All posts by Argo

The Infinity of the SELF, and Without the Existence of SELF Nothing Exists (explanation and clarification): Response to A Mom

Metaphysics

““truth doesn’t need me to be true”
I just said something to someone very similar to this recently. Something like, “It’s true, whether I’m saying it or not”. So I pondered it. And, you know, that person wouldn’t know it if I didn’t say it, so… you’re right. That is a silly statement. And it marginalized me, didn’t it? Not affirming to my life either, right?”

-Commenter, A Mom (previous post’s comment thread)

A Mom,

You make a point that I had not considered…I never thought of it quite that way.  Like, if YOU hadn’t told that person, they’d never actually know that particular truth. So, in that sense, the truth did need you for it to be true to THAT persons…you were the source of that truth to them, and so you are right:  the fact that it is true “in spite of you” is neither entirely true, but even more salient, is, in that particular instance, entirely irrelevant.  At that moment you were indeed the source of that truth to them.  The truth needed you, like it always needs a human agent in order to be true; in order to exist.

Great illustration of this, A Mom.  Excellent.  Again, truth always needs a human agent.  And it speaks well to the point I am (trying…not sure how successfully) making in my last two posts concerning “plain meaning” of words and text:  there is no such thing as “truth” in a vacuum of its own meaning.  That is, without a human agent who makes his or her life the standard of all meaning (that is, your LIFE is WHY anything is true, or false, or good, or bad, etc.), there is no truth.  If you are not conscious, then nothing exists to you…and if nothing exists to you, then you cannot really argue that anything exists at all…obviously (or not).

And this is a hard thing to get our heads around.  For on the one hand, we do need to be able to make a distinction, for practical purposes, between what is a fact and what is merely personal opinion.  For example, no Calvinist gets to say that total depravity is reasonable just because they happen to believe it, because factually, it is simply NOT reasonable.  Them believing it does NOT make it true; will not make it true, and cannot make it true.  So, it is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of reason.  Obviously we don’t allow maniacs to define the world for us because that leads to all kinds of disaster and torment.  So…”reason” is a guide is a practical idea because, remember, truth has to serve human life, not demand its death.  And human life is indeed individual, because the individual is the infinite source of their own existence and all that exists to them.  But by our empirical observation, which MUST be true (because I submit that if you are consciously aware of something, then that something must be real…for there is no such rational thing as a “false consciousness”, or an illusion, so to speak, being aware of an illusion, but that’s another discussion), we can see the very real lives of other human agents.  So, what we affirm as truth must not only serve our SELVES–and indeed, it would be quite logically impossible to rationally argue a truth that affirmed the right of our SELVES to live and not the SELVES of other human beings, which provide a perfect frame of reference (infinite setting) for and an empirical verification of our own SELF–but it must also serve the SELF of every other human being and certainly God, Himself, who is likewise a morally equal and equally self-aware autonomous Agent.

But, as you understand (and kudos to you, because believe me I KNOW this stuff is really, really hard to get our heads around), I am, with all of this hullabaloo, attempting to breach a deeper, I guess, sort of existential idea.  And, as I have said before, ad nauseam (because, this is really my whole theological and philosophical bag) that is the idea of the human SELF as the beginning and end of all a person both knows and is, and all that IS, even God, to that person…and as that person is infinite, then by definition, this would mean that the individual SELF is the source of not only all that exists to him or her, but all that exists, period…because, when push comes to shove and the amplifier gets turned to 11, there is no way to really deny this reasonably; and again, that is because the single infinite constant to existence is YOU, and only YOU, and only ever YOU.  The source of your existence can never be anything or anyone else. Period.  Full stop.  Therefore, the only ultimate literal claim you can make is that without you, nothing exists.  (Now, let it be known that I am willing to possibly concede a true paradox at this juncture.  One might say, for example, that once you exist, FIRST, you can know that other things exist besides you, which means that they also exist concomitantly with you, or even, “before” you, if you want to qualify it that way.  The problem is, of course, that I fucking hate paradoxes because I think they are a fucking cop out a their root and I just cannot quite bring myself to believe that there is any truth which man can claim which is mutually exclusive to another truth.  I.  Just.  Simply. Can’t.  But…perhaps I may have to.  Buuuuuuut…not quite yet.  And I mean it…I am NOT conceding it yet.  At best thus far I may concede that all conscious agents infinitely ARE, together, and are concomitantly the roots of existence, period…and it is observation which allows for a relatively finite relationship between infinite consciousnesses.  But that’s getting pretty deep, and as you are already probably asleep, I’ll move on for now.)

I submit it is axiomatic to say that EVERYTHING we know, or think or see, etc., requires US in order to exist.  And I mean LITERALLY.  As I said, unless you are, it is impossible for you to claim the existence of anything else at all, by definition.  For all practical purposes, if you do not exist, then neither does anything else.

Now, at this point we inject reason–which is the observation of the senses integrated into our consciousness to form conceptual abstractions of other things which we rightly declare as actual.  Reason tells us by what we observe that our existence is not the material creation of the objects we observe…but here is where reason really needs to be parsed a bit.  Yes, we are not the creators of the things we observe, but we are the creators of what these things mean and how they are defined. And since we are the source all meaning by what we observe we do need to recognize that existence of everything, in a meaningful (epistemological) sense, is predicated upon our existence FIRST.

Now, one might counter argue that we are only the source of all meaning for us, and not anyone else.  And I would respond by saying: The difference is between our infinite SELF–that which is the never changing constant in your existence: YOU–and the relatively finite OTHERS with which we share our environment. So yes, meaning is only for our SELF, but our SELF is the only rational plumb line for all meaning because our SELF is the only infinite constant in the equation. That is, between your SELF and others, YOU are the source of their meaning for YOU; and YOU is the only absolutely relevant agent at the end of the day, because without YOU, absolutely nothing can have meaning at all because, like I said, unless you exist first, there is no way for you to concede any truth of any kind.  And once you do exist, meaning exists…and meaning to what end?  The only end which can have any objective relevance: YOU.

Now, I need to be careful here because, trust me, I know what this sounds like.  I know it sounds like I am saying the universe, even God, revolves around the individual human SELF.  And in a sense, I concede that this is exactly what I am saying because the fact is that the only constant in your life, again, is YOU, by definition.  There is absolutely no way to argue around this axiom.  You are the infinite, never changing agent in your life.  Your existence is the source of meaning for all the universe.  Without YOU, then nothing exists…and I am not arguing from, “observable evidence” right now–for lack of a better phrase–but from a literal interpretation of our existence.  There is no way to argue for the existence of anything outside of you, even God, unless YOU exist to make the argument.  And this fact completely undercuts any contrary perspective.  “There are things which exist whether I’m around our not” is contradicted by the fact that you have to be around to make that claim in the first place.  If you do not exist, then by definition it is impossible argue for the existence of anything else.

So, what does this fact then require in how we view our world?  Well, first, as I said, we need to be careful lest we attempt to take the place of God.  That is a real concern, I understand, with the realization of the axiom of your infinite SELF as juxtaposed to the relatively finite SELVES of everyone else.  But this is easy to head off once we make the proper distinction between the Creator of THINGS and the creator of MEANING (which I briefly touched upon above).

Besides dipping my toe into the waters of the anti-Reformed theology arguments, I spend an equal amount of time pondering the rationality of the ideas we accept as the “laws of nature”, or the “laws of the universe/physics/mathematics”.  I am currently working on a book–and who the hell knows where I’ll send it or to whom–which I have titled “The Metaphysics of the God Particle” in which I look at most of the basic scientific assumptions/ideas/theories/discoveries which have given rise, and continue to add to and modify, the Standard Model (of the Universe…according to physics), which culminates, currently, in the God Particle (the Higgs Boson).  Obviously, as John Immel rightly pointed out to me, science is fundamentally Platonist in its assumptions, so I spend much of the time criticizing scientific assumptions by measuring them against structures of reason (like, the presumption that space is actual, and that time is real…but since neither can be observed, by what reason do we declare their material existence?)…but in addition, I spend time affirming some of their theories with recommendations as to how to tweak the assumptions to arrive at a TRUTH which is reasonable, and yet still does not contradict certain laws of physics which clearly have some merit and practical application.

At any rate, after pondering these ideas for a looooong time I have arrived at the conclusion that God is the Creator of the objects we observe, while man is the creator of their meaning, by codifying them and organizing them in service to his own existence.  This distinction makes it impossible for man to pretend he is God.  God is the one who must create WHAT we are, materially. We are left with the task–and I believe Genesis 1 supports this–of creating the definitions of what we observe for ourselves, in a most literal way.  But the point is that the knowledge of God as the Creator of the material “what” of not only ourselves but what we observe gives God a place of, well, adoration and worship as GOD, without compromising the truth that our existence MUST precede our knowledge of Him.  We are still infinite SELF and He relatively finite with respect to us…but this does not create a moral inferiority of God, nor does it remove from Him his rightful label of “Creator”.  On the contrary, a proper recognition of ourselves makes possible the accurate defining of God.

Next, since we understand that without the ability of us to observe (sense) OTHER–that is, other people and objects–we can have no frame of reference for, and thus no knowledge of, our own SELF.  This implies an equal existential (and moral) value to that which we observe, especially other human beings who can verify the efficacy of our abstract concepts via language; again without compromising the axiom that we are the infinite SELF which is the yardstick for the proper meaning of everything else (everything NOT us).  We recognize that the existence of all we observe is predicated upon our existence first without relegating others and other things and God to a place of moral inferiority.  Indeed, on the contrary, there is now a mutual exchange of perfect value.  The human SELF gives meaning and verification of moral worth and truth to ALL he/she observes, while at the same time they do likewise by providing him/her an anchor for his/her own existence…that is, an observable distinction between their infinite SELF and relatively finite OTHERS is how both can be verified as TRUE.

So, I am not proposing that we all become Gordan Gekkos here and begin to worship ourselves, or that we set up altars with our old yearbook pictures surrounded by tealights and incense and then on Christmas Eve celebrate our own birth by passing our children through the fires of Molech in service to our own deity.  Not at all.  The argument I am making is for the existential and moral equality of the individual human SELF to all that he/she observes, including God, by making the very axiomatic observation that unless you, the SELF, exist first, nothing can have any meaning at all because all of its meaning and even existence is utterly a function of YOU; for you are the infinite and constant source of existence, thus, nothing exists and nothing has meaning unless it is a direct function of your existence.  Your ability to BE is why anything can exist, period.  Since you are a prerequisite for ALL you know, it must stand to reason that the existence of all you observe must serve your life or it cannot possibly be declared good or true; and this understanding allows man to then make accurate interpretations of all he observes, especially and including God.

We can know God is God because He, being Creator, is infinitely reasonable to the truth that existence is SELF.  As the Creator of the SELF, He is the ultimate proponent of it.

What is the “Plain Meaning” of Scripture in Light of Man’s Life as the Only Legitimate Standard of TRUTH (part two)

Calvinism/Philosophy

I submit that interpretation is antithetical to the idea of a “plain meaning” of Scripture.  “Words mean things” as a truism ultimately is incomplete.  The logical assumption of such a statement is that words can somehow exist in a vacuum of meaning outside of the context of the human agent and his/her environment.  Since this is not rationally possible, “words mean things” MUST be qualified.  And, of course, the obvious problem is that once this statement is qualified the question which must be begged is, “WHO gets to decide what the words mean, exactly?”.  And the question which is begged by the begged question is, “Why do THEY get to decide what the words mean?”

Why does Paul Dohse get to decide what the words mean instead of the Calvinists he and I oppose?  Nothing against Paul, but the question is a legitimate one.  Why should I trust his definitions over the definitions of the Reformed crowd?  What makes his interpretation more noble and righteous than theirs?  Simply swapping external standards of TRUTH will not solve anything.  And I asked Paul several times in a debate with him “What is the standard of TRUTH”, and got no answer.  That was concerning.  Either the standard of TRUTH is man and his life, or it is something else.  If it is something else, then ultimately man must die in service to it…his life and existence itself is meaningless, and an affront to truth.  So it is quite irrelevant what the standard is if it is not man’s life.  Whether it is the Bible or whether it is God or whether it is Calvinism is quite immaterial at the end of the day.

Anyway…I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

It isn’t enough to say “words mean things”.  Thus you cannot approach the Bible with the interpretive premise of the “plain meaning of the text”.  There is, again, no plain meaning of any text.  The things the words mean are never simply “what they are”.  Outside of a human agent interpreting the words, they cannot possibly mean anything at all.  Each an every person is the absolute context for every item in the lexicons of every language in the world.  Therefore what the words mean will always and only ever be a direct function of the individual human being considering them.  It can be no other way.

Thus, as we have shown that words need a context by which their meaning can be discerned (interpreted), we are left with only two choices which have to do with deciding that the meanings of words are actually “legitimate” or not.  Words and their meanings are only legitimate in how they serve a context…except, what is “context” exactly?  For there is no such thing as a context in a context…meaning, context is not a thing itself.  The context is then of a standard of absolute TRUTH…and this is constant, perpetual, never-changing, and infinite, and it is the thing which all concepts, words, meanings, interpretations and contexts perpetually revolve around.  The context then is the standard of TRUTH wherever it happens to be at any given moment with respect to its environment (place and time).  And therefore words must always serve the standard–its perpetuation, health, and affirmation–before they can be given any meaning or value.

So, yes…as I was saying, when considering “context”, which is the standard of TRUTH as it relates to its environment at any given moment, we have two choices we can make.  The standard of TRUTH is either ourSELVES, meaning, our existence and life; or the standard of TRUTH is well…something else, something outside of your existence.  And this is the root difference between the Primacy of Consciousness approach to existence, and the Primacy of Existence.  The Primacy of Consciousness approach puts the standard of TRUTH outside of man’s life.  Meaning, man himself doesn’t really exist except as he sacrifices himself for this “law” of existence outside of his own.  Put simply, man’s only moral obligation–indeed, his only moral act–is to die for the “cause”, so to speak…either literally, or practically, via surrendering his person and property and mind to the “priests” of the Primary Consciousness, or, as is sometimes the case within certain schools of Biblidolatry, to figure out for himself, in the absence of a mystic overlord in the flesh, just how he is supposed to remove his self from the existential equation by figuring out just what the “plain meaning’ of the text is and then dying to that.

Thus, we see, in the Primacy of Consciousness model, man only really “lives” when he denies that he has any ownership of himself because he must, being utterly outside of TRUTH, lack any epistemological competence, and therefore cannot really claim to know anything at all, especially himself if he is outside the Primary Consciousness.  For without the outside standard, he has no hope of even claiming he exists at all…his life is merely an illusion, and thus, has no real bearing on TRUTH.  Death is his moral obligation thus again…and he can’t really even know this without the knowledge of the Primary Consciousness, which he cannot get, by definition, from the Primary Consciousness on his own which is why the proponents of this philosophy are so big into “election”.  The way you know you are “elected” to “salvation” (the categorical death of you which is supposed to, contradictorily, bring life) is if you concede the truth of the Primary Consciousness without considering your life as a context by which to vet its “truth”.  And the rest of us unfortunate slobs are rightful heirs of judgement and wrath…somehow culpable for our “evil” even though, according to the philosophy, we had no choice but to be “evil” because we weren’t divinely (and arbitrarily) chosen by the Primary Consciousness.  A choice which, incidentally, can have nothing to do with us…and so how we are still culpable for our judgement and hell is well, as John Immel would say, punted into the great cosmic abyss of God’s (Primary Consciousness) mystery.

So, man’s only real “knowledge” is then, the Gnosis, or divine revelation given to him by an intermediary of the Primary Consciousness.  In the case of Calvinism, the mystic impostors for God (Pastors) are the intermediate between man and God; and in the case of the Biblicists, they would say that the Bible is the intermediate between man and God.  And what I mean by “intermediate’ is, of course, the divinely chosen keeper of the Gnosis.

If you have already seen that there is and can be no real distinction between the keeper of the Gnosis and the Primary Consciousness itself (or himself or herself, depending) then hats off to you, because you are absolutely right.  Why?  Because you, in your infinite depravity and the tragically embarrassing moral failure that was your birth, can by no means have anything to do in any way with the Primary Consciousness because he, she, or it is completely mutually exclusive to your life; and as such, you need to have something or someone around who or which can connect the Primary Consciousness to your existence.   And that someone or something is the compelling force which has the “keys” by which to either “save” you or “damn” you according to their impossible-to-dispute claim to hold mandate from the Primary Consciousness to serve as his/her/its absolute power to enforce its absolute will upon humanity with the singular purpose of destroying all of it, either by integrating it (again, somehow…and trust me the logic is impossible to reconcile) into itself or by killing off the detractors.  In other words, the purpose of the Priests is to decide which of the existentially-challenged savages is sacrificing themselves and which, in their stubbornness, need to be sacrificed on the PC’s behalf.

*

The Primacy of Existence approach is the better one, and the one which we all must insist upon as the approach for our lives because it is the only rational one.  It is the only one that doesn’t trade man’s life for his death.

The PE approach basically says that man’s life is the plumb line for all TRUTH because, quite obviously, nothing can be said to exist at all without a human agent existing FIRST.  The reason being that for you to know anything as TRUE and for TRUTH to have any relevancy to you, you must actually exist first.  You can neither know TRUTH, nor can truth be revealed to you without your life being there to serve as the source…the reference, not the vessel, of that truth.  This of course leads one to the only logical conclusion:  all truth is an extension of individual human life.  There is nothing that can be said to be true that denies the prerequisite of life before it can be seen to be true.  In order for the revelation of God to be known as TRUE, man’s life is required to serve as the revelation’s reference.  This means that all truth must affirm man’s life as the absolute, infinite reference.  Anything that says that man’s life is outside of truth…or that man’s life proceeds from a construct, a Primary Consciousness, that is outside of his existence, cannot possibly be true.  For there is no way that man can be birthed by something or into something which is wholly exclusive to him.  In other words, man is the source of HIMSELF.  You are the constant in everything…and without you, nothing can be qualified as even existing let alone as TRUTH.

Of course, the emotional knee-jerk reaction to this is that I am nothing more than a man-worshiping apostate…my claims, heretical and criminal, denying God, denying Christ, and blah, blah, blah.  Well…if anyone can explain to me how they can know any TRUTH at all outside of the frame of reference of their own SELF, then I’m all ears.  Believe me, it is quite an impossible argument to make.

Don’t you think its ironic that the only way you can claim a TRUTH which exists whether you are around or not is because you are around?   That the only way you can declare a truth outside yourself is from within yourself?  That the only way you can know God is because you were born  first?  Or do we pretend that what we know precedes ourselves?  That you know what you know because you weren’t around to know it?  That its true to you, even without you?

There is absolutely no logic to that.  Think about it, and thinks some more.  Without YOU, you cannot claim that ANYTHING exists…by definition.  Don’t we think it is ironic and contradictory for someone to say “truth doesn’t need me to be true” when the only way they can possibly concede that is because they exist?!  Who makes the statement “truth doesn’t need me”?  ME is making that statement.  ME, the person, has to exist first before they can know the truth which somehow doesn’t need them to be true.  Without them, there is no frame of reference for truth…no frame of reference for the existence of anything.  The backwards logic is mindblowing.

No, you give birth to what you know.  What you know did not give birth to you.  You say, “Argo, but I didn’t need to exist for Abe Lincoln to be President, or for Jesus to walk on water.  Those events were true even though I wasn’t yet born.”  And I say, how can you know that except by your existence?  The answer is:  you cannot.  And so which comes first in the “chain of truth”?  Your existence, or the fact that Abe Lincoln was President.  The answer is:  your existence must come first.  Before you can know that Jesus walked on water before you were born, you had to be born.

This is fun, huh?  Isn’t it great turning traditional logic on its head?  I love it.

And so the PE approach rightly claims man’s life as the standard of TRUTH, and thus gauges truth, value, meaning, morality, etc. in how it affirms man’s life.  Those things which affirm him are truth, those which deny him are false.  Those things which seek to perpetuate his life according to his own tastes and pleasures and health and contentment and satisfaction as an end are “good”;  those which demand from him pain and suffering and death as an end are “evil”. Does this mean that pain is always evil and pleasure is always good?  No…that is the argument of the “words mean things” crowd.  Remember, the context is always human life.  Pain and suffering can be good if the end is individual life..such as giving your savings away to help provide for your sick mother a place to live.  Pleasure and comfort can be evil, such as when you enslave other men for your “pleasure”.  The context is what is “good” for LIFE.  And so what I mean by “pleasure” and “pain” go beyond whatever “plain meaning” we might have.  No, they must be defined according to the context of the individual in how they pursue their own life, as is their right, while obviously affirming the rights of others with whom they relate to do the same.  Jesus dies on the cross to affirm man’s life and God’s goodness.  It was suffering, but the end was life.  It was ultimately his choice to pursue life, and this WILL bring pleasure in the end because life is GOOD, and good is rationally defined by what is MOST pleasing…and what is most pleasing will always be SELF-affirming, not what is painful and life-despising.  So am I saying that Jesus dying on the cross had value not only for man but for Him?  Yes I am.  Our relationship with God is an exchange of value, just like it is with any relationship.  As God turns man to Himself by his mercy, God reaps the benefits of man’s adoration…this adoration and worship is pleasing to him.  A sweet aroma, as the Bible says.  To say that God finds no value in man that He would sacrifice for him in such an epic way is to not only underestimate man’s innate worth because he is able to rightly observe God as God, which God likes, but also underestimates the goodness of God and the power of God as the Creator of man in the first place.  God will by no means create that which can observe God as God without that creation being something God will unreservedly adore.  What is the next best thing to being God?  To be recognized and worshiped as such, I submit.  And further gratifying is knowing that you gain this adoration by providing something of equal value and esteem:  man’s LIFE; knowing that you gain this adoration and praise and worship in the most moral way possible:  by giving man his SELF, his LIFE.  And this life is GOOD, and being good will then feel good.

To hate one’s life, I submit, is to hate God.  And no, this does not contradict Luke 14:26.  For what is “hating one’s mother, father, sister and life” mean in the context of following the Christ?  Jesus is making the argument that no one else can BE you for you.  That YOU are your life, and it is not found in anyone else.  Hating your life in that context, I submit, is hating the world’s definition of what is YOU.  Because that is a standard of life outside of the infinite and absolute YOU, which is the root of your moral goodness before God.  To pretend that anyone else has a right to define who you are for you…that you belong to some notion or idea is NOT Christ’s message.  Christ’s message is to be “born again”, from this life into His.  Born again means throwing off the definitions of this world for who you are and returning once again to the perfect moral innocence you had as a child.  Where on the day of your reason you looked around and knew that you were YOU, alone, and nothing and no one else was you and that you were GOOD.  And that it was RIGHT and TRUE and GOOD to be you and to live.  And that this–being you–is the end of your existence; its absolute purpose.  To be you.  And to affirm that same level of moral innocence in others by loving them for THEIR existence as human beings having innate worth before God.  And by this, we affirm that we can know God as the Creator of this good life, and thank Him, not despise Him for birthing us into a hell on earth which demands that each and every one of us sacrifice ourselves to some idea, some standard which someone ELSE has decided for us that we must conform to in order to truly live.

And that…that life of you and you alone, by no standard except the innate goodness of your very material being as a creation of God is the life we love, and that is the life we do not dare despise.

In the next post on this subject, we will look at the particular Primary Consciousness of “Bible”, as is espoused by Christians who would call themselves Biblicists.  We will look at why this approach shares the same destructive outcomes as Calvinism/Reformation theology, and why replacing allegorical hermeneutics with “literal” hermeneutics is basically the same thing:  saying the Bible is the standard of TRUTH is no different and has no better moral outcome than saying Reformed interpretive premises are the standard of TRUTH.

A Right to Believe Does Not Make it a Right Belief: Parsing Politics, Ethics, and Epistemology

Metaphysics

In one of her most recent posts, Dee of http://www.wartburgwatch.com declares that she vociferously defends the right of neo-Calvinists to believe what they want to believe, while at the same time making it plain that she rejects it, and would reject it to the point of becoming a giant nuisance.  You can believe what you want, and she’ll say bring on the freedom of speech.  But then, look out.  It won’t come cheap.  And she’ll take the cost of your right to believe right out of your ass.

I wrestled with this idea a lot yesterday.  I wrote a post about it…but still, I found myself unsatisfied.  I hadn’t found the core.  I didn’t get to that place where all the contradiction and “mystery” unravels into a seamless progression of rational thought.  Now I know that this does not always translate into a lucid, straightforward post…yes, I get that.  I understand that what is first in my mind a seamless progressions of thoughts ends up on the blog as a convoluted, mosh-pit of ideas, spangled with parenthesis, hyphens, and logical roller coasters…with loops.

That’s fine.  I don’t mind that.  I have often thought that perhaps I need to invent new words for some of this stuff.   My lexicon is sometimes an insufficient vehicle for what I want to express.  But as long as I have it up here [taps head] straight, I’m happy.

And yesterday…hmm, I just didn’t go to bed happy.  There was still something missing.  And there was this little nagging feeling that perhaps I had been a little too hard on Dee.  You see, I get what she’s trying to say, it’s just that I think she makes the same kind of connections in her thinking that we all do, but which are not really, when you think about it, rationally defensible.  Since we have, I submit, wholly conceded, ipso facto, Platonism as utter absolute (we are merely extensions of some invisible primary consciousness which determines our lives, and require “gifted” men to lead us in the right direction), most of us give little to no thought of philosophy.  Epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, art, politics…they all get crammed together into one soup, with all the parts and flavors mixing together until you really can’t tell one ingredient from the next.  The answer to the question of politics tastes and feels on the tongue the same as your opinion on art, or morality.  Every answer is from the same can,so the philosophical underpinning of each subject we engage in is exactly the same.  We accept all the same “truths” at once, assuming they all click nicely together like Legos.  You string them along in your arguments and you never realize that you just squeezed a Lincoln Log between two Lego pieces, and a few pieces down the line, you tried to connect the Legos to an Erector set.  And that’s why your argument never really works, and falls apart as soon as you let go…that is, as soon as you allow it to leave the soup can of your mind.

And this is why philosophy is so important.  If we are ignorant of philosophy, we will ultimately try to apply our entire belief system into a paradigm which will at best contradict itself logically, and at worst lead straight into moral relativism which always leads to the destruction of man because it leaves man without any epistemological anchor.  And without an anchor, human beings simple crash around and get in each others’ way until the person with the biggest gun and no compunction about using it just forces everybody the fuck out of his way and into a corner where he can keep a Gestapo’s eye on them.  You see, without a single, objective, undeniable and wholly reasonable (reasonably argued) standard of TRUTH, which is also simultaneously the standard for GOOD, which is also the standard of EXISTENCE (the fusing of the epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics of philosophy into one absolute standard of TRUTH, I submit) it will always boil down to violence.  And that is why I spend all of my time savaging Reformed doctrine.  Because when all the lofty standing on “orthodox” ceremony is gone and there remains only the quiet silence of the individual soul, alone in a room with a single bulb and a curtain-less window reaching out into the black, starless night there will be no comfort found in that philosophy.   At the deepest and darkest places of life it ultimately abandons man to the feral, savage will of the forces of determinism.  Once all the mystics with their phylacteries and books and worship bands and “care” groups and “gospel-centered”, “cross-centered” gnostic speeches are gone, and along with them the groping, salivating, brainless masses who follow them straight into a their black hole of existence, there will be only you remaining.

And in that small, bare room with its single blub and black windows there is only one question that will be on your mind:

If THEY aren’t here, am I still here?

And the answer to that question will either bring you comfort or naked despair.

*

I have said it once and I will say it again:  Reformed theology is a vile, evil thing.  It is merely another bastard child of Plato’s, with every doctrine pointing to only one “logical” conclusion. YOU do not really exist.  You are part of a theo-Marxist collective and the existence-razing divine determining force…and absolutely nothing more.  You owe your existence to forces outside of you, reducing you to a mindless brute by virtue of the fact that if you aren’t in control of you, and thus you cannot make any claim to knowledge at all.  And that is how you are looked at and treated.  The Bible is a rectangular, leather bound primary consciousness, whose authors have “special” access to dispensed knowledge (gnosis) that is simultaneously inaccessible to you as a function of your rote existence AND absolute TRUTH…which makes it, though you cannot possible apprehend it nor integrate it, absolutely relevant to your life.

And here is what Dee from Wartburg Watch says…paraphrasing:  I will vociferously defend your right to believe what you believe.

And it is this kind of thing which perfectly illustrates the philosophical problem I mentioned above.  In this one sentence, Dee combines politics, epistemology, and ethics into a single thought, and in the process creates a rational conundrum that seriously vexes.  She makes no rational distinction between a right to believe and the rightness of that belief.  I’m not saying she does this on purpose…but a failure to approach the issue rationally may indeed lead one to conclude, as it did me, that Dee is speaking out of both sides of her mouth.  On the one, she applauds the fact that one believes an idea, and seeks to teach it to the masses.  On the other, she declares her rejection of it on the basis that she concedes that it is so flawed that she could likely not remain on friendly terms with those teaching it…according to the right they have, that she defends, to do so.  So, she fights on both sides.

So what is the conundrum?  Well, that’s obvious.  How in the heck can you make a moral declaration that you will support the politics of an idea (its integration into society) while at the same time declare the idea a rank epistemological failure; and so vile that you’d risk open confrontation with its proteges in order to check it?  Yes, how do you do that without contradicting yourself…that is,without holding a contradictory ethic?  The “good” right to believe and teach an idea AND the “evil” believing and teaching of that idea.

Do you you see?

What I am saying is that there is no way that Dee, nor any of us, can morally declare that we will defend the right of someone to believe and teach an idea/doctrine/theology/etc. that we find morally repugnant.  Or even worse, that we can reasonably PROVE is morally repugnant.  If we truly concede that the idea is destructive, then we cannot proclaim that anyone has a “right” to believe it.  It is that simple, because that is a moral contradiction in terms.  We are conceding that the idea is both “good” and “evil”, and that is rationally impossible.  We are saying it is good to believe and bad to believe simultaneously.  Like I said in the title, the right to believe does not make the belief right.  And if it isn’t a right belief, then on what moral grounds do we declare that anyone has a right to believe it? On the contrary, we should demand that no one believe it, for indeed it is truly destructive.

Now, am I suggesting that people don’t have the right to believe what they want to believe?

No, I am not.  What I am arguing is that when we approach issues we should not integrate the apples and oranges of philosophy as if they were the same, which is what Dee did.  We need to focus on the relevant philosophical issue in question, which in the case of confronting evil and abusive church doctrines, is epistemological and ethical, NOT political.  Like I said in my last post, declaring that the neo-Calvinist despots have a right to believe what they want is utterly irrelevant to the debate, and it simply confuses the issue and I think, gives false assurance to those espousing destructive philosophies.  It allows them to confuse the “right to believe” with the “rightness of what they believe”.  For our message should always an only be that we deny the doctrine categorically, as evil and destructive.  The right to believe it is beside the point.  We are making a moral and epistemological argument, not a political one.  Meaning, we are not really discussing the “rights” question, as a function of the limits of a government’s authority (force/punishment) and/or the legal boundaries of individual citizens, when we take the neo-Cals to task for their rational larceny.

Further, what do we really mean when we say “you have a right to believe whatever you want”?  We are not declaring that you have the right to foist upon the masses an unethical philosophy which has no practical purpose except to drive men and women and children to their knees in service to an ecclesiastical authority and their political agenda, and which at the same time strips them of their very humanity and drives God as far from them and their existence as possible by placing them in a total metaphysical vacuum of determinism.  And further, MUST be rooted in lies and deception if it is not consistent with the only objective and rational standard of all TRUTH:  human life.

No, the “right to believe” has nothing to do with making any belief right, nor demanding that any belief be tolerated.

The right to believe what you want is not a moral issue, nor is it an epistemological issue.  It is political. Defending someone’s right to believe has nothing to do with defending the belief at all.  I would never and will never defend anyone’s right to believe a wicked and destructive theology which I submit cannot stand the light of reason to be shone upon it.  Because there is no such right.  No one has the right to be a tyrant.  And further, proclaiming that someone has a right to hold to totalitarian ideas which do nothing except feed human beings to the machine of abstract collectivism is a complete misrepresentation of the right of free thinking and free speech.  The rights thereof have nothing to do with being a rank psychopath or ignoramous…for no one anywhere on earth, nor any Government can prevent a dolt from being a dolt and and a sadist from being a sadist. So why are we talking about people having a right to do something which no one and nothing on earth can prevent?  It is ludicrous and irrelevant to consider THINKING a “right”. Thinking is what all human beings do.  It is even impossible to wholly prevent someone from acting upon their assumptions.  If one truly thinks a certain way, they will act a certain way…there will be some manifestation of it.  You may prevent some behaviors by fear or force, but if someone’s thoughts define their reality, they will act.  And you cannot stop them.  You can punish them, perhaps, but you cannot prevent assumptions from becoming actions…at least not entirely.

And now we get to the point, then.  Defending someone’s right to believe has nothing to do with curtailing or not curtailing an existential byproduct of a human life–thinking and volitional action (with exceptions of violence).  It has to do with this:  the right to believe is the idea that no one can FORCE you to believe something.  I may not defend your right to believe John Calvin, but I do defend your right not to have your mind changed through violence…physical, psychological (fear, manipulation, deception, propaganda), or confiscatory (theft).  And this is not the same thing as defending their right to believe what they believe.  The do not have a right to sit back and never be held accountable for their destructive beliefs.  They do not have a right to walk out their despicable ideas unchallenged and without criticism.  In the public square, they will and shall be spoken of, their assumptions razed, and they may not use force to stop us.  They have no right to force others to their beliefs.

And that is where Dee went wrong.  As I said, the threat of force is not from those of us who hate abuse and understand that abuse is due to a theology of FORCE, which compels and threatens and punishes people into submission, utterly denying THEIR “right to believe”.  The threat of this kind violation has always been from the Reformed crowd, and quite frankly, they are the ones who should be reassuring Dee about her “right to believe” what she wants, not the other way around.  Dee should never have gone there.  Dee is not threatening excommunication or church discipline (punishment) upon anyone disagreeing with her.  I mean, as much as I don’t care for Dee’s disposition I will say that the worst she will ever do, I submit, is kick someone off her blog.  That is hardly on par with the kind of appalling behavior the neo-Calvinist crowd inflicts upon its detractors.  And of all people, Dee should know this.

Trust me, after 15 years in SGM, I can tell you they don’t give a shit about your right to believe.  And it is my opinion that they would certainly use civil force to punish their members for incongruent or critical thinking or actions if they had the power.

So…the inherent right not to be FORCED to change your mind is what is confusingly called a “right to believe”.  That phrase is counterproductive and obscures the real issue:  changing thinking by offering better ideas.  Like I said, no one has a right to be a manipulative tyrant, and they don’t have a right to proclaim the “divine gnosis” without being criticized and challenged publicly.

So…let’s keep up the good work.  And let the Reformed crowd worry about OUR right to believe, instead of the other way around.  For they are the epistemological and moral and political threat.  Our strength is not fear-mongering, or epistemological charades, or moral relativism designed to confuse and subdue.  Our strength is our ideas.

“Winter Wartburg Follies”: The right to choose what people believe makes what they believe good? Another logical puzzle from our friends at the Wart.

Calvinism/Philosophy

“Please understand that I have no beef with any church and their selection of primary and secondary doctrine. I may disagree with the doctrinal emphasis or even the core theology of a particular church but I would vociferously defend their right to express and celebrate their beliefs. I would also “elect” not to attend a church that subscribed to the set of beliefs that are described in TULIP, etc. I would be unhappy. Also, given my propensity to verbally emote, in excruciating detail, my disagreements and affirmations, it would stand to reason that the church leaders would be dispirited by my presence as well.”

This is a quote of Dee’s.  She is the moderator and one of the proprietors of www.wartburgwatch.com.  Go ahead and read it…take a moment to think about it.  Try to decide if you can figure out just what point Dee is trying to make here, because I must admit that I am struggling.  Maybe we can think this through together and come up with something coherent.

I’ll wait.

[tick tock]

Finished?

Good.  Now, let’s examine this intellectual puzzle, because Dee, if nothing else, is very prolific, almost prodigious, when it comes to pithy remarks that contradict multiple points in a single breath.  Let’s look at this doozy.  What did you come up with?

Here is what I got:

Dee somehow has managed in her mind to make a complete and practical distinction between  a church “selecting their primary and secondary doctrine” and that same church actually practicing those doctrines.  Meaning, if you read her quote, she is utterly in favor of, and would support any given church selecting whatever doctrine they want to teach and be taught, regardless of how oppressive and destructive to humanity it might be I presume; and yet at the same time she reserves the right to disagree with—which means oppose—the actual implementation (teaching) of that doctrine that she is so happy they selected.

Hmm…wait.  No.  That’s not it.  Or is it?  I’m so confused.  She’s okay with them choosing what they believe, and yet she disagrees with what they believe.  And that can only mean that she does have a problem with them believing what they believe.  No…wait.  She has doesn’t have a problem with their right to believe what they believe, but she has a problem with what they believe. But if they don’t actually choose it, then how can she know that any right has been exercised so that she can affirm the right?  No…okay, let’s see.

Okay, here it is: Believing the doctrine is their right, it’s just that she doesn’t like the doctrine.  She just likes that they believe it.  Why?  I guess because they have a right to believe it.

So…er.  What in the hell does that have to do with anything?  I mean, as far as I can tell, no one is threatening to impose martial law on the neo-Calvinist churches.  In fact, the only ones interested in martial law are the Calvinists, I submit.  If there is anyone who should be reassuring the opposition that they have no interest in denying anyone’s right to believe what they believe, it should be the fucking Reformed crowd.

Still, I’ve gotta work through this.  Bear with me.

Hmm…you like the right but hate the belief; and yet there is no right without the belief, because rights are irrelevant and don’t functionally exist unless they are being exercised, and often times exercised in service to beliefs you hate.  But there is no distinct dichotomy between rights and actions, so the real debate isn’t “right”.  Rights are merely a vehicle for ideas.  The ideas still need to be destroyed even if they are exercised as a “right”.

Yep…yeah.  I think I’ve got it.  The right to believe what you believe is totally irrelevant.  Ideas are the issue. Not politics.

Of course, such pointless diversions aren’t, unfortunately, a joke.  We aren’t discussing rights, we are discussing evil ideas which destroy humanity.  It is this kind of thinking which kneecaps Dee, and many other discernment bloggers’ argument against abuse in the church.  Talking out of both sides of one’s mouth makes for no effective rebuttal of a Reformed Orthodoxy that has been codified, systematized, synthesized, and fully integrated into Western thinking for going on 600 years.  And this is why today Christianity has become little more than a collection of mutually exclusive ideas meant to convey a cohesive belief system which is good for nothing except propagandizing the masses in service to a theocratic Marxist “state”.  Be it a full fledged theocracy collective like Calvin’s Geneva, or the tyrannical mystic  Marxism of today’s Reformed “local” church.

Now, now…I know what you are thinking.  All Dee is doing is proclaiming the right of people in this country to believe what they want, and the commensurate right of people to believe differently.  Yeah, yeah…I get that.  I am an Enlightenment-American (my new hyphenated label…you like it?), and utterly deny the right of government to enforce morality except in the cases of direct violations against person and property.  That being said, I too, have no problem with people believing what they want; nor do I have any problem with standing up and expressing my opinion that what they believe is stark naked bullshit.

But here is the difference.  First, I submit, after spending much time on a her blog, that Dee does not make a connection between what people choose to believe-their assumptions–and how what they believe drives abuse in the church.  She doesn’t think that “celebrating” an evil, destructive doctrine will lead to human sacrifice in the form of all manner of horror.  I think to her, “celebrate” means happy and nice and loving.  And thus, “celebrations” of ideas always will lead to life, regardless of what those ideas are.  So, the tyranny is only caused, not by celebrating or choosing ideas, but by meanies whose mommies just never taught them any manners.  Could I be misreading Dee?  I suppose, but I have not seen it myself.  I still have not yet seen Dee make a connection between ideas and abuse.  Just “bad people” and abuse.  Or, people who are not “doing” the ideas “right”. Like, it can’t be the ideas’ fault, but if there is abuse, it must be in spite of the doctrinal assumptions, not because of them.  If I am mistaken about this, please send me a link.

Second, and to emphasize my first point, by being completely comfortable with people selecting whatever doctrine they want, Dee, I submit, is again not seeing anything particularly wrong with IDEAS.  The point is not whether people have a right to believe what they want…the inherent right of free thinking and free speech is irrelevant in this fight against the Reformed, neo-Calvinist juggernaut which is slowly coagulating Christianity into a violent, theo-Marxist altruistic hoard.  The point is that ideas matter…more than anything.  You can’t on the one hand be completely complacent about the fact that there is a growing denomination of Christian influence which is substituting life for death as the yard stick of man’s moral GOOD, and then turn around and condemn them on your popular blog for “celebrating” the very ideas you just said they have every right to implement…to foist at the point of oppressive “church discipline” upon the masses.  You can’t condemn doctrine and laud it too, is my point, and this is exactly what I believe Dee does in her statement.

The fact is one cannot ever celebrate any group of people choosing to accept and teach a belief system which categorically concedes the singular premise that DEATH is GOOD.  I don’t really give a shit if Dee thinks they have a right to believe what they want.  Again, what does that have to do with anything?!  You can believe that a friggin monkey built Disneyland…that isn’t the point of a “discernment blog”.  The point is to confront abuse…the rape of children, the fleecing of innocent parishioners in service to a money-lusting Pastor, the installation of idiot twenty-somethings in positions of “authority” (force) over mature and seasoned men and women, the relegation of women away from their own self-perpetuation and self-fulfillment in a free society to a “biblical role” which denies them any natural right to pursue their own interests and talents as categorical human equals.

And you will never confront abuse by “celebrating” the fact that everyday another church falls prey to the mystic despotism which is sweeping through our great faith like the Orc hoards of Isengard.

So, sure…they have a right to choose their beliefs.  They have a right to practice their beliefs.  But the don’t have the right to tell me that it isn’t stark, raving rational larceny.  And they don’t have the right to say it isn’t abusive.  And they don’t have the right to deceive the communities of our great nation in service to their own will to power.

You know…hmm.  I hate all this talk of “rights”.  It’s just…well, it’s just fucking irrelevant, like I said.  So, scratch that last paragraph as just ranting.  Rather…again, their “right” is immaterial.  Getting into this “rights” business is a red herring.  Better said, they have an evil doctrine, and it should not be tolerated by anyone who concedes that morality is summarized best by doctrines which confess that God actually loves and inherently values his children for who and what they are.  And the whole idea of they have a “right” to it is just pointless, immaterial blabbering. It is only useful for false humility.

Yes…that’s exactly what bothers me about Dee’s “you have a right” business and blah, blah, blah.  It has the appearance of something disingenuous about it.  Like…don’t be scared, I’m really a nice person.  Of course you have a right to your beliefs, we can all get along.  We just need to be nicer, okay? If you guys would just do it like Wade does, we could all go back to baking Christmas cookies, and my commenters could spend more time discussing their love of chocolate and sharing lasagna recipes.

It’s just…trying to assuage the very people who are exercising their rights in about the worst way possible.  It’s totally besides the point.  Your right to believe what you want.  Here’s a newsflash for Wartburg Watch. THAT?  Has never been the issue.  And the fact that you are making it an issue tells me that you still don’t get it.

Abuse is ideas, not politics and not personalities.  Abuse is doctrine.  Period.  Full stop.

And further: The Constitution allows us to have these debates.  It is sad that it seems it has become yet another Wartburg Watch excuse for intellectual laziness.

What is the “Plain Meaning” of Scripture in Light of Man’s Life as the Only Legitimate Standard of TRUTH (part one)

Metaphysics

Church historian, neo-Calvinism scholar and critic, Paul Dohse, has highlighted the difference between two interpretive approaches to Scripture:  the Historical Grammatical approach and the Redemptive Historical Hermeneutic.  For a detailed study of these methods, visit Paul’s site at www.paulspassingthoughts.com.  Briefly, however, the Redemptive approach is what many neo-Calvinists refer to as the “Cross-centered” interpretation of the Bible.  It places all Scripture within the context of the Cross…and truly, this sounds very humble, and deep, and contemplative, and studious, and holy.

Trust me. It isn’t.

The premise of this approach is summarized by the famous phrase (or infamous, if you happen to be a Sovereign Grace Ministries survivor like myself, who was cudgeled with this theology for years in that highly dubious institution) “you must preach the gospel to yourself everyday”.  Again, Paul Dohse does an excellent job deconstructing this idea and and exposing it to the wisdom and discernment of the clear light of day, revealing it for the heresy and false teaching that it is.

This hermeneutic, then, demands that the entire Bible be vetted and valued according to the standard of man’s depravity; that man is, at the root of his very being, which thus directly extends the totality of his SELF, morally corrupt and utterly evil.  This doctrine–total depravity, regardless of how the Reformed crowed equivocates their position–demands that man’s sin has nothing whatsoever to do with man’s choices, but instead has everything to do with his very existence.  His person is not only depraved, but is–more accurately stated–DEPRAVITY itself.  As if depravity, which is purely a conceptual abstraction, is a material entity which consumes man and replaces him, physically, as he exists in the universe and before God.  As if depravity itself is a thing.  Of course the implications for God as man’s Creator according to this idea should terrify those who concede it, for truly it makes God not only the author of evil, but makes evil an infinite moral equivalent of God’s goodness.

But it doesn’t terrify them because the nature of this Redemptive interpretation demands that man deny all his rational faculties and his very reason, and thus, whatever heinous implications it and its conjunctive doctrine have for God are shrugged off as nothing more than yet another example of man’s inherent depraved nature and his inability to apprehend God’s “truth”.

Because of this assumption–man’s complete ontological moral failure–all of the Bible is a narrative concerning what you can’t possibly do and what you can’t possibly understand, and thus, Jesus must do for you.  The Bible has nothing of YOU in mind, as if you were in any way sufficient for understanding the gravity of God’s “words”, let alone capable of carrying out His edicts, commandments, moral instructions/imperatives and so forth.  In short, the Bible means only “Cross” to you–your failed epistemology notwithstanding–and is thus merely a treatise of…well, God talking about Himself, period.  The point is that you, your life and existence, is beside the point.  And so the Cross is no longer a symbol of God’s divine love and acceptance of humanity, nor is it regarded as the terrible centerpiece in a glorious act of raw and pure Self-sacrifice for the Creation God loves.  No, the Cross, according to the Redemptive Hermeneutic, is useful for nothing more noble than bludgeoning human beings with their own cosmic worthlessness.

*

The other interpretive method, as I mentioned, is the Historical Grammatical approach.  This is an approach which portends to be quite a bit less allegorical/metaphorical than the Redemptive approach.  Ostensibly, the grammatical approach is more straight forward; an approach to Scripture which relies upon, as I have heard and read, “a plain reading of the text”.  The fundamental assumption of this method, as I have understood it, is that “words mean things”, and that by this very notion man is, by logical extension, capable of apprehending the proper and perfunctory meaning of what he reads; and is further able to efficaciously apply it to his life’s context.  The Scripture is not (entirely) allegorical/metaphorical, but is rather more of a literal work…to be interpreted as literal, and not as an arrow, necessarily, perpetually pointing away from man and to Christ’s “finished work”.  The “work” of pursuing moral goodness is presumed to be as much man’s responsibility as it is Christ’s.  Man is not considered a rank embarrassment to his Creator, but a partner who engages God and apprehends His commands, entreaties, and seeks to apply them.  Ostensibly, the Grammatical method assumes that man is not fundamentally flawed metaphysically and epistemologically, and is therefore in a position to apply and understand what he reads in the Bible.

A person who interprets the Bible according to the Grammatical approach, using an adjective I have only recently heard (the last year or so), might be referred to as a “biblicist”; while an employer of the Redemptive approach might be known as…well, a Calvinist.  For indeed, the “Cross-centered” approach was certainly John Calvin’s approach, as even a cursory reading of his Institutes of the Christian Religion will reveal.  And, to be honest, I submit that all of Reformed orthodoxy presumes a “Cross-centered” hermeneutic.  There is no Reformed Christian I have ever met who will concede that man at his root has moral equivalency with God, and this makes them Redemptive users by default (all the grammatical approach people are saying “wait a damn minute…we don’t concede that either”…relax, I’ll be getting to you all).  If man is wholly lower than God, morally speaking, then he IS totally depraved.  There is no such rational thing as a dichotomy of both GOOD and EVIL which resides at the root singularity of an individual human being.  It cannot possibly be.  Man is either GOOD or he is EVIL, period.  There is no such thing as an in between…unless we choose to define GOOD and EVIL as pure abstractions (which they are), in which case man is at his root physical being, morally innocent, abstracting “good” and “evil” for practical (life and self-affirming) purposes.  Which makes Good and Evil purely functions of assumptions which drive actions (which they are).  But more on that later.

Now, while I truly do appreciate the ostensible intention of the grammatical interpretive approach, which is to provide a credible rebuttal to the humanity-razing juggernaut of Reformed theology, I must confess that in practical reality I find disturbingly little difference in this approach from the redemptive approach when you get past the “plain meaning” of the grammatical assumption and realize that there is, in fact, no such thing as a “plain” meaning of any text…at least not in the sense that I submit they think it means, which is: that words exist in a vacuum of epistemology and language; that words have meaning outside of the context of a human life now…that is, at the moment the human being is considering them and their implications.  Because their implications and their meaning is always going to be first and singularly a function of the individual human agent who is, again, considering them NOW, at the moment that agent exists…which is always NOW.  Meaning, you always, inexorably exist now…not before, after, later, or in past; you ARE is an axiomatic metaphysical statement (not to be confused with God’s I AM, which is both a metaphysical statement and a positional statement: CREATOR of THAT which YOU ARE and all you observe) and therefore, the words you consider will always be subject to YOUR present context…words simply cannot exist outside of the context of an individual human being.  And that is the reason that there is absolutely no non-contextual, literal, and plain meaning of any text.  All text is vetted by the life of the individual human being engaging them at that moment, and no other.

Let me slow it down a bit.

The truth, I submit, behind the phrase “the plain meaning of the text” is that somehow the only real difference between the grammatical approach and the redemptive approach is, well…merely a matter of semantics, so to speak.  That is, both actually believe that the Biblical text has a “plain” meaning.  They simply disagree about what that plain meaning is.  The redemption crowd will claim that the “plain” meaning of the text is an allegory for Christ’s “work” on the Cross (I find that term funny…I have never heard of someone undergoing an execution as “working”), and that to the specially enlightened and called, this is perfunctorily self-evident.  They would likely suggest that one could simply realize that, per his or her total depravity, the entire Bible (except for the bits that the Young Earth folks draft into the service of their faux science) is a treatise on man’s categorical need for CROSS because the entire Bible can “plainly” be seen as a divine proclamation of man’s moral bankruptcy, as well as a perpetual cosmic flogging to drive him to his ontological death through visceral pain, shame, suffering, and naked embarrassment.

The grammatical crowd, on the other hand, claims that the “plain” meaning of the text is the text.  That the words mean what they mean; and I suppose the point is that interpretation of the text then is not actually necessary.  The words speak for themselves, in the scriptural context as well as any other…for the words have a “literal” and a “plain” meaning which is transferable from context to context to context; from time and place to time and place, to this person or that.  And thus, since there is no context to consider, it is insinuated that the reader should be able to simply pick up the biblical text and superimpose it upon his or her life with no regard for the historical setting of the bible, the view of the writer, or his or her own life, which again, quite literally and plainly in its own right, is the root of all truth for that individual.  The “plain” meaning is a one-size-fits-all approach, with the usual equivocations (when you read the literature) allowing for the inherent logical failures which prove that the exception to the rule means that the rule is utterly irrelevant.  Not that that matters.  You see, just as with any other scholar trying to defend the holes in his theory by merely adjusting its definition as the criticisms arise, you will find plenty of apologists for this approach who will declare that the “plain” meaning of the text doesn’t actually apply to the parts of the bible which are obviously figurative.  Of course, what they either ignore or fail to realize is that “text” is just another term for “words”, and if words have a “plain” and “literal” meaning, which is somehow its root which is removed from context, standing alone in a hermeneutic vacuum, then figurative language is quite impossible.  For if Jesus Christ is the Lion of Judah, then the “plain meaning” demands that Jesus walks on four legs and roars.  Obviously, this is ludicrous.  So what is the reader supposed to make of the phrase “Lion of Judah”?  He or she is supposed to apply it to the context of human life and realize the metaphorical meaning of it and the resulting implications and then act accordingly, as the notion serves to perpetuate and affirm his or her individual human existence.  Thus, the REAL meaning of words is always contextual…it is, in fact, never “literal”.  What they describe as the infinite “plain” meaning is really but one usage of any given term, phrase, or text, depending on, again, context.  There is no vacuum of meaning, and thus, no meaning is ever plain.  Interpretation of words by individual human beings is always demanded.  And this means that words cannot interpret themselves, but require a standard of TRUTH in order that their meaning and value be determined…that is, used in efficacious service to that standard.

The standard of TRUTH, again, is the only rational one we can concede:  individual human life.  There is no other standard.  For any standard ever defined must start with human life.  The creator of the standard IS the standard.  Man gets to define TRUTH as himself…his life, by pure and rank default, which is his very existence as a conscious self-aware agent.  All ideas must affirm him in order to be true.  Yes, even God.

And God does affirm, make no mistake.  He is the paragon of affirmation.  He is the Creator.  And if that is not affirming human individual life then really, what the hell is?

(Stay tuned for part two)

The Unknowable Gospel According to Wade Burleson: Why Reformed theologians cannot confront evil, and give succor to abuse

Calvinism/Philosophy, Metaphysics

In his usual Calvinist form:

“When the act of confronting evil is borne out of a desire for personal gain (healing), then the confrontation itself is in danger of becoming actively evil by seeking to take from or harm another human being for one’s personal profit and pleasure.”

Wade Burleson, E-Pastor, www.wartburgwatch.com

And this is an astute comment by David, from the previous post’s thread:

“Besides that, aren’t the Calvinists forgetting their own supposed doctrines of justification by faith alone and once saved always saved? If you have faith in Jesus and you happen to engage in the “sin” (falsely-so-called) of rejoicing when the Calvinist enemies of God get squashed, what’s God going to do to you? Damn you? My oh my! They’ve forgotten their own theology.”

My response:

David…of course you are completely right about this. Like Lydia said before, it is mystifying the level of cognitive dissonance that passes for “truth”.

But I submit they haven’t forgotten their theology; on the contrary, they are quite conscious of its inherent rational flaws.  They are aware, and simply do not care.  Rational flaws, you see, get punted into the cosmic abyss of God’s mystery (thanks to John Immel for his most excellent phraseology) So, its not a memory problem, it is a philosophical one.  They fully concede that “mystery”–what I refer to as rank contradictions in assumptions; because there can be NO mystery inherent in any legitimate epistemology–is at the root of their belief system.  They have no problem surrendering their reason to a theology that ultimately declares them completely inadequate vessels for knowledge.  The reason Wade pushes for being “nice” and “graceful” to rank evil actions is precisely because he is FULLY AWARE that his doctrine demands immoral equivalency (the hardworking, church going old man is as morally corrupt as the 18 year old SGM child rapist).  So, it is always best to fall back on “but for the grace of God go I”, lest you be “evil” in confronting “evil”.

Now, let’s look at this “evil in confronting evil” Burleson-ism again, because it speaks volumes as to how dangerous these Reformed pastors are; and how inadequate they are as teachers of…well, anything, but particularly God’s moral standards.  This idea of “being evil, or having evil motives in confronting evil” is a wholly impossible scenario.  Because if there is evil in your assumptions for confronting evil, then your problem is that you don’t have a real definition of evil, and thus, cannot be in a position to confront it, because you don’t really know what it is.  Your assumptions drive your actions, you see, and if your assumptions are wrong then so is the definition of what you think you are confronting.

That might be a little confusing.  Let me see if I can break it down.

What I mean is that if you are a hypocrite, you cannot really confront evil.  It takes a proper understanding of evil to confront evil…and if you had a proper understanding then your motive for confronting evil would be naturally good.  By Wade’s statement above it is clear that his assumptions cannot ever place him in a position to truly confront evil because he concedes, I submit, that he cannot really define evil; and that is reason enough to scare people off of Reformed theology .  Again, if you truly think that evil assumptions can drive behavior which confronts evil, then it is obvious that your very definition of evil is flawed.

That is why this doctrine is so vile…it destroys all moral definitions and creates a cult of moral relativism.  You MUST surrender all your judgements to the mystics who are, somehow, the ONLY ones in a position to have true revelations; to be in a position to possess real, efficacious “truth”.  And these men will stand at the podium and teach people that it is not really possible for you to confront evil in your lives; and to teach you that “healing” is somehow selfish gain.  It is a dreadfully un-Christian and unbiblical theology.  They completely distort the notions of mercy and “turning the other cheek” and “not rejoicing over ones enemies”.  The real reason Christians are to act in mercy and grace is not because all people are morally bankrupt and worthless and therefore cannot possess knowledge of anything with any certainty, but because they HAVE fundamental worth,and are thus fully capable of making rational and epistemologically sound moral distinctions…because they understand that all TRUTH starts with the human life, which is their singular, inexorable, perpetual frame of reference.  We respect the fundamental goodness of the humanity of all people as God’s creation, which is why we are not to take pleasure in the fact that there are some people who choose to deny their own selves, and God in the process, by engaging in wickedness.  Like David said, we are to ultimately rejoice in the destruction of evil (not people) because it represents the triumph of God and man’s existence; and we are to reject belief systems which demand man’s death in service to some subjective standard outside himself.

You see, Calvinist theology rejoices in the death of MAN, while true Christian theology rejoices in the death of EVIL.  And this is really the crux of the difference between God’s truth and the World’s truth.  The world loves external, subjective standards.  They smirk and smile when they think of “god” (whatever primary consciousness happens to be in question at the moment…political party, culture, race, tribe, science, philosophy, nation, “bible”, leader, cult, CJ Mahaney etc., etc.) bringing destruction to cities full of people.  But godly philosophy laments the destruction of humanity…it cries like the prophets at the thought of God’s creation being consumed in His wrath.  It pleads and begs with humanity, like God does so often, to turn from its wicked ways; its denial of human self and human life and God’s truth.  It does not take pleasure and get giddy about the destruction of human beings.

But Reformed theology does.  Because goodness only comes in spite of man, never because of man.  To them, God hates you with a hate that has no end.  If there is any love towards you it is only because, somehow God has possessed you, in spite of you.  He loves Himself, and that’s all.

But back to my other point:  it is not that they have horrible memories when it comes to their theology, it is that they totally concede that God’s “mystery” is the backbone of all physical and metaphysical and epistemological reality.

But the problem is that anything which is truly an “unknowable” mystery cannot possibly be relevant to man’s life.  If it is outside of man’s capacity to integrate into how he organizes his environment, then it is pointless.  Mystery cannot ever be rationally grafted into any serious philosophy.  “Allowing for mystery” is one thing, but it is unreasonable to actually ACT on what is NOT known, which is precisely Wades’ point:  all your behavior is in service to that which you don’t know…which is, according to his doctrine of Total Depravity, everything.  You and life your life exist as a purely function of God’s mystery.  Which means that there cannot ever be a YOU in there because YOU can’t even really know YOU…you are a vessel with a hole in the bottom.  Whatever truth you think you have is fleeting, nebulous…never still and always just out of reach.

They think:  well, we’ll understand in heaven. But the problem with this idea is that if whatever you don’t know isn’t actually relevant NOW, then there is no reason to think it will be relevant THEN.  If it isn’t going to help you to get to heaven, because you can’t know it, then it is meaningless. And if it is only relevant in heaven then why bother even bringing it up now?  Concentrate on what you KNOW, not what you don’t.  And if the sole end and beginning of its relevance is “trust God’s mystery”, then…well, where is the reason behind that statement?  It goes right back to the fundamentals of Reformed epistemology:  there is no way you can ever really know anything, because your mind is ultimately corrupt.  You are to trust that God is doing things in your life that you don’t understand, and so you just let go and let all manner of life happen.  Because confronting evil? Isn’t possible for you, really.  So turning the other cheek to a slap in the face becomes turning the other cheek to a serial rapist in your church.  And the fact that Reformed epistemology is utterly rooted in “God is doing things you can’t understand” means your understanding is irrelevant to life and living; both now and in heaven.  Assuming that people who engage in a wholesale rejection of humanity actually get there.

You are not really you.  That is the beginning and end of Reformed theology.  And that is why discernment blogs which do not confront the doctrine will never curb abuse. Because, as I said before, to them–exhibit A being, I submit, the Wartburg Watch–evil is a disposition, not a philosophy.  As long as you are nice, you must be good.  And they never realize that by conceding the doctrine they have conceded that they cannot possibly qualify “nice” in the first place.  They have no definition of good or evil, and so they cannot have a definition of anything else.

Remember, any philosophy which does not require man’s life to be true will require man’s death to the same objective.

Can Confronting Evil Be Itself Evil?: Examing another peculiar Burleson-ism

Calvinism/Philosophy, Metaphysics

Reading Wade Burleson’s latest post on his site, www.wadeburleson.org, he offers this disturbing insight:

When the act of confronting evil is borne out of a desire for personal gain (healing), then the confrontation itself is in danger of becoming actively evil by seeking to take from or harm another human being for one’s personal profit and pleasure.

Personal healing is “profit and pleasure”? Hmm…

But that’s not really the big problem.  The big problem is, once again, Wade’s doctrinal assumptions.  Okay…first, the boring stuff, then will examine the comment in all its Reformed glory.

Oh, before that, and by the way, I submit that a comment like this is merely a further reminder to us that Reformed pastors do not belong within a hundred miles of a church pulpit.  Run.  Run home.  Lock your doors and bar the windows.  For I have seen the zombie apocalypse, and the virus comes in the form of smiling Calvinists.

The beginning and end of all epistemology, that is, all knowledge, is the individual human SELF (which I describe as the inexorable condition of the physical body merged with the conceptual “I”; or the physical self and the conceptual self).  It is categorically axiomatic that the entirety of one’s life is comprised of a single infinite agent, and by physical extension this also applies to the root of man’s epistemology (how he knows what he knows, via conceptual abstractions):  oneself.  There is no disputing this.  There is no rational disagreement.  You must EXIST before you can know anything; therefore, all knowledge you have begins and ends with you.  Again, you are the singular infinite constant in your life.  This perspective forms the epistemological root of the conceptual human self.

All your actions have one single, infinite agent…the constant of your physical existence:  you (oneself).   And this means that all actions must be in service to YOU.  Because you are the infinite absolute in your mind and in your body, everything is done, literally, OF yourself and BY yourself.  That is, you can have no thought and perform no action which is NOT ultimately and infinitely self-serving.  This is the nature of man’s existence.  As soon as man concedes “I” and “I think”, there is no turning back.  He has embarked on a journey of the SELF, and again, all things are thought and all things done in direct service to the self.

This is a difficult thing to grasp, I understand…for many will argue that suicide, for instance, or “selfless living”, or “sacrificial giving” is proof that my statement is false.  But think about it for a minute…how do you commit suicide while denying yourself?  How do you sacrificially give or selflessly live apart from yourself?  Every action is in service to an assumption/abstraction/idea/concept, and that assumption was derived from YOU, according to an idea that YOU accepted was GOOD.  Your ability to BE is the direct source of every idea you concede or deny, doctrine you hold or retreat from, every revelation you accept or reject.  And this is to say then that for whatever reason YOU conceded the truth of the idea you act in service to; YOU had to decide to integrate it.  The action then must be likewise of you, and the outcome then must also, logically, lead squarely back to you.  You commit suicide because YOU have decided it is GOOD, and the same for “sacrificial giving” and “selfless living”.  GOOD for whom?  For others?  It is impossible for others to be the DIRECT beneficiary of what you think and do.  The first and infinite and absolute cause is YOU…thus, any actions and consequences are directly in service to yourself infinitely and absolutely, regardless of how you might qualify them by some kind of external, abstract standard of “Good and Evil”.  You commit suicide because it suits YOU first. You give to the Calvinist despot behind the plexiglass because it suits YOU first…there is no such thing as “putting others before yourself” in any metaphysically rational way; there is only loving others AS yourself.

And why others?  Because we know that we are human selves by observation; and the greatest affirmation that our observations are valid and efficacious is the interaction we have with other people.  Language confirms our ability  co-organize our environment effectively for life, and thus confirms the existence of other “selves”.  And by observing them, we know that we are indeed a true and valid SELF.  Therefore, our observation confirms BOTH us and others as whole, actual, human individuals.

But make no mistake, the idea that you can live for others, or that you somehow can exist without being the FIRST and most important beneficiary of your life is a lie.  And further, it is a truism that the only reason you can do good is because you ARE good…remember that. Because this is something that Wade will never concede with any metaphysical certainty.

And that is why his doctrine is false and worships death.

Actions which are in service to “death”, that is, the denial and destruction of the SELF cannot possibly be GOOD, because they fundamentally deny the existence of the SELF, which must EXIST before GOOD can have any value or meaning.  Thus, Wade’s statement is a logical fallacy; an epistemological impossibility, and it is rooted in again a philosophy which worships death, NOT life.

Self-gain is the ONLY gain.  The idea that an action which is in service to self–even, as Wade says, confronting evil for the purposes of “personal healing”–must be rejected is rape of logic at its worst.  The idea that that somehow human beings getting something of benefit solely for themselves he rejects as evil.  Why?  Because Wade’s doctrine rejects the SELF as any standard of truth.  The idea then is the DEATH of human beings is the greatest “good” they can do.  And this is of course utter nonsense, and isn’t Christian in the least.  It defies human existence completely, and flies in the face of what must be true in order for GOOD  to exist in the world:  man’s LIFE.  If there is no man, then there can be no good…again, this is axiomatic.  It takes a MAN to define good, and it takes a LIFE then for man to exist.  If you don’t exist, and we don’t exist, then GOOD does not exist, because GOOD is an concept that is solely for the benefit of man.  God does not need to be GOOD apart from man…God just needs to be IS.  God only becomes GOOD as he is revealed as Creator.  Whose Creator?  Man’s Creator.  Man understands God is GOOD because God Created his LIFE, and affirms it, and affirms that confronting evil for personal healing is not only acceptable to God but is the single greatest moral action a human being can take.

If you cannot act in service to self, then there is no way you can act in service to anyone else.  Because only YOU can give value to those you observe; your existence is a prerequisite for you defining them as valuable, and thus, worth your thoughts and time and actions and possessions.  Without YOU, in other words, there IS no other, by definition.  So all acts are “selfish” in this sense then.  And the only question which remains then is what are you gathering for yourself?  How are you promoting your own life?  Are you engaging others in a way that declares the inexorable truth that LIFE is GOOD, and that YOU are GOOD?  Are you reaping reward based on the reasonable assumption that you understand your worth by directly observing others?  And are you then functioning according to the rational axiom that this means that THEY must be inherently worthy as well?  If this is your philosophy, you will do good, and you will not have to feel guilty of your gain.  What YOU reap, YOU sow, remember?  And if your life is truly in service to YOU–which then, if YOU is rationally defined, must automatically declare OTHERS of equal worth–then you will reap reward.  You will live life fully, you will be selfish in a way that promotes LIFE, especially your own, not in a way that violates it.

Denying your life in “service” to others is an impossible metaphysical contradiction.  Impossible.  This philosophy is altruism…and altruism is evil.  Altruism denies individuals as the standard of truth.  Altruism HATES life…it sets up a standard outside of man and then demands that he commit suicide in service to it.  That he murder himself, and in the process, deny the humanity and worth of others.  It is passing children through fire; it is not holding them close and saying I love you because God has made you YOU.

So, confronting evil for personal gain is GOOD.  Personal gain derived from a philosophy which lauds human worth is GOOD.  The only way personal gain is evil is if it at the expense of others…as a result of violating others.  But how can confronting evil violate others?  On the contrary, confronting evil for personal gain is the very GOOD God demands of us.  How in the hell can there be any scenario where confronting evil is evil?!  The very notion is a contradiction in terms.  Confronting evil is ALWAYS good…there is no such rational nor Christian thing as confronting of evil being itself an evil act.  That’s simply absurd!  And Wade is a PASTOR?  What, if a man comes into my house intent on murdering me and my family and I stop him…is that not the very definition of personal gain? And is that not also a perfect example of moral good?  Wade’s tongue is like a flailing fish at times, slapping everyone in the boat whilst trying to “reason” with them.

There is absolutely no sense to his statement above at all.  No. Sense.  Do not concede it.  Do not believe it.  Deny it.  YOU are good, and seeking your GOOD, when it is truly GOOD, is GOOD.  There is NO violation of others when you pursue GOOD for yourself.  It is an impossible concept.  Because true good, like true love, will never violate others in service to self.  There is no such thing then as true “healing” or true good which is at the expense of others.  Which makes Wade’s statement categorically irrational.

Violating others is sin, not because it is “not putting others first”; it is sin because a violation of another is tantamount to a violation of YOU.  And if you deny yourself by violating others then who is God supposed to save?  What is God supposed to make of you?  You have denied other, and in doing so must deny yourself, and thus deny God.  And this is why I warn Calvinists so fervently.  When you approach God’s throne with a philosophy that intentionally denies your own existence, what do you expect God to do with you.?  If you cannot acknowledge your moral and existential worth because you have decided that only the REMOVAL (death) of you is “good” before God and others, then what is God going to say, do you think?  He can very well say, without any hypocrisy on His part, “I never knew you.”  Because you have taken it upon yourself to declare yourself irrelevant, and thus non-existent, with respect to truth and goodness, by putting it perpetually away from yourself.  And since TRUTH and GOODNESS can only be efficacious concepts if you EXIST, then you have, by declaring yourself pervasively depraved, removed yourself from the Promise.  For God is a God of not the dead, but the living, remember?

Yes…Avoiding Doctrine Certainly is Less Disruptive and More Nurturing

Calvinism/Philosophy, Metaphysics

“I think part of the reason it hasn’t done so, apart from our own watchful openness, is that Deb/Dee delete comments meant to be disruptive. How many on this thread alone? Thanks, you two!

There will always be a few who arrive in a group wanting it to fail and they need to be disarmed of those intentions, (while also being aware that mere bias is not a reason to disarm). It’s a tough row to hoe, steep learning curve, but there’s no other way to create a nurturing successful group.”

That was a comment left yesterday over at www.warburgwatch.com.

I won’t mention who the commenter was…doesn’t matter.  The point is that this kind of attitude is why discernment blogs are doomed to fail in the long run.  In the short run, there is an uptick in self-esteem…the abused have a voice, ostensibly, and they have a “community” of fellow Christians who pat them on the shoulder and tell them they are going to be just fine…God still loves them, sit down with us, and maybe we’ll organize a little get together in person sometime in the future and all of us can come together and have a great little gathering where we’ll exchange recipes and stories and put names with faces.  Never happens by the way.  It would ruin the the experience, trust me. Faces to names reminds you that human beings are really at stake here, and human beings aren’t the point, they are the problem.  Someone will be too fat, or too thin, or won’t look right, or won’t have the right demeanor, or will be too abrasive, or have the wrong haircut, or be too rich or too poor…they won’t meet that idol of our external standards.  Yep, the people will fuck up the good vibes, because there will be some who just won’t conform in person they way we think they do online. The presence of actual people will be too “disruptive”.  And that’s why it never happens.  Too much baggage…too many opinions, and no moderation.  Also, remember, Church people need a leader, of course, because as the commenter above said, they love nurturing above all else.  They are kind of like dogs and cats that way.  It’s why no one wants to talk about doctrine.

So, as I was saying…these people feel free for the first time in a long time; and this freedom high can last for a while, and it is intoxicating, and beautiful.  Hell, I was right there, man, for well over a year.  I mean, they’ve just gone from a destructive relationship with tyranny to–again ostensibly–a place where they are free to be themselves, to speak their minds, to rail against abuse and shake a righteous fist or two, and rightfully so, at the despots running a large portion of American churches.  Moderators like Dee and Deb, and many others after their same kind, pat them on the shoulder and assure them that they are not crazy.

The only problem is…well, think of it this way:  if a crazy person tells you you’re not crazy then you probably shouldn’t take much comfort in that.

Because here is the problem:  ideas.  Sooner or later people like me and others after MY kind come along and begin to question the point of such a place.  I mean, I was in like Flynn over there at Wartburg Watch for a good while…I even defended Dee and Deb to some of my blogging friends who warned me that they had precious little to contribute to the fight against tyranny; and they certainly weren’t the least bit interested in looking at doctrine.

No, no, I said.  Dee and Deb.  They are good people.  They are nice people.

But I was wrong.

Doctrine.  Yes, that’s another problem.

So I came along and after a while my high was wearing off, and I was getting a little too comfortable.  And this was making me decidedly uncomfortable.  I noticed that we on the blog were becoming…well, just like the commenter above said, too obsessed with being nurtured and shielded by “meanies” who actually wanted Warburg Watch to, you know, generate a philosophy which was able to rationally answer the evil spewing forth like vomit from Reformed churches like SGM.  And I saw that this wasn’t happening, and more, was NEVER going to happen because that was never the point of Wartburg.  Dee and Deb either will not or cannot intellectually confront tyrannical ideas.  That for me was a big problem.

We the commenters were becoming like animals…seeking comfort; to be taken care of, but not particularly seeing any actual VALUE in other human beings, and refusing to define human life as GOOD.  Why? Because confronting doctrine was NOT nurturing.  It was judging and being mean.  And lo and behold, we could never at Wartburg actually define the thing we had been talking about forever:  love.  And that scared the shit out of me.  Human life was not defined as an object of LOVE, a STANDARD of GOOD. There was and is a constant resistance, I submit, to defining just how we know love is love, without ultimately appealing to the “mysteries of God.”  And when I tried to define it, I was accused of trying to “explain God”.  Well, if God is love, shouldn’t love be explained, since love is the whole point of living, then?

But they consistently resisted, and still resist defining a standard of love.  They are unable or unwilling to define just how they understand that love is love; by what yardstick are our actions measured?  Dee and Deb and even Wade do not define love, because love is a philosophical/epistemological/doctrinal topic.  It isn’t emotions; it isn’t saccharine camaraderie; it is something which must be reasoned.  And this scares the shit out of people because once love is a matter of doctrine then all of that discernment blog high, all of that camaraderie goes away.  Because in reality…all of it, must be in service to that which is gauged to be the standard of TRUTH.  And inevitably this standard, by the very doctrine which essentially ALL of these people concede and refuse to renounce, is outside of human beings.  Which means that all of that “nurturing”, all of that “freedom” doesn’t mean a hill of beans.  Sooner or later, the same demands which abused many of the commenters in the past will be made of them once again:  sacrifice yourself to the doctrine.  Accept the suffering and abuse as divine payment for your existence.  When push comes to shove, be willing to die, not for LOVE, because that is never defined, and not for God, for God does not need your death or your life, but for someone’s idea.  An idea which you cannot possibly disagree with because YOU and YOUR LIFE are wholly irrelevant to its truth.

It is only true in spite of you, never because of you.

So, for a while, yes, take comfort in the nurturing; take comfort under the watchful eyes of Dee and Deb  who are ready to pounce with a vengeance on anyone who comes along and says, “The vibe is nice here, but when are we going to discuss WHY abuse happens; and why are we okay with it?”

The “when” is never.  Because what you see on Wartburg Watch is the END of itself.  The lovefest is the whole point.  And notice that abuse still keeps happening.  Every day, new stories here, there and everywhere.  Nothing changes, nothing gets stopped, many words are written, things “publicized”, but there is no real challenge…because the Wartburg lovefest is the end of itself, I submit; there is no loftier objective.  And this is true with not just their site, but most discernment blogs out there.  Because when ideas are off the table as topics of discussion in the interest of actually seeing abuse stop, then all you can reasonably expect is to have a place where mean people like me who are not content to concede the same doctrine he conceded before when he was in the tyrannical shit but only this time in a place that is more “comfortable” and “nurturing”, are removed unceremoniously from the blog as a “disruption”.  When all I want is for someone to stand up and say God likes people, and he thinks they have worth; and thus, loving human life is a TRUTH which is as GOOD as loving God.  And the fact that those who even suggest that a Reformed pastor cannot be in a position to really confront abuse because of their doctrine are booted from “nurturing” blogs should speak volumes as to their priorities.

Because they are really okay with the abuse.  Mark my words.  Now, I’m not suggesting they are okay with it on some kind of intentional, conscious level, or that they are abusers.  What I am saying is that they are on the moral hook for defending their decision to support doctrine that hates humanity…and if they don’t think it does, then they are on the hook for arguing just how someone can be pervasively depraved and yet loved by God; I’m waiting for an answer that is not a contradiction in terms.  It never happens, because you must have the courage to confront orthodoxy, and courage is something they do not possess.  Courage offends people, and so it must be evil.

And what I am saying is that since they have decided that the doctrine (ideas, assumptions) to which theses churches concede to is fine, and doctrinal assumptions which place man in a perpetual state of moral depravity and inadequate epistemology can somehow in no way drive abusive behavior, then they have, ipso facto, deprived themselves of even a single rational argument as to WHY there shouldn’t be abuse in the church.  The doctrine that they defend by their silence (and by the rank silencing of those who would wish to discuss doctrine–in the interests of dismantling abuse the only way that actually works, by destroying the false biblical assumptions which laud it), demands the destruction of human beings.  The scary truth is that human suffering is precisely how we can viscerally know that the doctrine is “sound”.  In other words, suffering and trauma are how we know that God hates evil; because according to Reformed doctrine humanity’s very existence is the root of all evil.  If suffering ceases, if abuse becomes a byword, and removing abuse and suffering becomes a full-on objective of our religion, then it must be conceded that human life is GOOD.  And that is something you will never hear any good Calvinist declare with metaphysical certainty.

Never.

Remember, when one has no rational standard for love, then it becomes impossible for one to really define it.  And that is precisely what is happening at Wartburg Watch.  “No disruption” and “nurturing” have been substituted for real love…for a deep abiding affection for, and a deep desire to affirm and promote human life as the reason we were created and saved in the first place.  Comfort replaces love.  The intoxicating high of the “discernment community” has replaced a true heart for healing the abused.

And this is not “drama”, Julie Anne.  This is serious, serious business.  And the fact that people continue to pretend to care while affirming doctrine that declares people worthless at their metaphysical root is some serious hypocrisy.

The “church” may not be overcome in the end, but I fear that it will be no thanks to the church.

Wade Burleson and Commenter Ken: Defending Wartburg Watch’s community of commenters against Reformed theology’s epistemological madness

Calvinism/Philosophy, The Wartburg Watch Watch

This is a neo-Reformed assault launched against the Wartburg Watch by Wade Burleson and some commenter named Ken.  I have no love for that site as I’m sure you have gathered by now, but I will call out mystic oppression when I see it, and this is mystic lording at its most subtle finest.

Wade Burleson UNITED STATES on Thu Dec 05, 2013 at 10:33 PM said:

ken wrote:

@ dee:

Got tied up with a couple customers, Dee. Wasn’t intending on skipping out that long. I’m very glad you post the majority of people’s comments and show the real world, but it wasn’t really what I was getting at.

 Maybe this would help explain my concern: there is a difference between a genuine comradery that develops when people are drawn to this site because of their painful/wrongful experience with authoritarian leadership in the church (I commend you guys for this) and comradery that results from being analytical and critical (not so good, imo). The latter is my concern in that it produces extremely fertile soil for the seeds of self-righteous banter to take root. I’ve seen it in my own life when I started seeing and identifying the huge problems in “church” as I knew it years ago. I’m still guilty of it at times and need to repent of it. I am no better than they are, will always have error in my thinking regarding Christ and His Kingdom, and am in desperate/continual need of the grace of God in all areas of my life…especially my attitude towards others with whom I disagree.

 So, yes, I realize not everyone who comments is professing to love Christ here, but among those (a rather large group) that have claimed to love Christ there seems to be much joy and satisfaction in finding fault. Just my humble opinion, but it seems your comments frequently incite that aspect of response, rather than curb it with a graceful reminder.

 What do you think – does that make any sense? I know there is a fine line here, and am not sure I have the ability to articulate it. Thanks for your patience with me!

 Dee and Deb,

 The above comment by Ken (whom I do not know) is worthy of our serious contemplation. The spirit in which he writes gives evidence of the Spirit possibly speaking through him. Nobody has commented on his comment, so I thought I’d highlight it lest it be missed. What he’s written, in my estimation, is very profound.

 Now to a couple of other issues at hand. It should be obvious to everyone what happened to Mefferd. When someone’s livelihood is at stake, one’s silence is understandable. However, in the end, truth will always win. I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and reflect on the truth that in the age of the Internet, stunning silence speaks ten times louder than ten thousand blogs. It has the REVERSE effect intended. So, hang on – its only beginning.

 Second, to the two of you (Dee and Deb) – your labor of love in running a blog that has hundreds and thousands of daily readers is amazing. Don’t get discouraged. It’s difficult to walk the line between truth and love (No, it is not.). I see you doing it well. Continue – loving people where they are, including those who disagree with you theologically, and you will continue to make an impact with your truth writing.

Praying for you guys and Rachelle and I love you both!

Wade

(Bold print added for emphasis, and bod print in parenthesis are mine.)

So says Wade Burelson, resident e-pastor over at Wartburg Watch (www.wartburgwatch.com).  Now, there is a ton of philosophically and theologically ridiculous stuff going on in this comment; and notice that half of the comment is a re-post of another comment by this Ken guy.

Both of them are birds of a despotic feather in my opinion, because both of them concede the idea that man is not capable of making any  moral distinctions, and thus by logical extension is incapable of taking moral action.  This is certainly implied when Ken declares:

“I am no better than they are, will always have error in my thinking regarding Christ and His Kingdom, and am in desperate/continual need of the grace of God in all areas of my life…especially my attitude towards others with whom I disagree.”

It should be standard operating procedure that any rational human being be infuriated at statements like this.  This is rational larceny at its glittering finest…literally.   Ken’s statement utterly robs you of your ability to apprehend truth, to call evil, evil and good, good.  He openly admits that HE has no such inherent ability to make such judgments…that God, by his “grace”, does it for him, even though this defies any logic.  For if Ken cannot help but have “error in his thinking” then how can he pretend to understand God well enough to even know that he cannot help but have “error in his thinking”?  For that statement is, itself, a declarative absolute…the very thing his statement utterly DENIES he is capable of.  If his thinking is perpetually in error then why in the fuck should I believe that he has anything useful to add to the conversation?  If he preaches Jesus, why should anyone listen to him?  He flat out concedes that even HE doesn’t really know what he thinks he knows; that his entire epistemology is pervasively flawed at its root.  

Asinine!  And this is what Wade thinks could “possibly be the Holy Spirit”?!  How long…O, how long will “Christians” continue to exchange reason for madness?! 

Bullshit in its finest, and it tasks my temper.  For there is no such thing as “partly good” or “partly evil” in order that you can make such a statement that you “cannot fully know” what you think (as if thinking is somehow subject to abstract concepts like “knowing and not knowing”…NO, you either are thinking or you are not thinking; when you think, you think ABSOLUTELY.  Your MIND is THE absolute, not the concepts you use to organize what you observe).  The very notion is irrational piffle.  Evil and good are mutually exclusive absolutes.  If you cannot fully concede good and fully act in service to it, and fully concede evil, and fully act to avoid it or destroy it, then you are morally broken, defunct, and irrelevant to LIFE.

Aaaaaand….here we are again, right back to Calvinism.  For those of you who were or are Calvinists, you know that this is exactly what they believe.  Human beings, saved or unsaved, are morally useless, never fully understanding good, and thus, by extension, never fully understanding evil.  They are “lukewarm”, as Christ would say, and are fit for nothing as a matter of metaphysical course. This is why this theology utterly condemns to hell all men and women, and must appeal to God’s rank and arbitrary “election” for salvation.  Nothing you and I ever say or do at all, good or bad, really matters, because your entire existence is perfectly broken and irrelevant.

With respect to the “tone”, or “attitude”, or “bitterness”, or “fault-finding” of Wartburg’s commenters:  Well, what the fuck do Ken and Wade propose these poor propagandized people do?  I mean, Ken and Wade and Dee and Deb divorce doctrine from behavior, so what do they expect the comments to look like when you have a group of people who want to decry spiritual tyranny and are invited to do so and yet are gagged when it comes to actually discussing the ideas which drive it?  If you attack the precious “orthodoxy” and “sound doctrine” (which is basically pure Calvinism), you are an apostate and a heretic and Dee gives you the left boot of fellowship right into moderation oblivion.  And according to Ken and Wade if you attack the behavior and actions of others you are “self righteous”, and “pridefully” ignoring your own proclivities to utter sinfulness…you deny your TOTAL depravity.  If you judge others’ actions on the basis that they are not in keeping with proper doctrine, you pretend that you have the same wisdom and authority as PASTOR, who is divinely called by God and thus somehow specially dispensed to know a bunch of shit you don’t.  Which means you are assuming THEIR authority to gauge degrees of “orthodoxy”, which puts you in the position of trying to actually BE God (because there is no distinction between Pastor and God in reformed theology/Calvinism as fair as the laity is concerned), which makes you vulnerable to excommunication, Church “discipline”, or worse.

The purpose of this philosophy (Reformed/Calvinist) then should be obvious:  to use fear of death and hell to compel the masses into a specific ideology in order to serve that ideology, in order that those who “lead” may grow in power.  Make no mistake, there is nothing Christian about any of this thinking.  Calvinism and Reformed theology have roots which do not find their way back to Jewish Law nor to the Revelation of God which is the source of the Torah.  Calvinism and Reformed theology are the evil spawn of Gnosticism, which is one of the many bloodthirsty sons of Platonism…the university and bulwark of all tyranny.  To declare that people are wholly unable to make moral judgments of either behavior or doctrine (or motives, or intentions, or “heart”) is to remove humanity from itself.  By putting an awareness of TRUTH utterly outside the metaphysical and epistemological boundaries of human beings, those who proclaim themselves, hypocritically, as “called” to lead are in a position of absolute power and control.  THEY alone, by God’s Will, have a monopoly on all LIFE…they alone get to say what is true and what is not; and since the reasons for doing so are completely beyond the “average” person’s ability to apprehend, by purposeful divine mandate, these “leaders” are in an indefatigable position to control absolutely.  Whenever and in whatever way they want.  Capriciousness has no definition in such a worldview.  Actions are right not based on the consistency of them to a standard of reason or life or truth or anything else;  actions are “right” merely because they say so; and they are God as far as you are concerned.  And you should know that neither they or you are, according to their “sound doctrine”, able to make ANY distinction between their words and God’s words; their authority and God’s authority.

So, notice what Wade does here.  He invokes “possibly” the Holy Spirit in service to the doctrine he accepts. That’s right…not in service to “truth” or “good”, because both of those things are entirely subservient to doctrinal orthodoxy in reformed theology.  TRUTH and GOOD, even God’s GOOD, is not the standard of their doctrine, but the opposite is true.  If it isn’t doctrinally sound (which means consistent with their interpretive premises, which deny human life as the standard of truth), then it cannot be GOOD and it cannot be TRUE.  This makes TRUTH and morality a function of the gnosis–the Pastor’s special knowledge–and not the other way around.  And this of course makes truth and good something which is BEYOND the scope and context of man’s life.  And the hounds of hell are free to run wild amongst the human race.

Let me explain.

Now, Wade qualifies his statement about the Holy Spirit with “possibly”, which is wise. But allow me to pontificate on the dangers of holding to the doctrinal beliefs Wade presumes, and the precarious and dangerous position it places him in, as a Pastor; because you must understand, whether they admit it or not, reformed theology demands a spiritual caste system.  In other words, it demands that the ecclesiastical leadership possess the “gnosis”, the divine knowledge, which eludes “normal” people like you and I.  It requires that Pastors have “authority”, and authority is the power of force/punishment, and this is defended precisely by appealing to the their special relationship with God.

So, notice what happens when one does not have a rational epistemological plumb line…that is, a rational standard of TRUTH (which must be and can be nothing other than man’s LIFE)  by which to vet all ideas and notions so that their efficacy to truth can be reasonably seen and reasonably observed.  The Holy Spirit becomes subservient to what?  That’s right.  To doctrine.  And what does the doctrine say?  It says that Pastors are spiritual authorities.  And what does that mean?  It means that they have a special revelation from God that you cannot have…it has been bestowed upon them, despite this assumption being categorically contradictory to every point in TULIP.  Somehow, God has decided that they are “worthy” (but not worthy…making God’s truth nothing more than rational insanity).  So, I submit that if Wade reads something that sounds reeeeeaaaally good and reeeaaally in keeping with what HE believes and what HIS heart thinks, then, viola! the Holy Spirit this must have been.

This is very, very dangerous ground for him and any other Reformed pastor to stand upon.  But they don’t lose a wink of sleep over this of course, because…well, think about it.  I mean, if you are God, for all intents and purposes.  Ce la vie.  It’s all good.  You don’t have to fear God, for God serves YOU…that is, God’s truth is YOUR truth.  Fear is incompatible to the Pastor who decides that his every whim is divine.  What do they have to be afraid of?  The Holy Spirit becomes merely another useful servant in their quest to perpetuate their own power as “God in the stead”.

And they go on, never really understanding how terrified they should be that they believe this kind of “orthodoxy”.

You see, conceding that man’s life is not the plumb line for truth, even though it is the only  rational standard, leads to every sort of evil, and every manner of violent and tyrannical consequence.  This should not be hard to graps.  And when I say evil, I don’t even mean Hitler evil (which it does lead to…all tyranny can be traced to Platonism; and certainly Reformed theology is Platonist in its foundations).  I mean…using God Himself as a means to the end of your own power.  Yes, THAT kind of evil.  Even typing that last sentence made me shudder and tremble.  Do you not see that when the plumb line of  TRUTH is OUTSIDE of man’s life then man cannot ever be in a position to know truth, by definition.  Which means he cannot know God!

But God is relevant not because He is TRUTH outside of man but precisely because man can know Him as TRUE.  Man can define God, and define God properly AS God, because epistemological understanding is utterly within the scope of man’s existence!  If man’s epistemology is subservient to a TRUTH outside of him then God loses all definition; all relevance, all meaning.  And those that fill the vast moral vacuum which rips through the universe like a galaxy sized black hole can declare NOTHING off limits to their own power.  THEY are the only ones who are somehow able to have a useful epistemology…that is, they are the only ones who can say what is “true” and what is not.  This means that they do not serve God, but God must serve them because TRUTH is categorically ruled by them.  God only has any meaning when THEY define Him.

Now, they will declare “God’s revelation” as the source of their knowledge and authority, but understand that this cannot be true.  For in order for God’s revelation to be understood—to have any useful relevance–then man must possess innately an ability to properly judge his own reality/context in order to see that God’s revelation is “right”.  In other words, man must possess the inherent ability to be “revealed upon”.  Which means that any revelation must coincide with man’s root EXISTENCE.  It is the fact that man IS which makes it possible for God to reveal TRUTHS to him.  Man has an innate standard of truth by which he can automatically apprehend God’s revelation.  That standard is of course his LIFE.  Thus, man can know God is God because such knowledge is rationally compatible with man’s EXISTENCE.

But if we say that man’s existence is purely subjective to God’s truth, then man’s very BEING, his very SELF, can by no means be any kind of vehicle to understand what God reveals.  Man’s life is irrelevant to God’s truth being true.  This makes no rational sense, but it is precisely what reformed theology teaches.  And this means that truth, inherently, cannot be known by man because “truth” ignores man’s very existence as a prerequisite for it being true.  This makes man’s epistemology (how he knows what he knows) totally useless!  Which puts God, Himself, as a “truth”, beyond the scope of man’s life. Man cannot know God, and God cannot know man, because “knowledge” must be KNOWN by someONE, and according to the doctrine you cannot appeal to your LIFE—your someONE, so to speak—as a means for knowing anything.  So, by their own doctrine, the neo-reformers declare that man cannot be “revealed upon” because man’s life, man’s EXISTENCE,  is an insufficient vehicle for knowledge.  And if man cannot be revealed upon because his existence is wanting as a receptacle for knowledge, then how in the hell can they appeal to divine revelation as the source of their authority?

The answer is, they cannot.  So, by their own doctrine they remove God from man entirely and place themselves in His position as the source of all power and authority over life and death, meaning and truth, good and evil.  And if this is a philosophy which saves man and does not destroy him then God is a farce.  The only way for God to be God is if man is capable of reconciling God to the affirmation of his own life, his own existence, if for no other reason than your LIFE is the only objective, observable, actual means you have of knowing ANYTHING, including and especially God.  It is axiomatic to declare that all you know as true begins and ends with your existence.  This is not blasphemy…on the contrary, by recognizing that human life as the standard of GOOD we can easily reconcile the Bible and God to TRUTH.  Why is God, God?  Because He is NECESSARY, not to the destruction of human life, but to the preservation, affirmation, and CREATION of it.  How in the world can anyone declare this philosophy unbiblical?

By being a gnostic, that’s how. By exchanging the truth for a lie.  By pretending that human life/existence is incidental at best to TRUTH. And notice how motherfucking convenient this idea is to the acquisition and maintaining of absolute power.  It’s a hook in a sea of madness…and many are being reeled up.  They expect to see heaven, but all they’ll get is a boat full of hell.  And into the cooler go their souls.

Propaganda is Violence: Answering Joseph Goebbels

Calvinism/Philosophy

Yesterday while perusing the latest Wartburg Watch comments thread, as I’m sometimes wont, I came across a comment by one who calls himself “Eagle”.  In his post he quotes Joseph Goebbels, who as you probably already know was Hitler’s very prodigious Minister of Propaganda before becoming Chancellor of the Third Reich for about five minutes before ignominiously blowing his own brains out.

I don’t recall Eagle’s context for the quote, except to say that it was to make a disparaging comparison between  Goebbels and some neo-Calvinist…which I would normally say is fine, but I cannot make such a judgement until I know that Eagle has rejected Calvinism himself.  Which I hope he has, but he’s still a ubiquitous regular on Wartburg Watch so I’m not so sure.  Generally, the outspoken anti-Calvinists are run out of town on a rail over there, as Dee makes a sport of criticizing the perfunctory abuse which is a direct consequence of the very doctrines she concedes are just fine and dandy, and then pretends that she somehow manages to pull this off by exorcising motives/assumptions from actions, which is hypocritical at best, so…shrug. Who knows?

At any rate, Eagle’s context is quite immaterial, having nothing to do with the point I want to make.  It is the quote which caught my attention, not the context of it within the comments thread.

Ostensibly elegant and with a thin veneer of civility about it, one might imagine for a fleeting moment, if the author of the quote was not immediately named, that Goebbels is not the utter psychopath that he most certainly was.  An evil, vile man, he was a vociferous proponent of “final solution” and, in an act almost as horrific, he and his wife, while huddling in Hitlers bunker just hours before the Communists came to cave it in, poisoned to death their SIX children before killing themselves.

Such an evil man means that ANYTHING he utters needs to be parsed with the pen of reason and utterly debunked.  I decided to do my part by  responding to this quote.  Hopefully I can show that Goebbels’ ostensible wisdom is just that, purely ostensible…a superficial, razor thin facade which masks a thoroughly deranged personality.  If anyone ever should be condemned to hell for exchanging the truth for a lie, reason for madness, it is this man.

Here is his quote…notice the charade of appealing to reason while categorically throwing it, kicking and screaming as it goes, over a cliff:

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda.  In the beginning, there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men that shall turn understanding into politics.  Success is the important thing.  Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners.  It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct.  I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry.  The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right.  I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things that I say in the Pharus Hall.  That is a matter of practice, not of theory.  We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses.  Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing.  It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.  Those are found in other circumstances.  I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”

My response:

(Part one)

If it is really truth one is seeking to disseminate then propaganda should be unnecessary.  To appeal to the masses truth needs only a ration defense…which should be quite perfunctory if it is indeed truth.  The masses will be persuaded when they see all other ideas fall before its certitude.  Truth then, again, does not need propaganda, but merely propagation.  It needs only brave men and women who are willing to enter into the arena of ideas and fell the impostors of truth.  Debate, then, not propaganda, is the only reasonable and civil course for the swaying of the masses, who are quite capable of, perhaps not the rigors of parsing through the lies (for that is the philosopher’s job; and it is not so much a matter of intellect as it is of interest), but of seeing a false idea collapse under the weight of its own contradictions; and see truth rise from the ashes.  No, truth does not need propaganda, lies need propaganda.  And the distinction between the two is hardly makeable, and this should speak volumes of the “truths” the propagandists peddle.

(Part two)

If reason is excluded from the entreaty, then how is it possible to teach or persuade people to truth?  There is no truth without reason.  And if it is reason then it is not propaganda…for reason is truth, revealed in its various, consistently connected logical foundations.  Therefore, if reason is truth then propaganda is irrelevant, for there can be no coupling of reason with propaganda because there can be no coupling of reason with what is inherently unreasonable.  So propaganda can teach nothing, by definition, because there is no such thing as an unreasonable truth…this is a contradiction in terms.  Propaganda then is force, it is slavery.  It can only compel by deceit, which is inherently violent in its opinion and treatment of humanity.

Further, propaganda is a false dichotomy, pretending to teach truth while never appealing to it, by Goebbel’s own definition.  And if this is the assumption, then death is the standard of “truth”, never life…because a truth that does not require life demands death.  For if life is irrelevant to truth then the only rational service man can perform for it is to die.  For this truth, it must be said, functions perfectly without him.  Man’s life, being irrelevant, poses a stumbling block to truth, and thus the human SELF must give way.

Therefore, the reason propaganda is needed is because no one will sit still and be told they must die in service to an idea which is true only when man’s existence is excluded from the equation;  an idea which is true because it lay beyond the boundaries of human life.  Propaganda is always needed when the assumption is that the truth is so special, so divine, that it can only be mysteriously bestowed upon specific men who are “called” to stand in as truth incarnate…as God’s proxies, as it were.  Humanity in general must be beyond the understanding of the “truth” as truth is declared to exist beyond the scope of man’s life…eluding his own metaphysical reality and his entire epistemology.

The reason for propaganda then is to force mass compliance to an idea which cannot be reasonably defended because it is proclaimed to be “higher than man”, and this statement itself is rationally indefensible. For there is NO truth outside of man.  And any idea which cannot be reasonably defended to affirm and promote the only rational standard for any notion whatsoever–man’s life–cannot possibly be true.