I’m sorry it’s been so long since I posted.  I broke my laptop’s LCD and it took exactly one million years for me to get it back from the shop.

So, after that unfortunate hiatus, and now that we all are a little older and closer to death….

After over a year’s worth of thinking and writing (not just on this blog…you should see the piles of notebooks; I write almost everything freehand first because, well, I actually LIKE writing, as in the act of it) I have finally concluded what the root of my philosophy is.  In one sentence, all of my views can be boiled down to a singular idea, so simple that I’m kicking myself for not realizing it sooner.  I could have saved myself a lot of literal headaches by just proceeding from what I realize is the ONLY rational truth to ALL of existence, and I mean universally.  Grasp this, and you have the foundation to explain just about anything…if not actually everything.

Hubris?  Well…you can judge for yourself, fellow thinkers.  We all have brains after all, and they can lead us to amazing places if we let them.  Assuming, of course, we refuse to put them on the head of the horse before which dangles the carrot of mystic despotism.  Otherwise known here as Reformed Theology, and its chummy wicked stepsister, Calvinism.

So, here is the cornerstone of rational TRUTH (which is the only kind that matters):  The tangible, visceral, and actual is always and only the source of the abstract. 

Or, put another way:  Objects are the source for all law, natural, metaphysical, or otherwise, which are used to qualitatively and quantitatively define them. 

The egg always comes before the chicken, I suppose you I might say, meaning there must be a real SEED before the product of the seed can be observed.  And I also say, grasp this truth and you are perpetually pointed north.  But as soon as you concede the opposite, which is precisely what every false idea and despotic religion and political school of thought does, that abstract laws are the SOURCE for the objects which exist according to them (which is actually a total lie; an impossible logical fallacy, for law can only be descriptive and predictive, never proactive…that is, without first the object, there can be no law or other abstraction by which to describe its existence.  There must be something before you can say something about it).

This is obvious logic that always seems to elude the smartest and brightest of our theologians, philosophers, and scientists.  It is why the lie of determinism in any form rules the metaphysical and physical day and night, and why even rank atheist scientists are some of the worst mystic shamans around.

Their determinism, interestingly enough and as an aside, is always based on the idea that “if you were God, you could utterly know just how everything would act by the very laws we, the eggheads, have so astutely discovered and quantified by the utterly abstract concept of mathematics; and these mathematics prove that YOU are merely a function of  this LAW…you see the law IS you; YOU are the abstraction, and as such there is nothing that is not utterly knowable, if you have the capacity to know it”.

Funny how the very obviously reply, “But we are not God, and so there will always be a lot of stuff going on that we cannot possibly predict” is never given anything other than a wave of the hand and practical lip service.  The functional outcome of this fact IS GOING to be a random existence of some sort ALL the time.  To try to live in a world where nothing is random and yet it always WILL be is a psychological mind-f**k that I just don’t care to live with every day.  It is almost as bad as Calvinism.  I choose to deny determinism.  And it’s the better choice, trust me.

The other problem is that “If you were God, you could know what WILL be”, is a metaphysical ditch, because by definition the way God knows is NOT by predicting, but by being everywhere at every time (or, God is in all space time, for our physicists), thus He “knows” because He DOES it, not because He made a law.

Thus, if natural law truly determined all of reality, then it could have nothing to do with God, for any mind able to grasp the concept of law so utterly and universally from now unto eternity has absolutely no use for it.  It would be redundant for God to create law in order to determine the path of all Creation.  He wouldn’t need to determine it by law.  He would simply circumvent determinism and just make it that way at every instant.  He would be, as R.C. Sproul declares, in perfect control of each and every molecule.  That’s NOT determinism.  That’s BEING Creation.  And thus, by definition, natural law isn’t law at all.  It’s an illusion.  A lie.  But even more salient, it is impossible that Creation is created by God so that God can BE Creation.  God is utterly complete, of course, in Himself, and so, if God needs Creation in order to possess it, He’s not God.  And if He is God, He would never create a separate thing for the sole purpose of BEING that thing.  He would never bother to create that thing the first place.  Thus, if He created anything, it can only be so that it can exist to be ITSELF, apart from God.  And this means that that which is Created, namely objects–real THINGS–must act for themselves.  And THIS is where any mathematical “laws” are born:  from things doing for themselves, whether conscious or unconscious things.  And if that is the case, then determinism must be false, for nothing existing by doing what it does of itself can be determined by anything other that IT, and that is not determinism.  That is free will; the freedom of Creation to exist and to be its own thing, or things.  Like, you can’t have a rock if a rock isn’t a rock.  Meaning, if a rock is functionally some LAW, then we’d have no rocks because the abstraction of the “law of rock” (I like the way that sounds) is absolute by definition (all abstractions are absolute, by the way).  Logically, you cannot add a rock to the law of rock because, of the two, the law of rock is the absolute perfect essence.  The rock itself is a dualistic thing:  rock/not rock.  The law of rock is only this:  rock.  Rock is the beginning and end of itself, to add anything else voids the truth of the law, and reduces it to a mere figment of man’s consciousness.  But of course this is precisely what it is, and so, logically, you have to have a rock before you can have the “law which begets rocks”.  You can’t have a law which begets rocks without first a rock.  This is a fact.  So…all you scientists believe what you want.  But stop bringing God into it.  I know you love looking smart…so, with that in mind, you may want to fear a little more treading into the metaphysics side of the pool.  You aren’t wired for this kind of thinking.  Sorry.

Anyhow, the point is that even those who claim to be “objective” must at some point concede that contradiction forms the core of their assumptions, no matter how much math they throw at the blackboard.  And that contradiction is that IF all is determined because LAW guides and creates the reality that IS objects, then no one can truly “know” anything, discover anything, predict anything, or declare any kind of truth.  All reality is an illusion.  And so, how can you really argue anything?

You can’t.  So to say that you can KNOW that all life and creation is determined for any reason is a categorical contradiction in terms. The fact that you can know anything must be proof that determinism is false.  Knowing is based on reality, and if all is determined, then all is an abstraction.  Your very “knowing” of this or that  is an idea of about as much density and substance as evaporating dew, because your very mind is merely the abstract product of an abstract “law”.

But again…rational metaphysics is of no more use to the sciences, it seems, as it is to Calvinism.  And this?  Is rather depressing.  Even our smartest aren’t smart enough to realize that according to their own philosophy, their “smarts” have nothing to do with them, or you, or me…because there is no them or you or me.  It is nihilism, plain and simple.  Does that help you sleep?  Our brightest scientists in the world have a functional world-view of “everything is meaningless and existence is merely evading the point”.

Yeah.  Me neither.  These are the men who design atomic bombs.  Gross me out.

My philosophical ideas are in stark contrast to this.  For the determinists, all reality…that is, all that is observable by the senses is really the illusion.  The “laws” or the “doctrines” are the objective force behind the illusion of life.  I deny this.  All truth, meaning, law, and doctrine, can only be a function of what is observable to the human senses.  What can be seen, touched, felt…etc (why Jesus spent so much time convincing people that He had the authority to forgive sins by doing SIGNS that people could touch and observe).  That is how we know what and all we know.  Nothing is determined because abstractions are NOT REAL.  They are merely ways of qualifying or quantifying those REAL things that we observe exist; and, specifically, how they move.  To say that some law determined an outcome of an object is to declare the object to be an extension of the abstract.  The arm of the invisible “force” which owns it.  It is like saying “I’ve always dreamed of owning a Porsche, and now I have one; thus, my actual dream is precisely how this car got into my garage.”

That seems crazy, but it is no different than saying:  the law of thermodynamics, or the mathematics of angular particle spin are precisely how the objects do this or that.  No.  The object acts; the law is how the action is measured.  It produces an effect in another object by THAT object reacting, and its reaction is thus likewise measured.  And from this, we can now reasonably predict, and thus organize our days, weeks, theories, reality, plans, dreams, wants, wishes, environments, Bon Jovi tour dates, movie times, school closings, trips to the doctor, to the parole hearing, to AA, to Bombay…by understanding how OBJECTS act.  But once we put the cart before the horse…that is, once we reverse the roles of what is real and what is  abstract then all manner of destructive philosophy boils over.  Once we concede that real objects are merely the disposable tools of unseen forces, we have opened the floodgates for human destruction.  This may seem hyperbolic, but I assure you, the carnage from this kind of determinist thinking is only beginning.

Human beings exist in service to the political collective.  Human beings exist in service to the economic bottom line (e.g. chattel slavery).  Human beings are a product of evolutionary forces (I actually believe in evolution, by the way), thus, survival of the fittest is the only objective morality.  Human beings are merely the products of genetic laws, and so sterilizing criminals is the best way to control crime.  Euthanizing the cognitively impaired is morally justified because their brains aren’t functioning properly, as our “laws” of biology prove, and thus, they aren’t really human.  Gassing a generation of Jews is morally sanctioned because they are the product of their own determined existence, their own inevitable fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being who they are, and thus murdering them isn’t murder, it’s a “solution” to a “natural” problem.  Sacrificing the lives and psychological health of children sexually abused in SGM churches is okay because the “greater good” must be served; the doctrine must be protected.  Murdering the individual for the cause of abstract laws of economics, social protocol, or the group cohesiveness must be done.  For, as Spock said to Kirk, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”.  But isn’t it strange how Spock doesn’t explain what he means by “needs” and who exactly gets to define these “needs”.  “Needs” in itself is often ambiguous, and abstractly used as  just another excuse to pillage life and/or property from another human being.

An object is never the product of a law.  The object is what it is.  If there is any “law” by which to describe it, the only hint of that law’s actual reality is found in this admission:  the the object IS the law.  Separating the law from the object is rank ideological larceny.  All objects own themselves.  In other words, to get to my by-now obvious allusion:  all human beings own themselves.  And thus we must only deal with other people as they exist completely in and of themselves by the real flesh and blood and thoughts and feeling which comprise them, as well as their property and their dues (e.g. wages, legal entitlements like retirement accounts/inheritance; and you can read the Old Testament if you don’t believe me; all I can say is I thank GOD for the Jews…they saved us from a horrifying existence of spiritual insanity, and gave the philosophical mind a rudder in the storm of mankind’s madness…unless you’re Calvinist, then your pastor ate your rudder).  To treat them as a stepping stone to the pursuit or realization of the abstract “truth” of some external “law” is to rape them; to deprive them of their inherent, divine right to BE.  The only true moral law is that which says “love others as you love YOURSELF”, and yourself, incidentally, is SINGULAR.  And the reason why this law is true is because it specifically links moral worth TO the human being.  Jesus does not separate the two greatest commandments from the OBJECTS which create them.  God and man ARE the two greatest TRUTHS.  THEY are the truth from which all morality and objective thought grow.

We must stop putting abstractions in place of objects as the plumb line for moral and existential truth.  No matter how altruistic these abstract ideas may seem, they can only lead to death.

“Biblical inerrancy/infallibility” is such an abstraction.

And in the next post I will once again attempt to dismantle this destructive idea.