magnet surely must always attract all magnetic south poles and repel all magnetic north poles, the nature of God is such that all principles of goodness, joy, honor, integrity and such are attracted to him and all principles of falsehood, misery, cowardice, compulsion, and so on are repelled from him. There are no magnetic north poles that attract south poles but do not repel north poles or vice versa. Same with godly love and godly hate. They are two sides of the same coin.

Rationality of Revelation

Traditionally there have been two separate approaches to learning truth and the two camps supporting each approach have been at odds. Truth can be learned by the scientific method. Observations are made, data reflecting the observations is recorded, hypotheses are formed to predict patterns in observation and experiments are executed to support or disprove a hypothesis. Some people claim this is the only way to discover truth.

The crowd usually associated with religion espouses the discovery of truth by revelation. This is that truth, or knowledge about reality, can be revealed to us by an external influence or intelligence. Some philosophers have tried to argue that ultimate reality is something beyond what we can now perceive with our senses and that seeking this ultimate reality should be our life pursuit. What good is reality if it is other than what we can perceive through our senses at any particular moment? What good is it to label anything else reality?

The idea of revelation has been muddled through so many strange concepts and mystical thinkers through the ages that we must identify what we are talking about when we speak of revelation. Revelation is not communion with the all-being, or being 'at one' with the universe or anything else. Eternalism is characteristically individualistic. Man's progress and development are his own responsibility and the individual must make the choice to involve or collaborate with others when he sees that it is for his ultimate benefit and happiness to do so. Reality has no meaning in an absolute sense. Reality for an individual is all that we can identify and talk about; reality is what an individual perceives through his senses.

Remember faith must be rational; that is, there must be a reason for believing what we have faith in. Each truth learned by the scientific method is like a distinct point of a math function. Generally, the more points we know for a math function the better we understand the function as a whole. Revelation can help us extrapolate on distinct points of knowledge to see a continuous, differentiable function. Revelation fills in the gaps.

David Hume was a supposedly brilliant philosopher for pointing out that just because we know that a specific cause has yielded a specific effect ten out of ten times, or a million out of a million times, we have no basis for believing that that same cause will produce the same effect in the future. Just because I have burned my hand each of the ten times I've put my hand on a stove does not give me a basis for believing that I would burn my hand again if I put it on the stove again. Clearly life would not have continued to exist if this were the natural progression of thought. Living creatures would have no survival instinct. The law of causality cannot be proven to exist by experiment, but is rather revealed to intelligent beings. Putting your hand on the stove again will cause it to burn, again. This is a very rational revelation. And all people who have lived longer than two hours have done so because they have learned at least this one revealed truth.

Revelation can be described in many different ways. It works on an intuitive level. An idea forms in the mind and it feels good. It feels consistent with the other truths and beliefs of the individual. The idea does not create any cognitive dissonance; there is nothing bothering you about the new idea on any conscious or subconscious level. It is not possible to think about every truth you know to check for consistency with this new idea, so this intuitive leap is necessary.

Revelation and the scientific method bring the diligent searcher to the same truth in the same way that y=2x+1 and (0,1);(1,3) describe the same line. Both are necessary and both are rational. One cannot learn truth through one medium without simultaneously learning truth through the other. It is counterproductive to try to separate the two.

Worth of Life

Sanctity of life. The phrase is designed to stop rational thought by inciting an emotional response. Most words with religious undertones are this way nowadays. It's really very sad. If rational beings were intended to devote an inordinate amount of thought to anything I would think that it would be the eternal, fundamental, the driving forces of everything; the "what matters most." The real God would invite nothing more vigorously than intelligent beings questioning who he is and what he is like. For the subsequent investigation would reveal the principles of godliness and happiness. What could be more important, of more worth to our and his happiness, than this knowledge? Implementation is just one simple, rational step away from knowledge.

Sanctity is a word pertaining to holiness or godliness. What could be more incumbent on us to question? So if the sanctity of life is that part of life pertaining to godliness, this investigation becomes a natural follow-up to the nature of God.

The question is related to another one that's been addressed by philosophers since Plato. The dignity of man. My co-author on this blog has summed up Plato's dignity of man: man's dignity at birth lies in his potential to become as God is; man's dignity at death is his having done so. These are very natural and deliciously simple conclusions based on our already-laid philosophical foundation. Man is on a quest for progression. The dignity of man is derived from having developed his character and abilities through the honor of work of the mind and hands to produce, create and make better his condition. The dignity of man comes from having realized his potential to become more like God.

The sanctity, or godliness, of life then is the potential that rests within each human soul to CHOOSE to become more like God, to choose to develop himself, to choose to better his eternal state. The sanctity of life is derived from the choices made by that life. If the person chooses to develop and realize the godly potential, he is making his life sacred. If he chooses to debase himself and regress to the status of beast or lower, he forfeits what could have made his life sacred. Life is not sacred because it is life; life is sacred because that life chooses to make itself sacred.

Cowards that choose to try to induce fear and terror by shooting people in the back shame themselves and are not worth enough to drink the urine of honorable people. I really have no idea what is being talked about when we try to apply 'constitutional rights' or 'human rights' to terrorists. They are not citizens, and they have chosen to not be people in any more than the biological sense. Just as a person would not think twice before using disinfectant to destroy the lives of all bacteria, viruses, parasites and all creatures that we know are bent on our pain, illness and destruction if given the chance; I believe any more complex life form that chooses to put itself in the same category is worthy of the same. Death is not the ultimate evil; states of unhappiness and fear are.

The Bible, by itself, is Crap

I'm really sick of people who cling to the Bible. Why do people like the Bible? It sucks. I know, I've read it. Cover to cover. That's just in English. I've read many parts of it in another language too. And I've studied enough Greek and Hebrew to know that we have no business extrapolating on English words to derive nonexistent meanings from the book. Bottom line, if the Bible is your exclusive guide then you are lost.

Asking a typical Christian about the Bible is almost universally pointless. It usually goes something like this: "Why do you believe in the Bible? Because it's the word of God. How do you know it's the word of God? Because the Bible says so." The conversation usually ends about there. How could it go on?

The most frustrating type of people are those that claim to live by the Bible, have never read more than disjoint stories in it, have never studied historical contexts for the stories, and exclusively look for justification for their already-made opinions within the Bible. Then they stop searching. They stop thinking. I mean the Bible agrees with me so I'm right, right? What?

People don't know or care about the history, formation, or specific authorship of the book. Interesting since these same people claim its infallible and universally applicable. How can you possibly know that and not know a wretched thing about the book? Who wrote it? Who compiled it? Why did they put this in and leave this out? What was on the original manuscripts? What language nuances were lost through the three or four translations to get to this thing I'm holding in my hand? What are we to learn about the love of God from the story of Lot's daughters raping Lot? Or Judah having a kid with his daughter-in-law whom he thought was merely a whore? The whole book is screwed up and makes no sense out of context. The parts that seem to make sense really mean something else in their proper context. So once again, the Bible is messed up and no good by itself.

If you can't tell, people who try to use the Bible as their foundation for authoritative assertions are my pet peeve. I think they're blind, ignorant and lazy. They're certainly not eternalists. I would never say that eternalists do not believe in revelation or inspiration because we certainly do. The God we have been discussing would certainly love for us to know about him and about everything that is true. But those who refuse to seek cannot find and those who refuse to see, won't. If you believe that God has ever wanted to speak to man then he must now want to speak to man. Any other God would be inconsistent and therefore not God. Stop believing in your Easter bunny God.

If it's possible for God's words to have been received and recorded before, then it must have been possible for other people who sought God's words and must still be possible. In short, if the Bible was originally inspired by God then there must be other scripture in existence that supports and explains it. If the Bible was about God's dealings with ancient people then let's search for a record of God's dealings with his people now in our global culture.

Do not attempt to limit God with your stupidity. See things for what they are. Look for what is missing. Always ask questions. Do not perpetuate irrational and willful ignorance that masquerades so universally as 'faith.' Faith is always rational, always logical and always leads to greater knowledge, power and happiness. Do not be scared of heresy, blasphemy, or any sort of thought-crime. The fear is blasphemous.

The Face without Guilt or Fear or Shame

It's a commonly perpetuated idea that politics corrupts even good people. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and such. For some reason the downfall of especially good people are their imperfections, their mistakes that are common to all men. To be precise, the fear of other people knowing about these mistakes compels them to things they would not otherwise do.

The only way that man can truly have full causal efficacy on his surroundings is by having complete confidence in himself. Confidence is faith and faith is confidence. The man with vision has no need to fear. The man who knows who he is and who he is becoming has no need to feel shame. The man who acts for his own happiness by systematically striving to be more upstanding and have more integrity has no need for guilt. The man who knows and likes who he is and who he is becoming is the only truly confident man, a man with full faith in himself. This man need never feel guilt or fear or shame but only move forward to be more the man he wants to be.

The inherent danger of guilt, fear and shame is the power it grants others over you. No person can afford to give such power to anyone else. All make mistakes; if you allow yourself to feel ashamed for a mistake that you have already learned from your personal progress is stalled while you leave yourself open for external extortion or internal self-deprecation which will destroy your vision of who you are and where you were going. It can take a long time to recover from guilt or fear or shame. Your recovery will be painful and it will mean lost time. Lost time to learn new things, lost time to further develop your character and lost time to be a force of positive influence, a force for truth in your environment.

The person without guilt or shame or fear is one that is steadfast and immovable. He is an anchor to those around him. He chooses to make himself invulnerable to external forces other than what he chooses to allow to affect him. He only allows positive influence to affect him, influences that enrich his own life and increase his personal happiness. By being this steadfast anchor he grants an example for others trying to gain a vision of who they can be. He stands as a light to those trying to recover from guilt, fear or shame. He chooses to be a positive force to act, create and produce; to form his environment according to his ever-increasing vision. Only the man without guilt or fear or shame can be happy without reservation.

Merit and Chivalry

Enough of the framework of eternalism has been laid out so that we can begin to build the philosophy in any direction. A philosophy is only as good as it can be practically applied to one's life for the increase of his own individual happiness. This was the basis for the assumptions made about the primacy of reality. The philosophy of truth/reality expounds on a rational process for evaluating our methods for understanding and dealing with our environment, detecting inconsistency, identifying the necessary correction and executing it.

All cultures are in constant flux. Most of what some call "general opinion" does not make sense and is incredibly inconsistent. An example fresh on my mind is Mother Teresa. Many people mentally equate Mother Teresa with the personification of goodness. Yet these same people cannot name one specific thing she has done, do not know anything about her personal life or beliefs, and do not know why they think she was such a good person. It's a groundless belief. "The masses think it and so I think it" is never satisfactory for an eternalist.

During our cultural flux in America we have two incompatible ideas that are simultaneously extolled by the 'cultured': feminism and chivalry. Let's examine them both and see what the ideas are that are consistent with truth and individual happiness.

Feminism originally was, and still in its true form is, a recognition of the equality of the potential of the minds of men and women. This is consistent with the eternalist idea of Merit. A man or woman is only what they make of themselves. If a person wants to be a great scientist then they do those things that will make them a great scientist. Same for a great athlete, engineer, doctor, judge or anything else. If a person wants to be respected then he must act respectably. The self has primacy over circumstances. The self will be a controller of his circumstances. We will not accept any idea or image that our environment attempts to project on to us.

A man is only worth what he makes himself worth. I greatly value the lives of my family and friends because they have chosen to do those things that make them of great value to me. The life of any of my sisters is of astronomically greater value to me than some drunkard bum on the street or even a stranger. If I had power to control a situation in such a way that my options were limited to choosing to allow my sister to die or a bum, the bum would die. Between my sister and 5000 strangers, I choose my sister to live. Between myself and my sister, I choose my sister to live. These are the only choices that would be in harmony with a happy life after the choice. Death is not the ultimate evil; unhappiness is.

Chivalry, as practiced by many, is wholly incompatible with any self-respecting life philosophy. I will hold this door open for you precisely and only because I have male genitalia and you have female. This is insulting to both parties. You are what you have made yourself. I will hold the door open for you because you are a respectable human being. I would hope that you would esteem me enough to treat me likewise; but if not I'm content to be who I am and will not allow an unfounded opinion of me to influence what I think of myself. For so many people chivalry is very ostentatiously displayed by young men to young women, as a wild peacock trying to attract a mate with his brilliantly colored feathers. Then after a man and woman marry there is no need for such display again. This seems opposite of rational behavior. As I get to know and respect a person more and more, I treat them better and better because they have merited that respect and courteous behavior. Following through with this philosophy, a married man and woman would treat each other best of all other men and women. They have come to the point where they know each other best and respect and admire each other more than any other. They have each merited the best feelings and emotional responses from each other.

Man is a mover and a doer; a creator and a producer. If you want to be happy then merit what you want and become who you want to be.

What The Hell Are You Doing and Why?

There are so many stupid questions with flawed premises and therefore stupid conclusions masquerading around as 'deep' nowadays. One is especially poignant in my mind today. I was in a class this morning that was discussing Dante's Purgatorio and it is said, "O human race! If you knew everything, no need for Mary to have borne a son." Hmmm.... It might be a natural human inclination to react immediately and emotionally to any theologically charged statement. So you can imagine the kind of discussion that would have ensued. It should seem obvious that before reacting to this kind of statement we need to ask what the premises of this statement are. So... why did Mary have to bear a son? Only after an answer is proferred for such a question we can analyze the validity of the statement.

All right so that aside, here's the related stupid question: Are you saved? It's so ridiculous that there's no way to respond. It's like walking up to a stranger on the street and asking "Is he guilty as charged?" Who? What are we talking about? And most importantly, why should I give a damn?

It seems as though many people try to separate religion from all else in their mind, beliefs, behavior, and so on thereby creating two personalities and constant cognitive disonnance. Someone may say consciously or unconsciously, "I believe in the scientific method Monday through Saturday but on Sunday I believe I'm drinking the blood of a 2000 year old god who is now everywhere and nowhere." Ever wonder why you feel weighed down and stressed? You suffer from the burden of inconsistency. You have made two mutually incompatible assumptions about reality and your mind can't resolve it: it is your mind verses reality and reality is winning. Reality always wins.

Stop fighting yourself. There is no truth that is inconsistent with any other truth. Truth is real. Anything that is real, must be real. By definition. There is nothing more real than what you can experientially know for yourself to be real. Do not ever assume that any hearsay is more real than your experiences. If saved means happy then yes I want to be happy. If saved means strumming a harp and doing nothing forever with your jackass of a God who does that then no, I surely do not ever under any circumstances want to be saved. What you call hell I venture to guess will be a more happy place. I know it'll be more interesting. Check your premises.