(Part One)

The completely subjective abstract value hierarchy under consideration in this series is the following:

1. God

2. Family

3. Church

4. Work

Or, as we are already starting to see in the orientation schools of spiritual and state tyranny, the neo-Calvinist/Reformed “local churches”, it may be expressed something like:

1. God/Church

2. Family

3. Work

What this adjustment to the hierarchy means is that not even the lip service paid previously will be given to any distinction between God and the Church.  Remember, in any entity which roots itself in Marxist philosophy–which is rooted in Augustinian/Luther/Calvinist theology, which is rooted in Greek gnosticism, which is mysticism–the assumption is that the depraved, unwashed, unenlightened, uninformed, or socially “disadvantage” masses are existentially unable to apprehend TRUTH.  And TRUTH is a direct function of “god”, in whatever form the philosophy happens to acknowledge him/it.  This puts the masses inexorably outside of the absolute WILL of the One who demands that all people and all things conform to a particular Standard of existence; some “law” of reality, if you will.  Therefore, in order to compel the masses into right behavior and thinking someONE must “stand in the stead” as “god’s”  proxy to compel.  The means of compelling the ignorant masses is always–by virtue of the metaphysical assumptions the philosophy makes about man–through violence, but the violence is not always blatantly physical.  Often “lesser” forms of destruction are used, such as indoctrination, propaganda, subterfuge, conflation, subliminal messaging, persistent monitoring (i.e. the destruction of privacy), blackmail, intimidation and fear-mongering, and so on.  All of this is in service to ushering in the only model of civilization that “god” will accept: “Salvation/Eden/Heaven”, the “utopia/workers paradise”, the “categorically fair and socially just society”, the “divine destiny of the Nation/State”, the “promulgation of the Race”, the “New World Order”, etc., etc..  Now, these ideas are merely euphemisms, employed as vessels of indoctrination, for the utter benefit of the ruling autocrat who becomes the very root and source of all reality, and thus, is the only one metaphysically and epistemologically capable actually receiving “good things”, because only he is able to truly apprehend them, because only he possesses the pure and divine Gnosis, or “special knowledge”.

In other words, the autocrat is “god” for rest of the world.  And as “god’s” incarnate proxy, he is the only one with the proper frame of reference by which to truly understand the benefits of the pure utopian society.  Therefore, the overwhelming lion’s share of spoil goes to him.  The rest get what he decides to give them, and they are expected to be content with that.  Any discontent is seen as pridefully asserting the lie that the dissenter is capable of apprehending TRUTH on his or her own, apart from the “grace” of the leader who represents God to them.  This naturally is met with swift punishment, which can be and often is exceptionally violent.  You must understand that once you deviate from the collective, your value as a “life” is nullified (and I put “life” in quotation marks because the philosophy does not permit the existence of anything which can rationally be defined as “life”).  The only way to deal with you is to either force you back into the collective or to eliminate you in service to the collective’s absolute TRUTH; which I have already explained is represented by the autocrat as its incarnate form.

From this vantage point, I think you will notice, or have begun to catch at least a glimpse of, the extremely interesting position this places the autocrat in.  He is no longer merely the incarnation of “god” to the masses, but also represents the incarnate singular form of the masses as they are presented perpetually before “god”.  In this position, the autocrat has truly become “all in all”.  He is both God and the Group, the Primary Consciousness and the Collective, the Nation and the People.  He is the absolute and infinite SELF of ALL Creation as well as (and as inexorably integrated into) the absolute and infinite SELF of the Creator.  Indeed, I am sure those of you with any significant experience with neo-Calvinist/Reformed churches have heard the Pastors explain how they will have to “give an account” for you before God on the day of judgement, and this is why you should submit to them and make their calling a “joy”, not a burden.  They have been called to care for you and your souls, because they are ultimately the ones responsible for them before God.  This plea for obedience because it is they, not you, who will give an account for you at the final calling is precisely what this means:  they are the singular, incarnate form of the church collective before God.  They are YOU to God as much as they are GOD to you.  To the sane among us, the level of presumption and conceit it takes for a Pastor (or any priest of the Primary Consciousness) to actually believe this is utterly beyond words, and is awesome in its evil.

This is a very interesting metaphysical position indeed.  And one that is rationally impossible and self-defeating at its core.  And is why collectivist societies in any form always wind up in tyranny, with the death of the individual touted as the greatest moral good.

The sad and terrifying irony of this is that since the autocrat assumes the identity of both Creator and Creation, he has lost his ability to define himself, since there is no such thing as any efficacious, rational, practical or relevant definition of what he IS without the ability to make the observable distinction of what he IS NOT (an issue I covered in my Borg post).  This makes him a man without any identity and without any rationally grounded, objective understanding.  The moral equivalence of all things, ideas, and actions is the inexorable and inevitable outcome of this psyche.  And though I have discussed this before, it bears a review.

What is moral equivalence?  Moral equivalence is the final, destructive outcome of the more commonly heard phrase “moral relativism”.  It is not the idea that there are dichotomies of good and evil, and that these dichotomies are relative as a function of specific and quite possibly mutually exclusive contexts, as we find in relativism;  rather, It is the idea that there is no such thing as good and evil at all.  That all actions are morally identical…that they are morally inert.  Thus, and by definition, the rape and murder of a twelve year-old child is the moral equivalent of Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand. Mother Theresa the moral equivalent of Genghis Khan.

This thinking inevitably turns individual human beings into playthings which exist for the sole purpose of satisfying the whims and insatiable appetite of the autocrat, who will exploit living and breathing souls as though they were so much pocket change dumped into the slot machines at Caesar’s Palace, or dollar bills stuffed into the crotch of some Chippendale’ s thong.  He will do favors for his friends, and commit genocide to eliminate his detractors.  He will lie and cheat and steal and deceive and there can be no one in the position to question his actions because no one else actually exists.  And this is precisely how wind up with…North Korea.  And Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  Stalin’s Russia.  Hitler’s Germany.  Communist Cuba.  The Weather Underground, the IRA, the UDA/UFF, and various sundry Islamic baby killer clubs.  They are all of like mind.  The Primary Consciousness is the cause, the Collective is the outcome, and the autocrat is the incarnation of BOTH.

Welcome to the jungle; come, all you children of the Beast.

*

(Part Two, Redux)

The specific “Christian” abstract value hierarchy we are examining is generally considered to be a product of puritanical influences, which find a contemporary voice most vociferously within the Protestant church, predominantly those which espouse an adherence to “Reformed” orthodoxy.  These churches often advertise themselves as being “Bible believing”, and practicing “sound doctrine”, which is based “only upon the “Word of God”.

Do not be fooled by such deceptively innocuous and benign terminology.  What they mean by “solely appealing to the God’s Word” is anything but.  Rather, their doctrine is rooted very much in Greek mysticism, most notably Plato’s theory of Forms, from which almost all totalitarian states derive their ideological foundations.  This mystic tyranny is codified and systematized and stamped “Christian orthodoxy” most cohesively in John Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion”, which for all of its loquacious and academic ramblings is little more than a primer on how to subvert the individual and press them into the service of the State.

Modern day Protestantism in general I submit is, by virtue of its shared roots in Greek mysticism/Platonism/gnosticism, inextricably linked to Marxist totalitarian philosophy, wherein we find that the sum and substance of man’s material and “spiritual” being is found only via the complete integration of the individual SELF into the collective which–and this is important because it underscores the hypocrisy inherent in the philosophy– is governed by a central autocracy, which must always terminate at a single person, who proclaims himself the full-on, indivisible, incarnation of the Primary Consciousness (that “essence”, always metaphysically unobservable, outside of humanity, existing in a sphere of being which is mutually exclusive to the senses and thus the epistemology of the “masses”).  In communism, fascism, or socialism, the Primary Consciousness is simply known as the State; in Monarchism it is the King or Queen; in Tribalism it is the Tribe; and in the “melting pot” of America’s societal subcultures it is the Race.  And in the virulent strain of neo-Calvinist/Reformed “Christianity”, it is the Church, or the Body.

In all of these we need to recognize that the root of belonging to the collective has absolutely nothing to do with the individual person him or herself.  Literally nothing at all.  You are a direct function of the group or your do not exist at all; there is no distinction between the individual SELF and the group COLLECTIVE, which is, of course, purely a conceptual abstraction and as such is completely beyond the scope of man’s senses and therefore his understanding.  Thus, there is no answer to the question “What is man?”in neo-Calvinist/Reformed theology because no MAN exists.  “Man” is the collective, and the collective is man.  Man becomes the concept of “many”, which, because the “many” is a totally absolute collective has no quantifiable, relevant, or efficacious parts.  The collective IS, period.  Which means man as a SELF can only be metaphysically defined as IS NOT.

With that in mind, let us turn our attention once again to the abstract value hierarchy in question:

1. God

2. Church

3.  Family

4.  Work

The church loves to use this scale ostensibly because it is a reasonable way to organize the most prominent spheres of one’s life.  As always, the church must play the role of the benign altruist.  It is a role they play well, thanks to two thousand years of practice on live subjects.  The ostensible argument for such a hierarchy is this:  if we can effectively organize these integral components of life into their respective levels of importance, surely we will be much better able to prioritize our time and our money, no?  We will be in a much better position to pursue the most important goals according to their relative value to the grand objective of “glorifying God”, and therefore we shall be in a much better position to effectively live up to our Christian calling and our personal responsibilities before our heavenly Father, right?

Of course the one glaring problem with this false hierarchy is that nowhere within it do we find what should logically be affirmed to be the prerequisite for the existence of such a value hierarchy in the first place:  the SELF of the individual…or, YOU.  YOU are nowhere to be found.  Look around.  Call your name.  Do you come?  Do you peek out from behind “family” and wave?  Do you give a thumbs-up from behind “church” and call out cheerfully, “Hear I am! I’m okay!”?

Not at all.

This is by design.  For any mention of YOU automatically makes a distinction between the individual SELF and the abstract concepts within the value hierarchy.  And this cannot be suffered in collectivist ideologies.  The inclusion of YOU simply confuses the issue.   In a sense, “you” are I suppose somewhat of a given, as it were; as the ipso facto bystander who is somehow there, but indefinable.  Pointless.  The irrelevant “external” observer to the abstract ideas which claim sole ownership over your life…your SELF.  This is why human beings individually are never actually defined or formally recognized in the creeds and catechisms and statements of faith of Reformation theology, either official or unofficial.  In these articles, the individual becomes merely a cosmic apology; the scapegoat which makes all of the control and violence necessary in order to satisfy the wrath of God.  The problem of evil is the existence of the individual.  And the solution is to remove him or her from the equation, which is precisely why YOU are nowhere to be found in the abstract value hierarchy.  The point is to erase you from your own existence.  And this is done via the exchanging of the SELF for abstract ideas, notions ,and concepts like hierarchies, caste systems, church membership agreements, systematic theologies, statements of faith, creeds, laws, rules, home groups, care groups, youth groups, committees, church bodies, ecclesiastical offices, etc., etc..  Yes, these are all instituted to function as a metaphysical replacement for the great cosmic offense of the SELF.

YOU are photo-shopped out of existence, like Marty McFly’s dog-eared photograph of he and his siblings in “Back to the Future”.  Wiped clean…the stain of YOU removed from before God’s eyes, replaced with God and Church and Family and Work.  And even these are indistinguishable from each other.  Even these are simply ONE when the assumptions which produced the hierarchy are taken to their logical conclusions.  All of these are merely direct extensions of the collective, which is the Church, which is the Senior Pastor, the Omnipotent Autocrat who stands in the stead of God to you, and in the stead of you to God.

YOU never get a place on the mystic totem pole of abstract value hierarchies; in the caste system of “special revelation”; in the “authority” demarcations of the collective.  Thus, the individual can be given no relevant value.  As such, as I have said, the individual does not actually exist.  You are a shadow, nothing more, having causal power like a shadow causes the doorknob to turn or the gate to move.  Therefore, the individual is afforded no dignity within the collective…and those of you with any measure of experience with neo-Calvinism are likely familiar with this truth.  You recall how often you heard the woes of church financial difficulties, or the lack of adequate volunteers on the Urinal Cake Cleaning Committee, or the conflicts amongst the leadership or laity…yes, you recall how the convenient scapegoat for these difficulties was always the desire of people to “do their own thing” (i.e. own themselves), instead of listening to the counsel of the Church.

Why is that?

Because proclaiming the right of autonomous SELF is akin to the worst kind of apostasy in neo-Calvinism and Reformation doctrine (or any collectivist ideology), and is the root of all evil.  The individual is the devil incarnate, and is rebuked with substantial vitriol.  Church troubles always boil down the dickheads who have the audacity to think that they can exist in any relevant or righteous sense outside of the collective group think…as if God recognizes anyone apart from their proper “role” in the church.  The nerve.  Any assertion of YOU is selfish by definition.  Your resistance to the all-consuming push of the collective is an affront to the absolute truth of its existence.  You are not allowed to say no.  You are not allowed to refuse.  For any self-promotion is precisely why God hates people, and why so many are going to roast and hell, and why so few (sniffle, sniffle, and down roll the crocodile tears) find their way to the narrow road which leadeth unto heaven.

Most of you are familiar with this abstract  value hierarchy, or some variation of it:

1. God

2. Family

3. Work

With the meteoric resurgence of Calvinism in our churches today we find that the abstract value hierarchy has been expanded as:

1. God

2. Family

3. Church

4. Work

And at the neo-Calvinist church I  attended until recently, I noticed that the abstract value hierarchy had been, not expanded, but significantly altered to become thus:

1. God

2. Church

3. Family

4. Work

Notice the change?  Of course you do.  You notice how the “church” has risen up the ranks, promoted to its new office by those who have conceded that the “group”, which in this case is the “church”, is that which defines the life of the individual in all its aspects.  That is, the “church” is the Christian version of the Marxist collective from which individual man derives all of his mortal AND spiritual value.

Which is what makes the church collective among the most dangerous kinds, and why it is that when we hear the word “cult” we immediately think of mysticism.  As opposed to, say, the “cult” of Nazism or the “cult” of tribalism.  “Cult” has specific spiritual connotations, and they all lead squarely back to the implicit collectivism found in religion.  Even and especially Christianity, which forsook its Jewish philosophical traditions to play the harlot with Greek gnosticism starting most prominently and significantly with Augustine.  Who was, as you well know, NOT a protestant, but a Catholic.

Interesting, no?

What this means is quite simple and obvious.  In terms of philosophical roots, there is no practical distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism.  What Luther’s reformation was all about was merely a fight over who had the right to own everybody else; it had nothing to do with the altruism of freedom from tyranny.  Nothing whatsoever.  Luther had was under no illusion that mere man possessed any kind of inherent worth or ability to apprehend truth on his own, apart from a duly and divinely appointed ruler.  Luther simply thought that a different philosopher king was needed, instead of the Pope.  Why?  Well, from what I can tell, for no other reason than because HE decided, in contradiction to his own theological assumptions, that HE just didn’t happen to agree with the Pope.  Which is an act of pure arrogance even by his own doctrinal standards.

But notice that the metaphysical assumption remained unchanged:  man still needed a philosopher king.  Man still needed someone to force him into right thinking and behavior through violence mandated by God.   He just thought it shouldn’t be the Pope any more.  Of course, one can easily discern that once the need of a ruler who must inevitably resort to violence to compel the depraved and unwashed masses into “holy” compliance is conceded, further arguments concerning who gets to be ruler are merely superfluous.   The “who” doesn’t really matter.  It becomes nothing more than a pissing contest amongst tyrants.  But practically speaking it spells the same thing when all is said and done:

The masses are fucked.

*

Now, in my last post on the topic of abstract value hierarchies (and, as a side note, when I use the word “abstract”, know that “subjective” is also assumed concomitantly) I spent a goodly amount of time discussing the first reason for this, which is the natural and inevitable fusing of the Church with God, Himself.  (The second reason will come in my next post, where I will examine the Marxist assumptions in the hierarchy).  This is a perfunctory evolution.  Quite predictable, really.  Anytime man is told that he is fundamentally flawed at the root of his existence (the neo-Calvinists/Reformed call this Total or Pervasive Depravity) the inexorable assumption must be that he is also epistemologically flawed.  Epistemology deals with how man knows what he knows.  Epistemological failure thus means that man is utterly incapable of knowing TRUTH, and as such, he is incapable of any moral behavior, because he is by extension incapable of knowing GOOD.  In this sense, man cannot possibly be in any position to have any sort of efficacious or relevant relationship with God as an individual.  Thus, the Church then (which is the leadership…there are MEN who must proclaim themselves the incarnation of the collective) has no choice but to step in as God’s proxy…as “standing in the stead of God”…which is an egregious statement, granted, but I assure you is not unheard of in today’s Protestant churches, and indeed is utterly assumed by those who concede Reformation theology.  And thus, to the laity, there is no distinction to be made between the Church (i.e. the human leadership, culminating in the Senior Pastor) and God, Himself.  And if this is taken to its logical conclusion…well, it’s not hard to see how this fares for your run-of-the-mill pedestrian in society.  If you are not “called” to lead, you are “called” to follow.  And this is merely a euphemism for “owned”.  The Church owns you as far as God is concerned.  Which means that the cover charge for entry into the only place salvation is offered is, by definition, the DEATH of the SELF.  Which…it seems odd that DEATH and Salvation, literal opposites, can be part of the same existential equation, but there you go.  Welcome to today’s Protestant church.  It is a dreadfully dangerous place.

And as far as civil authority goes?  The church wants it, and wants it bad.  Mark my words.  The next evolution in the abstract value hierarchy is indubitably:

1. God

2. Church

3. State

4. Family

5. Work

And God/Church/State should be assumed to comprise one big, indivisible juggernaut of AUTHORITY, which is force, which is violence.  There can be and will be NO distinction made between these three spheres.  And this, incidentally, can be assumed for any totalitarian form of government.  Fascist, socialist, or communist.  Once the state assumes “divine” (absolute) authority, it IS God.  It is the singular author of all truth and all creation.  This is why religion is outlawed in communist regimes.  The State is God and the Church. They  just don’t make the hypocritical distinctions in their abstract value hierarchies like the Reformed Christian church does.   In this sense, they are much more honest; once again proving the curious irony that the secular despot has more scruples than the mystic one.  But, the point is that there is little and will be little difference between any Christian theocracy (theo-marxist entity) and a rank communist republic.

*

The natural assumption of any leader who assumes it is their divine right to compel by mandated violence the thinking and behavior of everyone else–to God’s glory, of course; and can there be a more noble goal?– is the right of absolute civil authority.  After all, this is the very reason they love to quote the Apostle Paul in the Bible as declaring that civil government has been instituted by God to wield the sword of justice and righteousness; to bring all evildoers to the reckoning.  And who better to do that than those called by God to stand in His stead?

Answer?

No one.

Thus, be very wary of anyone running for office on the platform of his or her “good Christian values”.  That person is quite possibly the Grim Reaper…the devil in disguise.

In fact, it is a good rule of thumb to be wary of any man or woman in any context who puts God or Church or Work or Family or State or anything else before individual SELF.  That man or woman is a full on collectivist (Marxist), and what they are really proclaiming is that the death of the SELF is the key to TRUTH.  And thus is the key to GOOD, which means it is the key to LIFE.  And the concession of this impossible contradiction in terms is inevitable despotism and destruction.  They are proclaiming that you are not really YOU.  And as such, you cannot possibly exist to YOURSELF; for YOU are an illusion.  The SELF, which no matter how we try to deny it…no matter how we “if”, “and”, or “but” our way around it, no matter how egregious an affront it might be to our “good Christian” humility or our “social justice” or our “sound doctrine” or the “loving of our neighbors”…yes, the SELF is the inexorable, infinite and singular source of anything that exist to you, meaning that YOU, YOURSELF is the absolute prerequisite to ANYTHING which exists, to anything which you proclaim is  good or bad or right or wrong or falsehood or lie or up or down or this or that.  Unless YOU are YOU first, then nothing can exist to you.  Which means, practically and relevantly speaking, nothing can exist period.  Thus, to proclaim that YOU are a direct product or function of something NOT you is in fact the categorical proclamation of your death (i.e. NOT you) as the root of being.

It is the single greatest contradiction in terms and full on rejection of the Creator to proclaim that TRUTH is a function of that which is wholly outside yourself, be it God, or Church, or any collective or group or ideal or abstraction of any kind.  For the denial of SELF in the metaphysical, epistemological, and moral sense in service to that of any  “other” is a full on denial of your Creation.  And if you were not created you could not have had a Creator.  You cannot know God because you are an illusion.

Thus, you have rejected God and have supplanted Him with a transient impostor.  A liar.  A charlatan who has seized God’s place by lies and fiat.  And how do you intended to answer for this crime of existence before the judgement throne?  Hm?  How are you going to mount a defense or appeal to your “Savior” as dying on a cross for you when you have categorically rejected your own existence…when you have no answer for God when He asks you simply, “Who are you?”.   If by your philosophy you have rejected your SELF, I ask you…who in the fuck is God supposed to save?  There is no YOU standing before Him, by your own admission!  All of your hope rests in the notion that if you deny your creation you can somehow receive God’ salvation.  But does that make any sense?  Will it make sense to God?  Of course not.  Because God is not an idiot.  And He certainly is no liar.  When He calls Himself the Creator of you, that means He created…YOU!  

 And thus you shall suffer the same fate as whatever collective to which you have sacrificed yourself.  You will  suffer the same fate as anyone who cannot answer the question “What is man?”  Or worse, anyone who answers the question with full on hypocrisy and in blasphemous prose,  “Man is nothing.”

Fine.

If you are nothing, then nothing is what you shall get from God.

Commenter Greg (welcome!) reminded me of something I think that bears revisiting.   In a comment posted recently, he mentioned the philosophical similarities between Calvinism (and Reformed theology in general) and atheism.  This is completely true, and it is something I have addressed in detail in the past.  But as we all understand, Reformed theology is like hemorrhoids.  It may subside a little, but eventually you must run back to the ointment.

So, let this little post be the anointment which pushes back, yet again, against the raging rash of Reformed orthodoxy which exists to eventually make its way  up everyone’s ass, and to stay there forever.  You are the puppet, they are the hand…in your pockets and in your bottom.

*

Here is what I wrote in response to Greg’s comment:

They [atheism and Calvinism] really do [share the same philosophical presumptions]. Both suffer from the root assumption that human consciousness is purely an illusion. The Calvinsts maintain (no matter how they try to equivocate out of it) that you are ALWAYS a direct function of some determining force.  This force is “total depravity” prior to what they call “salvation” (which is not really salvation…for if there is no YOU in the salvation equation, then YOU cannot be saved, by definition; and remember, you cannot choose salvation, it must be imputed to you in spite of you, and that is their whoooooole fucking theological point at the end of the day).,..so, yes, it is “total depravity” prior to “salvation” and God’s “sovereign grace” after it.

Notice how the volitional SELF of man is irrelevant…and they do not concede that man is volitional at all, by the way.  No matter what they say.  Your “choices” are a function of your metaphysical failure, which is absolute, and thus all choices are irrelevant because the root of each choice is your categorically evil metaphysic.  So whether you choose left or right or up or down or beach or mountains or the red pill or the blue pill, all roads lead straight to hell.  The ONLY salvation then comes in the form of God’s arbitrary election, which is in SPITE of any choice you might make.  You cannot choose Christ since all your choices, no matter what they are, ARE ABSOLUTE evil.  Even if you choose Christ, it is still an evil choice because YOU are the one making it.  Christ must choose you for you; which, again, means in spite of you.

According to Reformed foundational tenets, your existence is why you are evil.  This means that before you can be saved, YOU at your root must be made irrelevant.  You must be declared non-existent in order to be saved.  And this is easy once “total depravity” is conceded.  If man is wholly determined by his depraved nature, then man isn’t really man at all; that is, ALL of him, right down to the thoughts in his head, are purely a direct function of the all-determining force of depravity, which is the entire sum and substance of his existential BEING.  This makes choice irrelevant since the choice, whatever it is, is a direct function of absolute depravity.  Voila!  Man is saved by “faith alone”, and this faith is “not of himself” (a doctrine the Reformed Christian completely bungles and bastardizes).  It cannot be from himself because man has NO SELF, for the reasons I already mentioned aaaaaaaaaand because man is not, of course, and cannot actually be, self-aware.  Your “awareness” is a product of depravity, which is your absolute metaphysic.  Thus, your awareness is an illusion.

So, what does Reformed theology (and atheism) then ultimately deny?  If it denies SELF, it must logically deny that man can be self-aware, since there is no actual self to be aware of in the first place.  So again, what is the ultimate lie of man’s existence?

Consciousness, of course.  Like I mentioned briefly above.

This is a full on denial of consciousness at the core.  And if you aren’t conscious, then you don’t really exist, because you are not able to define SELF unless you are able to make an actual and efficacious distinction between what is YOU, your SELF, and what is NOT you (and this is where choice comes in…it is a function of an epistemology rooted in the actual material existence of individual human beings).  And this distinction can only occur in the case of the fully conscious agent.  If man is unconscious, then there is no actual distinction which can be made between what he is and what he is not.  And if he cannot make this distinction, then he cannot qualify himself as existing.  You cannot be aware of what you are unless you can also observe what you are NOT.  If you are “depravity” then you are an external determining force which is absolute and therefore infinite.  And what is absolute cannot be paired with something it is NOT by definition because the only logical definition of an infinite absolute is that it IS.  There is no IS NOT which can be juxtaposed to it.  It is all you, as far as eternity goes.

There can be no qualification of SELF then which is at all relevant; which can have any actual value.  The statement “is, is is, is is” is meaningless.  “Self is self is self” is a circular definition which cannot go anywhere.  You cannot qualify or quantify or value or “know” what just IS.  A denial of consciousness then is a complete denial of human value.  It takes man’s worth and imputes to it the functional sum of zero.

How this does not result in tyranny is an argument which is impossible to make.  Once individual man has been relegated to ZERO existential value he will be utilized and terrorized and vaporized in service to whatever primary consciousness the tyrant invents to “explain” man’s “purpose”.  And this primary consciousness always boils down to  someONE’s will to power.  Since the primary consciousness cannot by definition be apprehended by man, some “priest” must compel man by force to right behavior.  Thus, the only arbiter of “God’s power” is violence, mandated by God and wholly given to those who somehow rise above their absolute metaphysical condition in order to rule the unwashed masses in God’s stead.

This.  Is.  Calvinism.

If man is absolute depravity, then man cannot be qualified as existing.  Everything about you is a full on figment of the pointless, universal ether.

*

The atheists do the exact same thing. You came from a bunch of unconscious “particles” which form together according to invisible “laws of nature” which “govern”. These laws of nature include wholly unobservable and logically-contradictory forces of “space” and “time” which serve as the determining context for all the material objects in the universe, including man. Notice how material reality is rooted in unobservable forces which govern. This too denies consciousness as an illusion. You come from unconscious particles governed by unseen forces and then you eventually dissipate back into them. Life becomes a mirage; YOU don’t really exist. What you think of “you”, or “yourself”, is merely a conglomerate of all-determining forces OUTSIDE of you.  Only the mystic priests which have been given the powers of perception, the “grace to perceive–in this case, the physicists and mathematicians–are able to truly understand the nature of reality and how you “exist”.  Even though they wholly concede determining forces which destroy their ability to claim that “they” “know” anything at all, they will still address you and look you in the eye with that fucking smug tone and fucking smug look that only a numbers wizard can properly manage and declare that you aren’t really you at all.  And what’s more, they have the math to prove it.

The math?  The fucking math?! Absent the direct source of the material universe where in the hell can I observe math, exactly?  And if it IS a direct function of the material universe then what does that tell you about math’s existence?  It is totally conceptual!  It is not actual!  It is not causal!  Material objects cause themselves; mathematics is a direct function of man’s conscious observation of their relative movement, nothing more.

But if you as the “genius”:  where does math exist? He or she will essentially tell you that it is “out there” somewhere, in the unseen cosmic abyss, governing absolutely, from a place where the universal consciousness bestows it upon them because they were born special.

Does this ring a bell?  Sounds a LOT like the teaching at the corner Reformed sausage-maker.  And atheists and Christians think they are of diametrically opposed world views.  How cute they are.

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Of course, in both of these philosophies human epistemology is a total farce.  And the claims to that there exists someONE to actually concede these beliefs about human existence and the nature of reality become outright laughable. For if YOU don’t really exist, as your consciousness is an illusion, then by definition you can’t KNOW anything.  Who the fuck knows anything if there is no such thing as WHO in the first place?

It is outright ridiculous when you think about it.

Argo’s Universal Truth Number Two is worth pondering:  What IS cannot be a direct function of what is NOT.

Which goes hand in hand with Argo’s Universal Truth Number One:  Whatever is a direct function of something IS that something; there can be no rational or efficacious distinction.

If man is a direct function of absolute determining forces then man is NOT man.  “Man is a direct function of governing forces, but is not actually those governing forces” is a contradiction in terms. Man can cannot be a function of what he is not.  If man is man, then he is not subject to “laws which govern”.  And if man is subject to laws which govern then man does not really exist.

The doctrine of ex nihilo–creation from nothing; God spoke, and the universe just “was”, from “nowhere” by “nothing”–is full on gnostic determinism.  There is no way to argue sensibly this idea; and I apologize if this offends some of my readers.  If you know anything about me by now, it is that I deny, from the utter depths of my soul, that the root of the existence of man and the universe is founded upon irreconcilable ideas.  Indeed, insanity is the only legitimate definition of a world view that posits existence from presumptions which make existence impossible.

I hold that if there is a Creator and a Creation, then the understanding of how this Creation was built must be based upon ideas that do not contradict everything man observes MUST be true for him to BE himself.  And if man’s existence depends upon an understanding of reality that is not epistemologically or metaphysically self-destructive, then so does God’s.  Meaning that if man cannot argue rationally for his own existence, he cannot pretend to argue that there is a GOD by which he was created.

The very attempt to reconcile a REAL God with an ILLUSORY man (man that has no reasonable foundation by which he can even accept the actual IS of his own SELF) is laughable.  And if it were not for the ongoing “orthodoxy” of gnostic-rooted Christianity, which even the best and brightest are unwilling to shrug off, hoping against hope that they can have their metaphysical cake and eat it too, because they can think of no other rational explanation for how all this shit got here (I call this “shrug” theology; as in, “fuck it…we’ve got nothing else, so this must be true”)…yes, if it were not for 2000 years of culturally de facto Platonism which is the very bedrock of Western civilization, it wouldn’t be so ever-loving hard and ever-loving frustrating (as the comments thread of my last article can attest to) to try to convince people of what should be, frankly, obvious to anyone who’s awake.  And what is the obvious thing?  It is, again, this axiom:  “Nothing” cannot, by definition, give rise to “something”, because if nothing begets something, then nothing is NOT nothing, by definition.  Instead of being a metaphysical placeholder to conceptualize the relative NOT of objects so that they can be quantified/qualified as separate from other objects man observes, nothing becomes an actual “thing” from which something else can spring.  This is total contradictory thinking!  Nothing cannot be an IS.  It can be given no boundaries, no value, no location.  Period…full stop.  The universe could not be “not” and then “is”, because IS cannot be a direct function of NOT.  These two concepts “being” and “not being” are entirely exclusive of one another.  They cannot be reconciled at all in the literal/material/actual sense!  Only in the conceptual sense…and conceptual reality is entirely a product of man’s mind; it does NOT materially exist to create something material which man can then observe as actual and label, “nothing”, as if nothing can be given a distinct, practical, material value.  The whole notion is patently ludicrous.  

In the comments thread of the last article, commenter David said this:

“Out of nothing simply means that there was nothing and then God created something.”

I quickly pointed out that there is no significant difference between that explanation and the idea that God created the universe out of nothing.  In fact, both ideas say precisely the same thing:  Out of NOWHERE, which is NOTHING, there was something.  This is impossible for all the reasons I have described…beating the dead horse even more now with the idea that NOWHERE is not a place; it is not a location, by definition.  Therefore, it is impossible for anything to come from there, because “there”, in this case NOWHERE, doesn’t actually exist.  It is a conceptual placeholder, nothing more.

Like wise, look at David’s explicit contradiction as he attempts to defend ex nihilo.  He says:  “there was nothing”.

“There was nothing” is a complete contradiction in terms.  “Was” and “nothing” are mutually exclusive.  What was, was once an IS.  And what was once an IS, could not, of course, be NOTHING.  The only time you can use the phrase “was nothing” is when you are speaking purely conceptually.  For example:  “There was nothing going on at the party, so I left”.  Obviously nothing doesn’t actually exist, so the “nothing” referred to is understood not to mean the thing of NOTHING was happening at the party (that would never cross anyone’s mind, but ex nihilo makes perfect fucking sense), but that the person found the party uninteresting and bailed.

What David means, I submit, is that there was God and then Creation joined him.  There was not nothing, again, because God is SOMETHING.  There was God, and then there was Creation.  But that is NOT ex nihilo.  But–and this is important–this is precisely what they call ex nihilo.  Why?  Because they haven’t yet discovered a rational explanation for creation’s manifestation (but take heart, Christians, because the scientists don’t have one either).  So they take this relationship, God = God + Creation, and–in order to avoid the obviously false idea that Creation is a direct function (extension) of God, making Creation God, Himself, and thus denying Creation–they twist this false theory of how the universe came to be and call it ex nihilo.  Or, Creation out of nothing.  But it isn’t.  Because God = God + Creation leaves no room for a value of ZERO, or NOTHING.  There is no NOTHING in that equation.  So ex nihilo is a patently irrational, and therefore a false, interpretation of the idea of God existing before Creation came to be.

And to call that scenario the “true” version of ex nihilo is a complete distortion of the creation event.  There was not “nothing” before Creation, there was God.  So, the question remains:  Where did Creation come from if there was only God before it?  The only answer they think is “ex nihilo”.  But that is not an answer, that is madness.  It is not reason, it is insanity.  It is not even mystery.  The real problem is that the fundamental premise, the idea that there was God, and then God (somehow) became God+Creation, with Creation being a completely physically and metaphysically distinct entity from God, is fatally flawed.  The idea is wrong.  The root biblical interpretation that is almost universally assumed is an impossible lie.  And just because you have not yet been able to formulate a rational explanation for how the universe began does not give you license to declare impossible and mutually exclusive ideas the “truth”, when, in fact, mutually exclusive ideas violate the “truth” at its very root.

The best anyone can come up with is an appeal to “God’s mystery”; and then claim that I’m trying to “explain” God.  First of all, so fucking what if I am?  Is that a mortal sin now?  Oh…here we go; one more thing the lightning bolts home in on.  “Figuring out God” is grounds for divine punishment.  KNOWLEDGE = SIN is the tyrannical equation.  Well, there are only two kinds of knowledge in existence, and mystery is not one of them…I hate to break it to you.  There is only rational truth and propaganda.  There is no neutral zone.

Would a father smack the hand of his child for trying to learn what dad’s job is and how he does it?  Why is not our first response towards someone who is interested in how his heavenly Father orchestrates life and the universe:  “I admire your motivation; I admire your ambition”.  Why should we not assume that God might be gratified at the interest taken in Him?  Even Paul Dohse scolded me for attempting to strip all the “mystery” from God.  But his accusation is flawed.  It is not mystery I am interested in unraveling, for any mystery as a mystic defines it is irrelevant.  (I’m not accusing Paul of being a mystic, btw…but he has tendencies).  If we can’t understand something because our very existential nature inexorably prohibits it, then it is pointless information.  It is not mystery, it is, as John Immel might say, metaphysical madness.

Second, let me say that appealing to God’s mystery has gotten us into nothing but bloody trouble ever since the very first threat of punishment was issued by the Roman civil authorities to anyone not bowing to the name of Christ.  And neo-Reformed/Calvinist hoards naively applaud and dance in the streets at government exercising the moral “absolute” with such razor sharp force; and they pray and wail and gnash teeth, wishing that the government would turn statist proclivities upon the flag burners and the homosexuals and the atheists and the female pastors, never once understanding that we have had governments many times over in the history of the world do this very thing!  And guess what?  There was no thousand year reign of peace and love and acceptance and Christian collectivism where all the roses bloomed in perpetuity and everyone had according to his “need” (who gets to say what is needed for someone else, is my knee-jerk question) and everyone extended a hand and a kiss of friendship and bid each other blessings from above and  harmony was threaded through the fiber of all living things and the lambs and the lions laid down together, and both boys and girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice.

No.  There was none of that.

What was there?

There was bloodshed.  Bloodshed and piles of limbs and torture and oppression and caste systems and the divine rights of kings…kings who used their power to single-handedly lead legions of slavish  young men into bloody death to extend the reign of their power and influence…all in accordance with God’s will, of course.

I have a question.

Have you ever actually seen a real iron maiden?  Have you ever laid eyes upon this appalling instrument of human torment?  It is truly a terrifying sight.  Even the strongest of men will likely recoil as he lays a finger upon one of the dozens of spikes which line the inside of the sepulcher; spikes which are filed to dagger-like points.  The iron maiden is, of course, made of very thick iron, and it is shaped and molded into the image of a large, grotesque woman…hence the “maiden”.  It is about coffin sized, and is placed upright, and the front of it opens on hinges.  There is no opening in the device save for a small hole about eye level, where the poor slob can look out and be tormented by the mocking open spaces where he used to roam.  Both the front and back of the metal box are lined, as I said, with dozens and dozens of sharp spikes, and the idea is that the victim is locked inside the maiden, standing up, with barely a centimeter separating his body from the spikes.

I hope he or she isn’t too claustrophobic.  Because they are going to be in there for a while.

Now, this is where the fun really gets going.  The marvelously malevolent and cruel idea is that as the victim tires his body will wax and wane inside the metal coffin.  As he moves, and his body becomes slack with weariness, he will begin to impale himself more and more upon the spikes which are all too willing to bear the weight of his soft flesh for him.  Over time, the puncture wounds get deeper and deeper, and ever more painful, until eventually he either bleeds to death or pierces a vital organ.

Obviously, the amount of suffering, both physical and psychological, cannot be overstated.

And now,all of you who long for a return to a time when “good” Christian men held the monopoly on civil authority, tasked with the divine mandate to rule society for the production of a “godly” citizenry…yes, all of you who long for such a time, and praise the stalwart and uncompromising ways in which the theocracies of the past and present dictate morality with the righteous fist of God’s perfect will…all of you must look at that iron maiden–that symbol of man’s irrational worship of human death in the name of “godly” life–and ask yourselves how many times that fucking thing was used on “heretics”.

Oh…woe to us should the “elect of God” rule the land!  We should all flee for our lives in such an instance!

But, Argo, you will ask…of what relevance is the iron maiden and the state-sanctioning of  torture to the doctrine of ex-nihilo?

The answer is quite simple:

It is a short distance between a philosophy founded upon premises which are irreconcilable and therefore deny the actuality of humanity, and the gas chamber.  It is but a short hop between a philosophically and ideologically broken moral standard and the mass destruction of humanity in service to that standard.

All awareness and knowledge, revelation and enlightenment, demands a distinct and fully autonomous human SELF from which to extend; that is, the ability to KNOW is a direct function of the singularity of the HUMAN SELF.  That ability cannot be the direct function of what is not man…because if man’s ability to ascertain TRUTH is not of himself, then man’s understanding of everything is always OUTSIDE of him.  Which means that man has no frame of reference for himSELF.  And without that distinct and fully autonomous reference point, it is impossible for man to define anything else, including and especially God.  And it is this ability–the ability to BE an autonomous SELF–which is the very seed of man’s knowledge.  So that when understanding is reached, man can claim the knowledge as a direct function of his own ability to possess it; which makes HIM the source of that knowledge.  For without man and his innate ability to understand, which is of himself alone, then their can be no knowledge claimed.  For without a proper repository for knowledge–an agent which can manifest that knowledge into action which ultimately serves a singular and infinite standard of TRUTH (that standard which all ideas are measured against to determine their veracity; which I submit is man’s LIFE)–then knowledge is irrelevant.  And knowledge which is irrelevant isn’t knowledge, by definition.  For ANY notion, idea, construct, or concept without an agent capable of defining it thus, in accordance with a standard of TRUTH, is utterly meaningless.  Without man, knowledge has no purpose.  And what is knowledge without purpose…what is knowledge without an objective (man’s life) which it can serve in order to prove itself true and effective?  It is nothing at all.

The point is that man–his LIFE; his SELF–is the beginning of knowledge and understanding, and, as it is the very singular purpose of knowledge and understanding, it is not merely a stepping stone along the philosophical trail, it is the entirety of the trail itself.  Nothing is true and nothing is real absent the SELF, the LIFE, of humanity.

And that just doesn’t sit well with most Christians.  Because Christians are arguably the greatest proponents of Platonist “primacy of consciousness” philosophy the world has ever seen, and that is exactly why Christian interpretive assumptions beginning with Augustinian thought and metastasizing into various creeds of orthodox Protestant and Catholic theology have been the catalyst for almost every single war, revolution, uprising, human purging, brutal oppression, terrorist act, and mass slaughter of innocents in the entire Western world.  Perhaps only a handful of conflicts have ever been spawned for “righteous” (i.e. reasonable) reasons .  If you ever want to see just what the death of reason looks like, and the concession that ALL truth and ALL understanding lie inexorably (and impossibly) outside of human existence, go to Church.  Any church.  They all concede the same Augustinian root assumption:  you are not yourself.  YOU are but an extension of a determining force.  They call this force God; but that name is derived only by tradition.  It has actually nothing to do with God, as He is actually presented in Jewish canon.

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A SELF, in order to be a SELF–that is, understood as a distinct agent from whatever it is NOT (its environment)–must obviously be self-aware.  That this is axiomatic should not require any explanation.  If you are not aware of YOU as YOU, then you cannot be in a position to declare that YOU exist at all.

You must be YOU in order to truly be a SELF which can relate to God (i.e. exchange value), and to know Him.  And if YOU are YOU, then God is by definition NOT you, and thus God cannot rationally be declared omnipotent or omniscient.  Why?  Again, because God cannot be YOU.  And further, God cannot be anything He is NOT.  If there is a God and there is a Creation then one thing is an absolute certainty:  there is an infinite and absolute distinction between the two.  Creation is NOT God and God is not Creation.  Period.  Full stop.  And neither possesses the ability to be the other because to BE what one is NOT completely contradicts the agent in question.  If God can BE Creation, then in that circumstance He cannot be declared God; because an absolute cannot be parsed into two mutually exclusive agencies….it cannot be what it is and what it is NOT at the same time.  This is an obvious contradiction that not even God can suffer.  And if God cannot be you then God cannot be omnipotent.  He cannot be all powerful because all is no longer “all”, it is only part.  His power is reserved for Himself, which means that it is constrained by His own particular frame of reference.

And if His particular frame of reference is limited to Himself, then He cannot be omniscient because what He knows is always going to be an inexorable function of His own particular frame of reference: Himself.  He cannot know what is NOT Him knows because knowledge is always a direct function of the absolute of the individual agent which possesses the “knowing”.

You can never know absolutely what I know, and vice versa, because knowledge is exclusive to our own infinite frame of reference, which is our unique SELF.  So HOW one knows what he or she knows comes directly from BEING themselves.  Not from being anyone else, which is of course impossible.  No two self-aware agents possess the same knowledge because the infinity of the SELF’s frame of reference cannot, by definition, be breached by anything or anyone outside of it.  YOU are YOU infinitely, and so YOU cannot ever be in a position to see things as I see them.  And the converse is also true.  Thus, your knowledge is limited according to the infinite SELF of your own existence.

The same holds true for God.  While God can affirm the same IDEAS as man does, and can reveal to man wisdom and truth (properly defined, that is, not defined as the Platonists do), this does not translate into “omniscience”.  This does not translate into God’s ability to become what He is not and to act from it (do anything) and to realize from it (know anything).

So once again the same axiom dismantles yet more tools of the mystic tyrant.  Omnipotence and omniscience are rendered false by the very existence of the autonomous, individual human SELF.  The fact that YOU are YOU means that God is NOT.  Which means that you, as yourself, individually, are able to act and do and be and think and know and learn and produce and earn and deserve and will and act in service to morality and to TRUTH; and you can know that the fruit of your existence and consciousness is real and valuable and worthwhile and represents everyday something new and fresh and beautiful; that is, it represents the manifestation of your life and your pursuit of it thus, to your comfort and pleasure, which is the very purpose of BEING, and why life is such a blessing from God.

And the existence of SELF is a very, very good thing.  It means that real relationship can occur with the Creator.  Real value exchange can be manifest.  Real salvation can present itself.  Real Divine help can be offered to those who suffer.  Real joy can be felt by those who do not.  And it can be stated unequivocally that suffering is NOT the purpose of life; for this is the fruit of a life lived for DEATH’S sake.  And this is wholly contradictory to God’s purpose for his Creation.  Being should be joyful…it should be a blessing; and you have the sole right to determine how “joyful” and “blessing” are manifest in your own life.  And God is here to help you to that end, and to help others as well.

Sorry for the interruption in the regularly scheduled programming of this station.  Please believe me that indolence is not to blame.  But rather, due to the endless downpour of winter fury we are experiencing here, the proprietor of this blog has been constrained by other binding duties commensurate to his role as Suburban Keeper of the Yard and Cars.  Apparently, “Shoveling Your Ass Off” was at the bottom of the list of job requirements, and as such, was missed during the marital interview processes.  If it had been noticed, the marriage would have continued, but I would be writing this post to you from the comfort of a one-bedroom inner city apartment with fuck-all for a yard, sidewalk, or driveway.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled series on Omnipotence and Omnipresence, where we will further examine these two irrational prongs of the Reformed pitchfork.

On a side note:  Please stay tuned for part four of this series, coming soon, where we will consider the logical fallacy and impossible “truth” of the heady idea of “ex nihilo”.

Oooooh and aaaaaaaah, you are supposed to gasp.  The neo-Reformed gestapo loves to appeal to Latin in an effort to impress.  But fear not, for ex nihilo, though frilly in name, is the exact same level of bullshit we have come to know and love from the Reformed slave traders.  They have effectively declared that “nothing” is “something”.  So, obviously this is just another manner–Latin, yay!–in which they punt ALL of their interpretive premises into the great cosmic abyss of God’s “mystery”.

Sigh.

It’s all a mystery, I tell you.  Hang your brain up on the coat rack when you walk into your shiny new neo-Calvinist local church.  You know, its the big one down town, with all the concrete and glass, full of sharp and inviting angles, ostentatious and garish in all of its hyper-spiritual “humility”, advertising that you visitors “come as you are”, and that you don’t have to tithe on your first Sunday because that is a “privilege” of the church members.

I used to love that word.  Privilege.  Man, these erudite propagandists have a way with words, don’t they?  It is such a huge privilege to give your money to people who preach a doctrine which demands that they cannot and shall not POSSIBLY, at any time, really appreciate the amount of time and effort and pain it takes to procure a paycheck, because the doctrine?  A doctrine that teaches people that their  hard-earned money is all of God’s grace.  Which is merely code for:  you didn’t really earn it and don’t deserve it.

Yeah, tell that to the guy who works the roads for fifty hours a week and has a permanent stoop from lifting seven tons of dirt a day with a shovel; tell that to the sixty year old lady who works the register and is on her feet eight hours a day and has calluses on her hands and feet and scarcely minimum wage to show for it.  Tell that to the father of three who runs a business and has to deal with everyone from union reps to workers comp lawyers for 100 hours a week, all while sustaining himself on coffee, Prilosec, blood pressure medication, and Zoloft.  Oh my…thanks Pastor! You’ve really got your finger on the pulse of humanity’s worth, don’t you?!  Man, if working yourself to death to afford a tithe the amount of roughly what a house payment costs is how Christians define God’s “grace”, then I think we need a new translation of the Bible, like, yesterday.

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Besides the critical service they provide to the proprietors of spiritual tyranny (and coming soon to an elected office near you, CIVIL tyranny, which is sure to follow if any of these notoriously “godly” men win office), the notions of omnipotence and omniscience are, as mentioned, purely euphemisms for God-qua-determinism, which is nothing more than a gnostic presumption stemming entirely from NON-Jewish (and thus, non-Christian…remember, Christ was 100% Jewish, and the roots of his philosophy are entirely OT, not Greek Platonist) metaphysical and epistemological foundations.

Omniscience and omnipotence are utterly and absolutely determinist proxies; meaning that proffering them automatically implies a totally irrelevant human epistemology which is rooted in the quantification and qualification of entirely vacuous human metaphysics.  What this means is, for all the reasons I have heretofore expressed, that if we declare God is indeed omnipotent and omniscient, then we automatically declare our inability to exist as distinct-from-God and therefore self-aware agents (because if there is no SELF, and there isn’t in neo-Calvinist theology (by the way, I have a post on a comment from self-described “black coffee” Calvinist, Doug Wilson, who says that Christians are not “autonomous”)…so yes, there isn’t any SELF in neo-Calvinist theology and so humanity cannot be self-aware, by definition).  And if you follow the logical rabbit trail down to the edge of all reason, which terminates at the edge of reality, these notions of omnipotence and omnipresence must concede the idea that man then cannot possibly define God, because man is nothing more than an extension of God’s all-determining power.  In other words, if man is not a distinct agent, then he is not able to make a distinction between himself and God, which means man is merely a functional extension of God.  Man then cannot know himself, by definition, because there is NO autonomous SELF to man.  And if man cannot define himself, because there is no SELF, then how can man know God?

The answer is: he cannot.

So the massive irony of the determinist notions of omnipotence and omniscience is that if we concede them then we concede that man cannot possibly be in a position–that is, he cannot EXIST–to declare God omnipotent and omniscient in the first place. 

It is not hard to understand that if you cannot define your SELF as existing then there is literally no YOU to be aware of anything NOT you, which obviously must include God.  There is no such thing as NOT you because YOU are, in Reformed theology, always an extension of an absolute determining force.  The force being what?  The force is God, Himself, as the notions of omniscience and omnipotence completely attest to.   And then from this, if you care to weave your way delicately through the funhouse of Reformed interpretive premises (if not, I am happy to do it for you), you will notice that God’s “absolute” and all-“sovereign” nature–which is nothing more than all-determining–is somehow parsed into separate and mutually exclusive forces of depravity and grace.  The “unsaved” person is a direct function of God as absolute all-determining depravity (read “evil”), and the “saved” is a direct function of God as absolute, all-determining “grace” (read, “good”).  So God is somehow both the determining absolutes of depravity and grace, salvation and damnation.  God is a singular absolute of good and evil; even though this is entirely impossible as these two ideas are both completely autonomous and entirely exclusive of one another.  In short, God is a duality of two mutually exclusive conceptual abstractions.  Things which are not actual, IDEAS, which are what man uses to organize his environment (i.e. good, evil, truth, falsehood), become integrated incarnate into the metaphysical AND physical singularity of GOD.

And this is the utter root of Reformed theology.

It is impractical, impossible, irrational, and worst of all, it is evil.  It denies the very material reality of God, and separates Him from His Creation, and in doing so declares neither God nor Creation as actual.  God is not longer the Creator, and man is no longer His created.

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Remember the golden child of all of Argo’s Universal Truths?  It is this:  Whatever is a direct function of an absolute IS the absolute.  So if you are a direct function of God, because God IS determinism, then you are God.  And really…ultimately if determinism (e.g. “Sovereign Grace”) is true, then God and man are BOTH extensions of Determinism itself.  There can be no distinction of ANY kind apart from purely abstract conceptual notions.

And this is why the ideas of Omnipotence and Omniscience, which explicitly declare that God is able to be what He is NOT–meaning, God is able to be His Creation, for this is the VERY definition of these terms according the Reformed theological point of view–always lead to human destruction.  For if man does not possess a self-aware BEING, an individual and autonomous SELF, then man is nothing more than an animal which must be forceably compelled to the objective of God’s Will…for man’s will is a moot point (and it IS in Reformed theology; what YOU want is irrelevant, for there is NO exchange of value between you and God because you are not YOU).  Thus, it falls to the agents of the Primary Consciousness–the Pastors, Priests, Philosopher Kings, Shamans and Witch Doctors, Officiators and Divine Proxies–to lead humanity as God in the Stead.  And this makes violence and fear the only logical tools to which these despots appeal in service to their divine mandate to “lead” God’s “people”.  Indeed, this vile polity must demand violence and human oppression/subjugation as the the sole arbiter of God’s will.  If man doesn’t really exist as a rational animal, which is merely to say that man does not exist at all as SELF, then ALL of man’s circumstances and his position, no matter how brutal or destructive or bloody, are ultimately in service to God’s perfect Will.  Man, regardless of what he endures, is always acting in service to God’s will; for man is determined to, and all that happens to him is determined…according to the Divine Will, from which man directly extends.  So no matter how many men, women and children are slaughtered, imprisoned, raped, or psychologically terrorized/victimized, it is all “good”, ultimately.  Because things only happen one way:  the way the Determinist (Calvinist/Reformed) God wants them to.

Okay…I have to break. I will continue this post in a bit.

Stay tuned!

Why do we assume that God must know everything and do everything in order to be God?

Think beyond the canned responses of our severely conditioned (read: diligently propagandized and brainwashed) fellow Christians…responses that are really non-answers, meant to curtail humanity’s natural tendency to organize the world into reconcilable assumptions.  Meant to curtain man’s reason.   The very thing upon which man’s life utterly depends.

Let’s look at the idea of the conditioned, orthodox Christian.

Why it is that Christians for the most part are only willing to take their thoughts so far?   It seems as though they are outright fucking terrified to think through their doctrinal conclusions because I contend they realize that ultimately the doctrine implodes under the weight of its own contradictions. Thus, they ALWAYS revert back to the standard playbook of orthodoxy, no matter how often the horror of that particular belief system smacks them in the face with its cold, dead hands.  If the discernment blogs have taught us anything, it is that Christians can be abused to the point of physical and psychological damage, sometimes destroying the entire scope of their lives, and yet will recoil in rage and panic and hysterics at anyone who dares to question their traditional understanding of God and His church.

This is the conditioned Christian.  This is the Christian who has been afflicted with doctrinal Stockholm Syndrome.  The spirit is destroyed, and yet the obligatory answers and slavish devotion to the tyranny of their gnostic ideas remain.  They are satisfied that the very perfunctory doctrinal posits which have ruined their lives are sufficient for bringing peace to them; for healing and soothing, as though ideas which are purposefully designed to destroy and nothing else, are equally efficacious for life and happiness.

But this is what they have been taught…this is all they know.  And, like a dog to his vomit, it is to this they will return.  Because, unless you  make it a point to specifically address doctrine; to specifically reject the canned answers from the the “orthodox” feed bag which hasn’t been filled with anything new for literally thousands and thousands of years, then you are doomed to walk right back into the same meat grinder which just spit you out like so much psychological sausage.

Exhibit A of this trend, this revolving door of Reformed orthodoxy, is the discernment blog, http://www.wartburgwatch.com. Here you will see first hand the abused storm out of the edifice of “sound doctrine”, do a little dance, throw a little tantrum, call CJ Mahaney a bunch of appropriately pejorative names, spit on the side walk and then…brush themselves off, straighten their ties and corsets, and walk right back inside, full of stoic resolve, where Wade Burleson and his wonderful hair are holding the door open for you.

The catalyst for this irrational behavior is the refusal to question the doctrine.  Why?  Because the doctrine is not based on reason, you see…for that is precisely how they define “God-breathed” and “inspired”.  These terms mean, specifically: NOT according to man’s epistemological capacity…meaning that what YOU think is true is irrelevant (i.e. NOT true, by definition).  They mean that you never really get to say whether you concede their–that is, the Priests in the Stead–interpretive premises or not.  Your existence doesn’t matter, because you are wholly inadequate to understand what is ultimately the product of an omnipotent Being who transcends everything about you; because He is infinite and you are finite, and there is no way to logically, ever, reconcile these two metaphysical positions.  What is INFINITE can ultimately, and again by utter definition, have nothing whatsoever to do in any actual way with what is finite.  That’s pure logic…Reason 101 stuff.  How do you reconcile that which is endless to anything else? You don’t…because you can’t.  Because any coupling of infinity with anything else automatically contradicts infinity.  If it isn’t everything, then it isn’t infinite.  And that’s why God is not “omnipotent”.

I will get to that point in more depth in a moment.

The philosophy of their thinking, and all their interpretive premises, and all of the roots of their “sound doctrine” have nothing to do with you YOU insofar as you ability or outright need, for the sake of rank survival, to rationally organize and integrate what your senses absorb.  Ultimately, all “real” truth is wholly revealed by God, completely outside of man’s existential or epistemological essence.  In short, man has nothing to do with truth, so what you think or feel or understand or notice is entirely irrelevant.  Your comprehension of things which define your SELF and your environment and your life are categorically usurped on every level, right down to your very essence and existence, by a God who can do and know everything.

Hmm…

I’m starting so see why “omnipotence” and “omniscient” are such useful tools in the belt and harness of the spiritual despot.

And this leads us to another absolutely necessary tool of the successful tyrant:  Propaganda in the form of a systematic theology.  Present a codified, cohesive framework from which to address all of the concerns of the critics and detractors.  The answers do not have to be rational, they just have to smartly appeal to a source of “intelligence”–a source of “revealed knowledge”–that transcends the mind, on the metaphysical level, of the inquisitor.  That is the key.  Present a systematic philosophy which has the ring of intellectual fortitude and then root it ALL in the appeal to divine “wisdom”.  This satisfies even the most analytical among us.  The rigorous philosophical system allows the tyrant to appease the learned concerns of the more intellectual classes…assuaging fears by assuring people that their concerns have been thoroughly vetted by and integrated into the construct.  For the concerns the construct cannot address, because the logical conclusions are ALWAYS contradictory (and the “authority” knows this if they are worth their salt as respectable tyrants) it claims divine mandate of “truth” as its bulwark.  The discerning citizen is thus comforted by the nod to the intellectual cohesiveness the philosophy presents, and is further and most importantly comforted by the fact that it–as the propagandists will readily and willingly concede–doesn’t have all the answers.  And why do they take comfort in this?  Because it appeals to their inherent sense of superiority, I submit.  It appeals to their insatiable desire to have and lord TRUTH over everyone else…to prove that they indeed have been grafted into the divine wisdom; which is, after all, that which gives credence to the sum and substance to their own assumed intellectual pedestal.   I mean, what good would a “perfect” and “perfectly revealed” philosophy of God be if it had all the answers? Surely there must be some mystery involved.  We serve the Almighty, after all, they say.  We can’t expect to understand everything, right?  God has to reserve some things for Himself…things the “finite” human being isn’t capable of understanding.  And this intricate, beautifully organized and constructed and comprehensive systematic theology is just what the doctor ordered.  A perfect philosophy that leaves the logical conclusions open-ended, allowing for God’s infinite capability to both DO and KNOW everything. 

This naturally gives the mystics a get-out-of-culpability-for-abuse free card.  They can preach their destruction and compel by force and violence, blackmail and intimidation their Will to Power disguised as “spirituality”, and then when the shit hits the fan and some disgruntled and “prideful” layperson refuses to be placated any longer by the usual appeals to the “good of the church/state/collective/tribe/monarchy/race/party”, or “God’s will”, or “I was not given the grace to perceive” (thanks, CJ!) because it was his or her daughter that the seventeen-year-old psychopath repeatedly raped in the church bathroom, the spiritual “authorities” can always be absolved by punting the entire fucking systematic philosophy into the great cosmic abyss of God’s mystery.  Obviously God is in control.  Obviously He knows things we don’t know.  Does things we can’t do.  Of course our understanding of the world MUST recede under the mighty corpulence of God’s omniscience and omnipotence.  You must simply trust that only God can really understand, guided in “sound doctrine” (the very doctrine which spawned the abuse) by the skillful hands of His priests…who are the keepers of all of God’s divine mandates.

Think of the power this gives the priests!  They are NEVER accountable for any behavior; for anything they perpetrate upon or demand of the masses over which God proclaims them stewards.  Their systematic theology allows them an almost invincible two-pronged defense, depending on the situation.  They can either appeal to their own fallen, depraved humanity…the “we are all just sinners saved by Grace/but for the grace of God go I” defense; or the “I am the keeper of the keys/God has tasked me with standing in His stead to be God to you” offense.  Truly, it is almost a thing of beauty.

*

Okay, fine.  We understand the usefulness to tyranny of “omniscience” and “omnipotence”, but WHY?  What are the root assumptions which underlie the notions?  What is it about God…what is it about His metaphysical nature, His rote existential being, which drives the belief that He does everything (or “can do” anything, which is the same thing; for you cannot proclaim this without a frame of reference, which is that God, somehow, actually DOES everything), and knows everything?  Hence, my original question:  Why do we assume that if God is to be God, He must be omnipotent and omniscient.

First, we must understand that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive; that they are, in fact, inexorably tied.  It is a simple bridge of logic to say that if God can do anything, and does everything, then He must naturally know everything.  For how can one who does something–that is, organize the environment/reality towards a specific objective– do it without knowing how?  And if God can do anything, and anything then must extend from one edge of the universe to the other, in all dimensions in all times and places, from the greatest to the least, then doing everything must necessitate knowing everything.  For I submit that not even the neo-Calvinists, who declare God capable of doing the impossible (which is a total contradiction in terms, because if it can be done by anyone, its not impossible…but hey, the Bible says it (no, it doesn’t), so it must be true, right) will concede that He can do something whilst at the same time not know about it.  This would naturally contradict their own assertion of omniscience.  And furthermore, strictly speaking, knowing is doing…so, actually, to state that God is both omnipotent and omniscient is rather redundant.  All one really needs to assert is that God is omnipotent.  Omniscience and omnipresence are to be logically assumed from such an assertion.  For if we define omnipotence as the power to do everything and anything, then knowing and being, which are perfunctory extensions of doing, are implied.

But redundancy, irrelevancy, and contradictory logic have never stopped a good neo-Calvinist from blathering on and on every Sunday morning and then some, whilst procuring a handsome salary for doing so.

But here is the real problem in the logic of “omnipotence”, not to mention “omniscience” and “omnipresence”.  The problem is that omniscience and omnipresence are direct functions of omnipotence; that is, they are ACTING as a direct function of God’s ability to DO (act) anything.  But the train of conciliatory thoughts does not stop there.  For omnipotence–the power to do anything–is a direct function of God’s very existence; His very being.  For BEING is DOING. To be.  To be is a verb.  It is the verb.  It is the infinite action of anything which exists; any agent, and any object…it is that object/agent’s very SELF.  So “BEING” itself is the beginning and end of anything which exists.  And therefore God’s ability to DO anything is a direct function of His ability to BE.  And if we proclaim that God can DO anything then this “anything” must extend to the very root, the very core, of God’s existential SELF.

Do you see where I am going here?  Can you connect the dots? Can you follow the bread-crumbs of logic all they way back to the very start, where nothing comes before?  Can you find your way to the edge of the universe…through the trees, to the field, to the sea, and beyond to where eternity goes no further?

What I am saying is that if God can DO anything and indeed DOES everything, and it is from this that he can know everything and be everywhere, then it follows that this must include being what is considered to be NOT God.  In other words, God is not only God but He is all that is NOT God, as well.  Which means that if God can do everything this must include the ability to BE everything; for his power of omnipotence stems from His being. BEING everything is the source of God’s omnipotence.

So if God is omnipotent then God is everything which exists.  For the ability to DO stems from His ability to BE.  And so if God can do literally EVERYTHING, then His being, from which His doing proceeds, must extend to the very existential root of Creation.  Which means that Creation doesn’t really exist.  It is all God.  There is nothing which isn’t God.

I say that God is not omnipotent, because I declare that God cannot BE what He is NOT, which means then by definition that He cannot DO everything or KNOW everything, since DOING and KNOWING extends inexorably from the infinite BEING of anything which exists.  And by that I proclaim the free will of man to relate to and define God; and I proclaim the free will of the devil and his angels, and I proclaim that it is this which allows for God to absolutely and justly judge them and condemn them. And so I am declared an apostate and a heretic…worthy of death of the most barbaric kind; and in the dark ages of the hell of Reformed history I’d be guillotined at sundown after a five minute kangaroo court at best, surrounded by a crowd of feces and spit hurling hoards.

And yet declaring that there is no metaphysical distinction between God and His “fallen” and “totally depraved” Creation, thus making God the author and essence of those who engage of the worst kinds of sin and evil–abuse, theft, lying and deceit, rape and murder, child exploitation, rank barbarity, blood lust, and idol worship–is given a pass by the mystic overlords and their fawning crowds in the name of “sound doctrine”.

The hypocrisy does not go unnoticed by the Divine.  Calvinists and Reformers, collectivists and moral equivocators, I can assure you of this.

Stay tuned for part three.

In the comments thread of the last article, commenter “Lydia” shared a video of George C. Scott explaining (in character…it’s a movie clip) what Calvin’s TULIP acronym means.

I had seen this clip before and thought it totally egregious (naturally)…for the fact remains that there is nary a shred of truth to ANY point of TULIP whatsoever.  It is a complete farce from front to back.  But something else caught my attention this time.  I started replying to Lydia, and, as often happens, by the time I finished there was too much information for a comment.  But a perfect amount, as it turns out, for a new post.

What caught my attention was a reference George C. makes to God’s “omniscience”.  God’s “knowing everything…that’s why He’s God”.  Since you all likely–by now–understand my categorical aversion to and rejection of determinism in any form or under any label, no matter how pretentious, I couldn’t help myself from railing once again at this most egregious of theological posits…and unfortunately, one of the most universally accepted.  For try as I might, I cannot seem to shake peoples’ assumption that God doesn’t actually have to be “all knowing” and “all powerful” to be God.  And indeed not only is it not a requirement that God be able to do everything and know everything, it is not even possible.  What I mean to say is that the truth is,as usual, the complete opposite of what Reformation theology–in its most devious and destructive manifestation as today’s neo-Calvinism movement–teaches.  That is, if God really is God, then He cannot possibly do anything or know everything, because in order for us to make the assumption that there are agents (like man, for instance) in the universe which are distinct from God–are NOT God–we must assume that there are things then which are given for those agents to do and to know, which if God did and knew them…well, then they wouldn’t actually exist as themselves.  They would merely be manifestations of God, Himself.  If there is a distinction between God and the rest of whatever exists then the rest of whatever exists must do what IT does, which means that God cannot do those things for it; if He did, then they could not be known as metaphysically (nor even physically) distinct from God.  God cannot do everything and anything because God cannot possess what is not Himself.  Which means that whatever the universe does, IT does, not God.

You see?

Maybe?

I’ll explain.

No matter how humble it may sound…no matter how reluctant you are to deny it or to break from it, you MUST understand that ideas like “omniscience” and “omnipotence” are merely euphemisms for God-qua-Determinism.  There is nothing different between God able to know and do everything and the theology of Determinism.  Period.  Full stop. If God is able to know and do everything it must presume that God actually has a direct frame of reference for such an ability, which implies that he actually DOES everything and KNOWS everything; which means that what you and I do, and everything in the universe does, is not really us or the things of the universe doing them, or knowing them (if we are self-aware), it must be God.  Which means again that everything is merely a direct extension of God; which means that nothing else exists, and that everything you or I see or think or do is not really us, but a pre-ordained version of God’s very Self.  Indeed, this is precisely what R.C. Sproul is arguing when he says that God must be in control of every molecule or he is not God.  If God is in control of every molecule, we must assume absolute control…for how is it control otherwise?  If it is only “partial” control, then there is some substance of the created thing which is operating on its own utterly apart from any divine manipulation or sustenance at all.  And I can assure you that this is not what R.C. is conceding.  And even if it was, he would be left with the unanswerable question which utterly undermines his irrational premise which is: where is the line between the SELF of God and the SELF of the object?  If it is not a distinction that man can observe, then man possesses no capacity for assuming that there is any control whatsoever.  Objects are objects which do what they do and know what they know (if the object in question is self-aware, like man); they are NOT God.  Which means that God is not in control of them or their thoughts, which means that there are things that God has no frame of reference for, like BEING an object which He is not; in which case, the assumption that God is “able to to anything” is a lie.  Incidentally–and I know that this doesn’t wash much in the Reformed camp that adheres to “penal substitution” whereby an innocent man is tortured and put to death for a group of totally depraved humans who cannot be held culpable for their sin because it is not a function of choice, but of nature, which makes it not a sin at all, by definition–yes, incidentally, this is why God can reward and punish humanity justly, without being a hypocrite.  He does not proclaim that He is in control (read: possession) of humanity’s thoughts and actions.  Which is why the divine rewards and punishments are actually just.

Here are some waders. Hoist them up high as you can.  The neo-Calvinist, neo-reformed bullshit just keeps getting deeper and deeper as the ticker tape of theological madness and mystic oppression roles on and on with ever fancier propaganda.

My wife says my posts sound angry.

You bet I am.  I’m sick and bloody tired of being lied to by people who think that other humans exist for no other reason than to affirm their own subjective, asinine, irrational assertions about God and the world and everyone else.

Omniscient?

Really?  Well, I submit that Reformation theology is proof that God doesn’t know everything.  If He did, Calvin would have been a milk maid and Luther would have been hit by a bus on the way to post his 95 Theses.  Because Reformation theology removes God as far from His Creation as it does man from himself.

Now, finally, here is my response to Lydia:

Lydia,

Yes.  I’ve seen that before.  What caught my attention this time is…the woman says:  “Then it’s all worked out; it’s fixed.”  And George C. says, “More or less.”

LOL…how could it be “less”?  If God is “omniscient” then everything, certainly not “more or LESS” than everything, would have to be “worked out” by definition.

Why?

Because you of course understand that the implicit reason God knows everything, according to the Calvinist construct, is because He determined everything…which means that everything you think and do and say and feel, and that of everyone else, too, is merely part of the determining force of God’s “omnipotence”–from which his “omniscience” stems.  For the truth is that God cannot “know everything” unless He DID everything, Himself.  Which means that you don’t exist, nor do I, nor anyone else.  Everything is simply a direct extension of God.  And God is likewise an extension of the determining force.  And, incidentally, people always seem to miss that little, but infinitely (literally)  important, extension of the logic.  For even God, if truly everything is determined, must also be determined.  Determinism is absolute…it can have no beginning, by definition; for determinism cannot be a function of that which is NOT determined.  If everything that happens had to happen the way it happened and could not have happened any other way because God absolutely determined it, then God, Himself, must also have been determined to determine those things to happen exactly as they happened.  By definition of determinism, He could not have determined them to happen any other way.  So, again, as we see, even God is a victim of the determinism implicit in TULIP.

It is “all worked out”, as George says in the clip, because it couldn’t be any other way and still be determined so that God can know it ALL perfectly.

And, furthermore, what does “know everything” mean?  What exactly is knowing everything there is to know?

First problem:  human beings have no frame of reference for “knowing everything”.  Therefore, for a human being to claim that God can “know everything” when that human being can never, EVER, by existential definition, be in a position to even define “everything” is  antipodal to rational thought.  How can humans know and define this specific attribute of God when that attribute utterly eludes their apprehension?  The problem is that “everything”, outside of a specific context, which then must exclude “everything” except as a completely conceptual (non-actual), qualifier, cannot be given a set value.  Everything is simply another word for “infinity”, and infinity has no measurable value, by definition.  What is the value of infinity goes the answer-less question.  The value of infinity is infinity…infinity wholly defines itself.  There is no actual value to infinity which man can observe and thus apply efficaciously to his own context…his own existence.  Which gives infinity a practical and functional value of…you guessed it.  ZERO.  Which means that functionally “everything” is really nothing, because everything has no practical nor applicable value with respect to man’s context.  Which, if you are a human being, is the only context that is relevant, not matter what the neo-Reformed say.  They cannot argue their way out of their own existence.  They forfeit the debate as soon as they open their mouths to speak.  Because ALL their speaking and thinking will always and can only ever be from the context of their own SELF.  So they lose immediately.  And we, the rationalists, win.  As usual.  Which is why no one on any discernment blog or physics blog will debate me.  As soon as they concede that everything starts with SELF, they realize they forfeit.  Existence is the inescapable axiom…and yet man has been denying it for years.

(Hence the mad scramble by physicists to find the “God particle”, and now, since they have found it, to scramble to explain it in a way that doesn’t simply lead them further down the inevitable path of the Standard Model, which is infinity; this has been the whole problem with the Standard Model from the very beginning.  And not to sound arrogant, but I could have saved them the trouble and told them that without an external observer (i.e. God) simple logic dictates that all matter must reduce down to an irreconcilable “dimensionless” infinity, which is why scientists spend so much time scratching their heads the further down the path they go.  The realize that the path doesn’t end, and yet when they arrive at a place where it they think it’s supposed to end, but doesn’t, they are absolutely fit to be tied.  They never realize, in the forest of their Platonism, that it is the OBSERVER who mitigates infinity.  For without an agent who is aware of SELF as distinct from OTHER, then OTHER is utterly infinite.  There is no end to that which cannot be observed and realized to be NOT something ELSE.

And this is where atheism also always ends up:  unexplainable infinity, and irrational theories which attempt to reconcile infinity in a way which doesn’t include the only thing which is capable of doing this:  God as a distinct SELF.  And this is also why I reject Objectivism (which is a self-proclaimed atheistic world-view).  For all of Rand’s brilliance–and she was brilliant–her Philosophy winds up down the valueless road of infinity just like everyone else’s.  And so she eventually must concede the very philosophies she rails against.  Her premise is the same, whether she realized it or not:  you start at nothing, and nothing is what you get.  Which means…who cares what philosophy rules men at the end of the day? Man’s very existence cannot be valued against any objective plumb line at all.  And thus you have the weird irony of Objectivism.)

So we blithely proclaim, in our ignorance and false “humility”, in an effort to make ourselves sound so pious, that God knows everything, while at the same time not knowing what that could even possibly mean.

Stay tuned for part two.