As those of you who read here regularly already likely understand, I maintain that the only way to call truth TRUTH and good GOOD in any reasonable and efficacious way is to define a plumb-line…a STANDARD by which anything we concede as TRUTH and GOOD can be measured against.  And that without this standard there can be no such actual thing as TRUTH or GOOD.  That is, anything we declare to “know” or “believe” can only be TRUE and GOOD if it can be rationally known as perpetuating and affirming the standard.  Without those things which we concede as GOOD and TRUE being understood within the context the objective standard, there is simply no way to actually (rationally/objectively) know whether anything is actually GOOD or TRUE.

Let me define what I mean when I say GOOD and TRUTH, in terms of the overarching philosophical concepts.

TRUTH refers to those things we say are true and those things we say are not true.  What I mean by this is that some true things are truly true and other true things are truly NOT true.  For example, “the sky is full of air” is truly true, while “the sky is full of chocolate pudding” is truly NOT true.  The knowledge catalog of TRUTH contains those things which can be actually known as true and false (truly NOT true) in order that man may properly define and organize his environment.

Why?

Well, the why is the standard of TRUTH and GOOD (by which they are known), which is the point I am getting to.

GOOD refers to those things we say are good and those things we say are not good.  And what I mean by this is that some things we understand as “good to know” are truly good, while some things we understand as “good to know” are truly NOT good.  For example, walking on the sidewalk is GOOD; and walking in traffic is NOT good.  Both of these things are truly GOOD to know, but one concept–walking on the sidewalk–is GOOD, and the other–walking in traffic–is NOT good; one is morally a good thing and one is morally (morality defined in this case as maintaining one’s life) a NOT good thing.

You see, there is more to knowledge than what is true or false; the flip side of of the epistemology coin is the moral implication of that knowledge.  Knowing things objectively and non-relatively means that those things which are known–that is, defined as this or that–will also contain some moral imperative; either they will be known as good things or as bad things, in accordance with the moral standard, which is the same as the knowledge standard.  And in both cases, whether the thing is known as objectively good or objectively bad (objectivity being established, again, by the standard) the knowledge, broadly speaking in terms of the concept of GOOD, is good to know.  Ergo, the concept of morality I prefer to label as GOOD; while the concept of definitive (objective) knowledge I prefer to label as TRUTH.

Both the good and the NOT good are GOOD to know, and to know reasonably, because proper moral understanding is efficacious to maintaining and affirming and perpetuating the standard.  The standard being the “why” things are actually good and actually true.

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Okay, so what is the standard?  Those of you who are at least somewhat familiar with my philosophy will likely know the answer to this already.  And to be honest, it is the only answer possible.  There is no other answer which can in any way be reasonably defended, or rationally explained or defined.

The standard I am speaking of is HUMAN LIFE.  HUMAN EXISTENCE on the level of the individual, singular, SELF of you, and me, and everyone else who exists and shares the same inherent and autonomous ability of self-aware consciousness.  And you should understand that any Christian who concedes this wholly rational and objective standard will almost certainly be labeled as an unsaved, unbiblical, anti-Christ heretic who undoubtedly is “preaching another gospel” and as such is eternally accursed.  Agree with me at your own risk.  You want to see brother against brother, mother against daughter in law, and the like?  Try proclaiming YOURSELF as the infinite standard of morality and truth, as a child of God, able to define God as God and God as Good and SELF thus as good because you first exist to do so, making your existence the prerequisite for the efficacious truth of anything, even God.  And watch them flee.  Watch them light the fires and prepare the s’mores.  And then try to convince them that it is the height of humility to acknowledge the moral standard of SELF, because it means you can define God rationally, and thus understand His place of Honor effectively.  Good luck with that.  It is a thankless, uphill slog, and it must happen in the short time between when you first express your ideas and when they write you off as a hopeless apostate they want little if anything to do with.

Better yet…maybe you should just do what you’re used to.  Do what’s comfortable.  I mean, we have “orthodoxy” to rely on, after all.  Surely God will be happy with that, no matter how many children are raped and hapless lives wrecked in the name of “sound doctrine”, right?

No?  So be it.

Thus it goes when you try to introduce reason to mysticism.  And that is what Christianity is.  Christianity, except for a distressingly tiny handful of us –and I say that not arrogantly, but sadly and exasperatedly and matter-of-factly–is full blown mysticism these days.  Go around the world.  Scour the internet; the books; catechisms of the medieval “revelators”; talk amongst the pastors and priests of any denomination you like.  That’s fine…take all the time you need.   Just don’t check your Bible…well, unless you approach it with the false and evil interpretive concepts they almost all do.  For if you look at your Bible with an objective eye upon the rational standard of human life, you might actually see that Jesus Christ was a human being who was God.  If this doesn’t convince you that HUMAN life is fully capable of being an objective standard of TRUTH and GOOD then nothing will.  Well…almost nothing.

I am living proof that drowning in a sea of evil theology need not be permanent.  That rebirth is possible.  During the throws of confusion and anxiety which followed me and my family’s separating from Sovereign Grace Ministries (an entity dedicated to dark ages Christianity, Calvinist hedonism and wicked theology, and believes that FORCE and AUTHORITY are the plumb line for spiritual “truth”) I found myself contemplating returning to that crucible of evil ideas out of sheer stress.  And in the midst of this I heard the Holy Spirit speak to me in an audible voice and He said, “You have Me; you do not need them”.

And I never looked back.  And that?  Was the beginning of my understanding.  You see, a little after hearing those words I decided that God must be rationally explained; that any theology which rested upon a foundation of “who the fuck knows; its all a mystery at the end of the day” could not possibly be true.  And that if the Creator Himself was not able to be defined rationally and consistently (objectively) then man’s epistemology was doomed, and faith was completely wrecked.  I understood that blind faith was really NO faith.  That madness and the LACK of TRUTH could not pass for TRUTH and faith without impugning God; without relegating Him into the same corner as every other false god and foolish religion man had ever conjured up in his ultimately empty, pointless mind.  Now, I would be lying if I said I was on the brink of giving up  my faith.  Truly, I knew that the Lord had answered prayers in my younger days so clearly; so apparently and actually that that alone, I was convinced, would make my walking away from the faith even LESS rational than concluding that it could only be explained by “mystery”.  This is testament to teaching people about Christ as early as possible.  Because God indeed responds to the faith of children.  He NEVER disappointed me.  Not once that I can recall.  It is amazing that when you concede that you ARE, and that God IS, and that there is a mutual exchange of value based upon the rational notion that BOTH have freedom of the mind to define and know the other in truth and reason, how God will respond to that.  It was only when I began to sink in the quicksand of SGM’s determinist lie that the answers stopped.  They stopped because I no longer had a definition for ME, for mySELF.  And God will not hear the prayers of the unbeliever.  Because believing in God means that you must believe in the TRUTH of the SELF; and this means valuing the SELF as God’s supreme creation.  And if you cannot answer the question “what are you?” (what is man?) then it is impossible to answer the question “what is God?”.  And that is why I fear so greatly for the salvation of those who have given themselves over to the despotism and lie which passes for Christianity these days. I was once asked if I was a Universalist.  I laughed…not because I was surprised, you see.  You must understand that when you believe the things that I believe (that faith must be rooted in reason, and all TRUTH must be rooted in individual SELF/LIFE) you get confused with all kinds of things.  First it was that I was Arminian.  But then I explained I didn’t know anything about Arminianism because I had been a fucking Calvinist all my life.  Then it was Universalist.  Then it was probably some other thing I don’t know anything about, and now it’s just heretic or “idiot”.  Whatev.  Like I said, try to introduce reason into matters of “faith” when that faith is rooted in rank mysticism which looks more like a Hindu Caste system than anything resembling what Christ or Moses taught and get ready for some serious frothing.

And we think we are so much better than the hoards which stormed the Bastille or burned fake witches in Salem or dunked wives in ponds for “back-talking husbands” to the point of drowning in rural Pennsylvania or drove a generation of innocent Jews to the gas chambers or commit “honor” killings in the name of Allah.  (“Honor killing”?  Now there’s a contradiction in terms.)  What a bunch of fucking hypocrites.

But anyway, I laughed at being labeled a Universalist because if anything, I explained, I believe there will be far fewer people in heaven than we think.  That the “mansion with many rooms” is going to have…well, not that many rooms, relatively speaking, and won’t be as big as we imagine.

Deep down though, I was confident that my faith would not come to mystery; because if the understanding of my Creator was ultimately rooted in mystery–which is just a euphemism for “shrug”–then I could not know myself.  That ALL I observe, including the SELF of ME, is an illusion.  And you know what?  An illusion cannot be aware of an illusion.  That is a rational impossibility.  I  knew that I WAS.  And if I was, then God WAS.  And HOW He was and I was could not be rooted in mystery, because mystery is nothing but an illusion when we speak of matters of reality and metaphysical essence.  If I was me and God was God then I knew it was all a matter of reason…of logically reconcilable assumptions which would lead to the rationally explainable need for a Creator and a Savior.  And once I conceded that, it was just a matter of thinking about things..about all the questions that remained unanswered or “paradoxical” (which they aren’t, they are contradictions), and not assuming that since all this shit had already been “done before”, and that “people have tried to figure this out for centuries” it therefore must be impossible to know…as if the fact that Christians haven’t developed a rational understanding of their faith yet is relevant in any way.  It’s only relevance is that it illustrates just how far we have to go and why so much of the world flees our bullshit in droves.  The “we can’t really know, because it’s been tried before and we’ve always failed” mantra is a rank, intellectually lazy cop out.  It is much easier to throw your hands up and cry “mystery”.  “All is mystery!”.

Except when it isn’t.

Except when you are having panic attacks and debilitating anxiety and it’s all rooted in the assumption that someone who cannot define himself on a metaphysical level as rationally existing with rational reasons why and rational conclusions as to how cannot possibly know that this anxiety is BAD, and is not “God’s will”.  And its fucking hard if not impossible to get better if you think it is likely, in your determinist assumptions, that God WANTS it this way.

And that’s when I realized that all of that was wrong.  That if I was determined and God wanted it this way then good and evil had no real definition.  Right and wrong, true and false could not be known or defined.  And if that was true, then God had no business being believed in, so there was really no God who could “want it this way”, or to have “determined it”.  Because if I couldn’t know right and wrong from good and bad or true and false because ALL things were determined by a “sovereign” God according to His “sovereign grace” then God could have no definition because there was no such thing as me knowing anything.  Everything I knew was determined, and as such, there was no ME thinking it, because there was no ME.  I was DETERMINED.  Which meant that my consciousness was a lie, which mean that God was a lie, too.  Determinism, not God, was God…so to speak.  You see, if all is determined then all thoughts are determined.  And that means you have no choice but to think what you think and believe what you believe.  Which means that there is no YOU, because without the ability to choose what you will believe you cannot declare that it is YOU believing.  Even your very notions of SELF are nothing more than an extension of the determinist force.

So I began to develop, for the first time since I was little and prayed God prayers that He actually answered, a rational sense of SELF.  A sense of my own consciousness and that it was mine.  Mine alone.  Mine to BE, and with it I chose to think what I thought and believe what I believed.  And if I WAS, rationally, then I understood something even more profound and something more important:

The fact that I was, was ABSOLUTE.  It was the singularity of my entire SELF.  Me, existing, was the singular and infinite source of everything I was and everything I saw and all truth and all good that I conceded.  The fact that I existed was even the source–the vehicle–for knowing God.  Which meant that God’s practical existence depended first on MY existence and being aware of it; that I had to BE, first, before God or anything else had any relevance or meaning. And that this awareness and being had to be autonomous and independent or it could not be defined as anything but an extension of the determining force, which made me a lie, which meant that I could not possibly know God, because determinism is absolute, and as such removes even God from His place.  All there is is determinism.  Period.  Full stop.

And that is when it hit me.  The root of all truth and morality stares at each one of us in the mirror every morning.  Our efficacious, root existential, metaphysical SELF is the source of all we know and all that exists.  Why?  Because if it doesn’t exist to US, then it cannot be qualified as existing, period.  Without YOU, there is no way for you to know anything; and if you don’t know anything, you cannot argue for the existence of anything…anything at all, even God.

Thus, YOU (and me, and him and her, and all of us individual SELVES) are the objective standard by which all things are properly defined, and properly and efficaciously known to be TRUE and GOOD, even God.  And for those of you who cannot accept this, so be it.  But you must understand…and I DEFY you to refute this…you must understand that there is no other rational standard.  There is nothing you can concede, there is nothing you can say, there is no way to reject or deny my standard without automatically contradicting your own argument.  Why?  Because the prerequisite for you disagreeing with me is–like it is the prerequisite for anything else–YOU.  YOU must EXIST FIRST before you can “know” I am wrong, and declare to me that SELF is not a requirement for the TRUTH and GOOD of anything we know, even God.  And that automatically makes your counter argument a hypocrisy. 

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The standard is the human SELF.  It is the standard because it is the prerequisite for knowledge and belief.  All knowledge and understanding is a direct function of the actual IS of man.  And this is why the root of moral perfection and truth is man’s life, and not anything else.  Not even God.  God is known as TRUE and GOOD because man first EXISTS to know it…and even if you cry “revelation!” you must concede that man must posses an inherent ability to be revealed to.  Man must exist first, before he can be “given” the divine knowledge.  Existence cannot proceed revelation!  That’s simply impossible.  If there is nothing or no one to reveal to, then revelation is not only pointless but it is not revelation at all, by definition.

So the human SELF is the standard.  It is why anything can be good or true.  And if that offends some, I really don’t care.  I’m tired of caring…because I’m tired of being called an idiot and a heretic, or that my ideas are unbiblical and lies by people who have no standard of truth, which makes them hypocrites of the worst kind.  How dare they declare me a blasphemer when they cannot even rationally define God because they have murdered Him and themselves upon the altar of their false religion…of their “sound doctrine”.

I have no kind words for people like this.  And there is no limit to the invective I maintain for their ideas.  They are the seeds of despotism…and they worship the murder of humanity as the greatest and only moral “good”.  He who has no answer for “what is man?” is the worst kind of liar.