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

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

Personal healing is “profit and pleasure”? Hmm…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I was wrong.

Doctrine.  Yes, that’s another problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never.

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

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

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

“What is your favorite color?”

Really?  I’m on to them now.  I see the brainwashing inherent in the system, revealed in the question, applied in the assumptions.

Now, don’t get me wrong…I’m not a conspiracy theorist.  I’m not even that interested in conspiracies generally because, to me,  I just sort of assume that those in power use that power to fuck everyone over behind the scenes.  So what’s the novelty?  Where’s the surprise?  To me, lying and abuse of power by those who assume authority covertly will seek to maintain that authority covertly.  If it turns out that the government did have something to do with 911 or Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination…shrug.  It just sort of falls in line with everything I’ve been saying about those who think they have a right to BE everyone else…which is precisely the assumption held by those who presume to have some kind of divine enlightenment which grants them the power of the Primary Consciousness (the “church”, the “party”, the “people”, the “tribe”, the “Bible”…pick your tyrannical flavor of the month) to use force (violence) to compel human behavior.  And as soon as minds become fair game…well, lives are usually the flip side of the coin.  Remember, in every form of government ever established with the exception of certain representative governments such as the pre-Saul Jewish state and the American Constitutional Republic founded by Washington, et. al., which was built upon the legacy of John Locke and the Enlightenment, you don’t EXIST as a human being apart from the “collective” which is defined, continuously and impetuously, by the state.  So when I say conspiracy?  I am not trying to be a sensationalist.  I am trying to say…

Typical.

Still…take this with a grain of salt.  Whatever “conspiracy” may have existed as the purpose of the question, “What is your favorite color?”,  in some form or another in the past has long since been buried under the the many blankets of history…it isn’t so much a conspiracy now as it is a testimony to the fact that the conspiracy to push Platonism on the world actually worked quite well.  And now, there is no conspiracy to push Platonism on everyone, there is just…well, Platonism. In its  many tyrannical forms.  Catholicism, Calvinism, Marxism, Scientific determinism, Biblicism, and so on and so forth.  We are at the point now where most of us just shut up and tithe, to use a metaphor here. We bow our heads and surrender our wills and our property to strangers in front of plexiglass podiums because we think that just because they SAY they have been called by God to rule over you as God in-the-stead (which really just means “God”, period) then that is a good enough argument according to the philosophical assumptions that form the crux of all thought in the world today:  we can’t know truth; the pastors (or whatever leaders) must know it for us.  So we all just shrug and accept the fact that those urinal cakes in the men’s room aren’t going to clean themselves.  And off we go with our brushes and bottles.  Remember, being approved by God is biblically defined by doing a lot of free shit for the owners of the business called the “local church”.

This post will probably be a little more tongue-in-cheek than I want it to be.  What I mean by that is that I think there is something to this…I mean, at some point Platonism had to be foisted upon civilization.  What is “learned” at the academic level, in whatever generation, has a funny and persistent way of becoming “divine inspiration” when the academics are discussing their ideas with the masses.  In other words, what “educated” people discuss and and debate to arrive at their conclusions within the four walls of their ivory towers (with the requisite amount of beheadings and stake-burnings of the requisite number of detractors…Michael Servetus comes to mind) tends to be introduced by means of something like a slow, almost subconscious intravenous drip.  The masses in general never get a chance to debate these ideas because, well,  they just aren’t smart enough we are told.  The “laws of logic and nature which govern” are introduced as the primary consciousness of whatever body of thought happens to be in question, and they are bulwarked by small ideas, notions, rhetorical and self-serving questions, and “truisms” which are intended to be easily digestible, bite-sized morsels with which to fatten up the masses for the slaughter.

Okay, I’m sounding like an old crank.  And I don’t begrudge academics…oh good grief no.  How many times have we heard the mystic overlords rail against evolution or big-bang theory, plowing ahead with their rhetoric despite their utter lack of experience and education, possessing not even a rudimentary knowledge of the science? So it isn’t that, necessarily.  It’s more like…when you realize at a certain point in your life that you have been had by a foundational philosophy which infects essentially every body of thought and every idea in the world and is responsible for so much human destruction that even natural selection couldn’t hold a candle to its eviscerating power, you begin to see all the tidbits pointing to the philosophy which swirl about the culture and the language like tiny snowflakes as, you know, actually being there.  It’s like, you always knew they were there, but you didn’t really see them.  But now they are in your eyes and they sting like hell and you just want them to go away because you realize you can’t ignore them anymore.

Hence, here is me, offering this post for your pleasure.  Yes, here is me, probably reading way too much into this, and yet here is me compelled to pontificate about it in a way that will try to convince you that, no, in fact I’m not reading way too much into it, and that these little trivialities have done more to make you a slave of the philosophical destruction of modern epistemology, up to and including almost all of Christian “orthodoxy”, than you probably realized.

And…okay, maybe you’re right.  Maybe it’s not so much conspiracy theorizing as it as cynicism.  In either case, I don’t think I’m that far off the mark.

*

“What is your favorite color?” was probably the first question about which you were genuinely excited.  And you answered, like we all did and still do: Blue.  Green.  Red. Periwinkle. Okay, maybe not periwinkle, but you get the idea.  ‘Yes, Argo, I know what colors are’, you are saying in your mind.  ‘Thanks for that brilliant tutorial on common knowledge.’

And I respond by telling you that your answer to this question is a glaring indication that you still concede the Platonist foundational assumptions which form the philosophical superstructure of the entire western world today, if not THE world in general.  And as soon as you walk out of your annual meeting of the Discernment Blogger Institute for Free Thinking Thumbers of Noses I approach you as you hail a cab and I ask you “What is your favorite color?” and you say “blue” and I shake my head and put my arm around your shoulder and offer to buy you a drink while we sit down and talk about why it is you haven’t learned a fucking thing.

“But Argo, I know what colors are.  What haven’t I supposedly learned?”  And I tell you that you haven’t learned to come out of your meeting of the Free Thinking of Thumbers of Noses and not immediately concede the opposition’s entire fucking philosophical premise before you even get to the street!

And do you you really know what colors are?  Do you really think that the answer you provide is rational?  By that I mean, logically consistent?  If I were to ask you this question, and you said “blue”, and then I were to say “okay, show me blue”…do you know what you would do?  I bet I do.  I bet I know what you would do.  You would  look at me like I was an idiot and walk away.  And then I would chase you and pester you and follow you to work and throw paper airplanes at your head while you were typing on your computer, and jelly beans in your coffee and eventually out of sheer exasperation you would go, “What do you want from me, you freak?!”  And I would say “Show me blue.”

And you would pick up one of the jelly beans that missed your coffee and it would be a blue jelly bean and you would throw it back at me where it would ricochet off my glasses and land in my coffee and you would say with a smirk: “That!  That’s blue.”

But its not, you see.

It’s NOT blue at all.  It is a jelly bean, which we have qualified as “blue”.  We have made a distinction of a characteristic of an observable object (jelly bean) and have used a conceptual abstraction (“blue”, from the “macro” conceptual category of “color”) to define the object’s existence relative to other objects.  And incidentally, “blue” is just one of the many conceptual abstractions we use to qualify that particular object’s existence as relatively distinct from that of other objects.  The size, shape, smell, speed as it went through the air at my head, even the label “jelly bean”, itself…they are all abstractions used to define relative existence. Products of our conceptualizing brains.

You see, “blue” doesn’t actually exist.  Blue is an entirely theoretical concept.  We have a picture of “blue” in our minds, but even that very picture is a product of the senses.  The eyes at some point when you were just a youngling had seen an OBJECT which was called “blue” by someone you trust, probably mommy, and then confirmed by other people in your world and you noticed pretty quickly that there was a reasonable consensus about the application of that label according to the the language and thus you understood “blue” to mean that characteristic of whatever object you were observing at any given moment.  The image was thus fixed in your mind from that point on; and by now–through a lifetime of experience and persistent and consistent verification by society–your ability to properly qualify objects as “blue” is utterly firm…all of this without ever having actually seen “blue”.

Now, some of you might appeal to “light” as the standard of color.  But, Argo, you will protest.  I understand all that.  Blue isn’t really the Jellybean, it is the frequency of the light waves hitting our eyes making it look blue to us, the same way we see blue when we look a the sky.  Light is a composite of all colors, and how we see specific hues is merely due to the physical properties of objects which dictate how they absorb certain frequencies of light and reflect others.

How true…and how astute.  Obviously, you’re an educated soul.  Nothing wrong with that; and nothing you’ve said is false by any conventional standard.

But what is light, I ask, that it may be a “composite of colors”?

Light is a photon.  And a photon is what?

A thing.  An object.

And what are colors apart from this thing we call a photon?

A  conceptual abstraction.  Yes, even for color to exist at the subatomic level requires, well…an actual subatomic level, right?  A level full of THINGS which we can label as the “carriers of color”.  And further, you’ll notice in physics “forces” don’t actually observably exist.  There are “particles” which are the “force carriers”.  Even in physics there are real forces which somehow exist without needing to present themselves to man’s tools of apprehension (senses) or consistent logic (the logic which demands that everything which we qualify as existing must be a function of what is observable).  This should tell us a lot about the Platonist assumptions under-girding “hard science”.

But notice what this question–what is your favorite color?–does.  It reinforces not the fact that blue is an abstraction, but that it is an actuality.  That it IS something which can exist to be called a “favorite” thing.  Perhaps not in so many words, but that is the clear implication.  And the problem with this implication is obvious, or should be–namely the fact that colors do NOT exist by any reasonable definition.  And with this question we are asking someone to describe a favorite thing amongst a group of things which don’t actually materially exist.  So instead of asking the question, “If we consider this particular object, what color of it is your favorite?”, we choose the more abstract rout, which serves, I submit to reinforce the false notion that abstract concepts are causal.  The more reasonable rendering of the question is more like:  What is your favorite color of car?  Red.  What is your favorite color of dress?  Black.  What is your favorite color of wine?  White.

But no, the question is: What is your favorite color?

I stopped considering this a legitimate question a long time ago.  You see, at some point I realized that the question as it was commonly presented was quite silly.  Now, understand that I had no knowledge of Platonism as a philosophical superstructure back in those days.  I wasn’t really considering the difference between the actual and the conceptual…that didn’t register to me on John Immel’s “so what?” meter.  Back then, I would have said something perfunctory (and scary) like, “Yeah…of course math is real”, and went on my way with nary an inkling of the absurdity.  With nary a blush at such a flip and casual rejection of my own ability to observe reality.  Without even a brief start at how easily I could utterly reject any rational epistemology.  Still the question, “What is your favorite color?” just seemed…hmm, somehow all wrong.

I realized that I had been answering “green” all these years in the full awareness that I did not, in fact, desire everything in my life to be green.  I didn’t want my meatloaf to be green, for example.  Or my hair.  I despised the horribly tacky green bagels and green beer served every year on St. Patrick’s day.  I liked my cars red.  My coffee black.  My glasses frames sliver.  And I thought how silly for me to say I have a favorite color when clearly all reason pointed to the fact that this was simply not so.  I did not really prefer green.  My preference for green was actually quite arrow.  I liked a pair of green Dr. Marten shoes I had once.  And I wouldn’t want Ireland to be a desert brown.  But other than that, there wasn’t much I wanted green.

It was then I started answering this common question with, “Well, it depends”.  And it did.  I wanted an OBJECT on which to hang the concept on.  Without an object, the answer was utterly meaningless.  Because “green” doesn’t exist, green apples exist.  Black doesn’t exist, black cars exist…and so on. I learned that in order to rationally apply a wholly abstract concept required an object in order for the abstraction to have any value; to make any efficacious sense.  And this, incidentally is true not only for “color”, but for any abstraction we use to define objects.

The point is a simple one.  Look around and you will see how our society utterly roots itself in a de facto application of Platonism.  Whether we are talking color or time or direction or numbers or energy or force…notice the perfunctory assumption that somehow the existence of these concepts doesn’t necessarily require an observable, material object by which they can be valued.  Look at how often people cite the “laws of nature”, or the “laws of logic”…as though these things, like the Wizard of Oz, hide behind the curtain of reality and pull their determinist strings in order to give “existence” and “truth” to all that you see.  What is unseen is the source of the seen…which means that you aren’t really ever grasping TRUTH.  For TRUTH is a direct function of what lies behind the curtain of Platonist assumptions, hidden from all mortal eyes…and this is the root of all the oppression and violations of man.  An little innocent question like “what is your favorite color?” has massively destructive implications for human beings.

I heard a fairly well-known, Ph.D. level Christian scientist today refer to “God’s laws of logic”.  So now it seems that God is directly responsible for creating and defining abstract concepts which man can by no means ever observe but which man is somehow utterly beholden to.  Indeed, in a brief sentence, this hangman of reason managed to combine two Primary Consciousnesses into one great juggernaut of epistemological darkness.  And these are the best and brightest Christianity has to offer.  Dude…we are sooo in trouble here.

When the question is merely, “What is your favorite color?”, then the object which is an absolute prerequisite for one to observe “color” is completely removed from the equation.  And through this kind of thinking–this kind of subtle conditioning–we learn to put the cart before the horse.  We learn that what does NOT exist must precede, or as I would say, give value, to that which DOES.  Color gives value to the object by preceding it in the Platonist metaphysical food chain.   Abstractions give value, not the other way around.  In other words, it is not the jelly bean which is green, it is green which is the jelly bean.

And that backwards equation will lead to death.  For if the sum and substance of the TRUTH of what you see is unseen, then the sum and substance of its GOOD is unseen, and its VALUE is unseen.  This makes it impossible for you to really know anything at all because your senses have been eliminated from your epistemology.  Thus, you have no means to  challenge the tyrant, because you have no tools with which to fish for truth, let alone catch it.

Therefore, you have no standard of justice upon which to appeal when you are driven to the gas chambers.  You have no definition of SELF by which to demand that your government or your church “authority” stop robbing you blind.  You have no standard of LOVE to appeal to when they rip your family away from you and sell them into slavery.  You have no inherent “self evident” right to LIFE upon which to anchor yourself when they tie you to the stake and burn you for your apostasy.

So…I will ask you again.

What is your favorite color?

I have been having a debate with Paul Dohse on his blog http://www.paulspassingthoughts.com recently (link- http://paulspassingthoughts.com/2013/11/21/biblical-metaphysics-more-free-writing-notes/#comments).  In this debate I have asked several times for him to tell me what he thinks the standard of TRUTH is.  I know he is a “biblicist” (a proponent of biblical inerrancy), and so I feel like he wants to say “Bible”…but he won’t do it.  I’m not sure why, but I have a pretty good idea.

You see, if he says anything other than “man’s LIFE”, which is my unequivocal standard of TRUTH, this puts TRUTH outside of man, which puts authority outside of man’s life as well, because what is absolute truth must be considered to have a MORAL monopoly on the force that is authority.  And if truth is outside of man and authority is outside of man, then Paul has no actual, objective, nor reasonably defensible grounds for savaging the Calvinists like he does.  Why?  Because he concedes the exact same premise: absolute truth is outside of man, absolutely, and therefore, man can NEVER be in a position to know ANYTHING.  And if man can by his very existential being, never really know anything, then man cannot ever question any idea at all, because…how the hell would he know?  If truth must be bestowed, somehow, upon man, and cannot be learned, then how do we know upon whom it has been bestowed?  Therefore, who the person is who gets to be the “authority” over truth, and thus has the moral right to force others into right thinking eventually just becomes an argument that goes like this:

“God said I’m right!”

“No, He didn’t!  That’s impossible!”

“Oh yeah, how do you figure!”

“Because He told me I’m right!”

In BOTH Paul’s and the neo-Calvinist’s ideology the Bible is the source of all truth and authority.  Which means IT is truth and authority.  Thus, the fight isn’t really over any significant change in how we understand reality, it is merely a fight over who gets to say what the Bible really means.  But, since in BOTH schools of thought (Paul’s and the neo-Calvinist’s) the Bible is the very proof of its own truth, it is impossible for them to actually KNOW what the Bible really says, because the Bible, being absolute truth outside of man, isn’t actually telling them anything at all.  It is its own end.   If the Bible IS TRUTH, and does not require the standard of man’s life as a yardstick for its TRUTH, then the only logical purpose of the Bible is simply to BE the Bible. The Bible is true because and only because it is the Bible.  Any interpretation of it thus insofar as man seeks to apply it to his life (as if that’s even possible) is categorically irrelevant.

Thus, Paul’s fight is simply this:  who has a more “convincing” form of the exact same argument.  Who is better able to persuade people that their opponent is liar?  And if that doesn’t work, well…guns are considered the great equalizer.  If you can’t beat ’em, shoot ’em.  And that’s what it always, always, always boils down to when we concede that ANYTHING outside of individual human life is the standard of truth.

So, this latest exchange has got me thinking.  Is it time to shake the dust…for those of us really and truly interested in a faith that has an end and an identity beyond fear and ignorance…is it time to look for a harvest elsewhere.  Is it time to concede that Christians today are just too far down the rabbit hole of orthodoxy to be led out.  Has the rope gotten too short?

Possibly.  For me…it is discouraging.  I’ll admit, I am pessimistic.  The Christian identity is rank FEAR now, which is why they continue to retreat into their caves on the mountains, like the Israelites.  They huddle together in packs and cling to their insane ideas like “literal six day creationism” or “the Word is the Authority”…ideas that are simply indefensible to anyone else, even a “secular” world which, despite is many flaws, at least concedes in general that the senses are the root of truth, not “revelation”.  I hate the Platonism of science, but at least scientists pay lip service to observable evidence.  The observation by  man is entirely irrelevant and illusory to Christians today…your senses deceive you; what you see washes nothing with “truth”.   And the pack lashes out violently and blindly at anyone who would dare challenge the idols on their mantles.  Look at how man people are run out of town on a rail from sites like Wartburg Watch for daring to offend the sensibilities of the blog hosts, or the e-Pastor, or the readers by proclaiming the irrationality of “orthodoxy”.

Anyhow, here is an e-mail I sent to my friend, John Immel.  I often seek solace in John’s heavy intellect.  In a sea of Christian insanity, he is one of a smattering of faces of reason.  A brilliant person, he reminds me that Christians don’t have to be woefully ignorant and stubborn to the point of utter spiritual death.  It’s just that most of them are.

That sounds mean and arrogant.  Too bad.  That is how much I hate it when you call the “Bible” the “Word”.  I know what you are doing.  You are calling the Bible, God…removing all distinctions between Him in the Heavens and the talisman you worship.  And by doing that, you remove the distinction between you “interpretation” and God.  And by doing that you make YOURSELF God.  And that is not cool. The Bible ceases to lead people to their lives and to God and leads them to YOU instead. That’s…wrong.

Here’s the letter.

That’s a great point.  Just enjoy learning…enjoy the pursuit of truth.  I tend to get wrapped up in the results; where, really, all that really matters is that I can now properly define MY life.  I cannot define anyone else’s for them.  So, yes, we should just enjoy being US, and understanding that this is exactly the point of existence.  Existence, life…are ends of themselves.

Unfortunately, you are right…most people don’t buy that, so sooner or later they are GOING to want to force you to NOT be you, by whatever primary consciousness they declare is truth.

I see this a bit on some blogs…it is not a matter of intellect, it is a matter of ideology.  They merely disagree because my conclusion is not convenient to their argument–that MAN’S life is the prerequisite for ALL truth; which is axiomatic, for how can you concede truth if you don’t exist FIRST, which means that YOU must be YOU first, before even God can be truly God in any way that He can rationally be defined as “God”.  If God is the God of the living, this presumes that LIFE is a prerequisite for Him being man’s God.  But this idea is an anathema to them, because they concede that if there isn’t any authority or truth outside of man dictating the sum and substance of his life for him, then there will be rank moral relativism; an orgy of sin.  Well, look around…has the Platonist assumption led to peace on Earth anywhere?!!!  If the standard of truth is man’s life, then the standard is knowable and observable; it is also utterly metaphysically and epistemologically consistent.  It is also completely compatible with a Creator God because now God can actually be KNOWN as God; thus, He has a purpose for man which is not only knowable, but practically applicable.

I ask, what is the standard of TRUTH.

They will not answer me.  Because it can only be MAN, and they , like so many, are just terrified to admit this.  But their beliefs are FAR more terrifying, because if it is something else, then ultimately man MUST be sacrificed in service to the EXTERNAL truth; because truth is absolute and immovable.  In order for truth to be absolute, everything in existence must be laid down in service to it.  In other words, the death of everything is required.  This is why they I suspect have such a hard time saying that truth is MAN…because if truth is MAN then they believe that this somehow strips God of His power.  This is of course is completely backwards…a product of the evolution of Platonism as the singular philosophical foundation for all of western thought.  The truth is that God’s power can only be truly revealed, loved, worshiped, adored and honored when it can be known.  In a construct where truth is outside of man, it is existentially removed from him, and thus, man is never in any position to know truth.  Without this ability, man can never really know God, or, even worse, be known by Him.

I am done with all “discernment blogs” from now on.  I am over it.  There are perhaps a smattering of Christians here and there that “get it”, but most are just too far down the rabbit hole of orthodoxy to see any light.  And, the constant appeal to the cul-de-sac of Platonist logic disguised under a the altruistic facade of “biblical inerrancy” is wearisome. Once we concede that the Bible is the “Word”, we have set up an idol…we have made God a thing to be handled by special priests “called” to “ministry”.  We have removed the distinction between God and a book…which, even if it were God’s very words to man wouldn’t make those words GOD, Himself.  Even God’s words must affirm man as the standard of GOOD and TRUTH in order to be true; so even if the book were written by God, Himself, it would still need to be held to the standard of LIFE for it to be both reasonable and relevant.  But there I go again, offending the poor abused…the neo-neo-Calvinist (as I am starting to think of the new discernment crowd) virtue in a vacuum.  So anyway…yeah, the “Word”… really, this just means we have removed the distinction between God and those people who would hold it aloft and cry “My Power, My God!”.  This is idolatry and paganism, and the implications are profound.  I am too old to be a hypocrite any longer.

I love Christ…I utterly reject the epistemology of Christianity, as it were.

There are some pretty cool philosophy blogs I’ve been checking out lately.  I think my time is better spent over there.  There is a better harvest for Christ than can be found amongst today’s Christians.

Isn’t it always that way?

“That which is infinite must be absent an observer, and that which is absent an observer must be infinite. That which is infinite cannot exist, because existence is a qualifier/quantifier which cannot be applied except by an observer, who cannot, by definition, be in the presence of the infinite.  If something exists, it is not infinite, but finite, because the presence of the observer mitigates the “self’ of that thing which would otherwise be infinite (and thus without any qualification) absent the presence of the observer.  Therefore, when the observer is removed from the metaphysical AND physical equation, all things are infinite, and are thus utterly valueless.  Why?  Because observation is existence.  Truly then, every human observer creates in the conceptual sense the existence of what they observe…they define TRUTH.  God, of course, creates what ACTUALLY is observed; He creates what IS.  God then creates objects (by observation), and man creates meaning (by observation).  Man’s power to create meaning and TRUTH is man’s word (the language of man); God’s power to create material objects in order that man may observe them and conceptually organize them with respect to himself as THE standard of TRUTH is God’s Word (the language of God).  This is why Jesus is often thought of as the Word of God.  Jesus is the material actualization of God within man’s existential frame of reference.  Jesus is the supreme material revelation which proves the power of God’s Word (His ability to create anything absolutely).  This of course presumes that the Bible is not, in fact, God’s  “Word”; which it is not.  

“Absolute to absolute.  Determinism to determinism.  Free to free.  Infinity to infinity.  Any attempt to couple these notions…to couple what is limitless to its limitless opposite (a free agent, like the Creator, observing His determined Creation) will result in an utter schism of reason; an inexorable contradiction in terms, a contradiction of TRUTH, and an irreconcilable chasm within man’s whole existential philosophy.”

The first quote is a thought from my head.  The second a quote from my notes, via my head.  I believe them to be axiomatic, having thought upon them for quite some time.  And no, to answer the question in your mind right now (perhaps), it doesn’t take much more than that.  Much more than thinking.  I mean…think about it, that’s all.  With respect to the second quote:  How does the free interact with the determined?  We presume this to be TRUTH so quickly and instinctively that we scarcely blink when we are presented with such a notion:  “God has planned out for you every day for the rest of your life.”  But try to reconcile that in your mind.  Your days are determined, and you are determined then, by extension, because the salient component of your day is…you.  But God, they demand, is utterly free, unfettered by determinist forces, doing what he pleases, with no predictable rationale.

How can that be possible?  How can God “freely determine”.  For if we remove any observable object from the equation, be it man or any other material substance in the universe, and strictly put in a “box” the concepts of “free” and “determined” it doesn’t take much to realize that these concepts, denied any object by which they can be valued, must be utterly infinite; that is, defined merely by the value of “itself”.  The only definition remaining is that they are what they are, period, full stop (and even that definition is a qualifier which is antithetical to an “is”…the real point is that a thing which is both infinite and absent an observer cannot exist because it can in no way be qualified or quantified as as existing).   So, the notions must be infinite.  And thus the question becomes:  how can infinite concepts be coupled in a way that does not contradict them?

But here is the thing:  according to our perfunctory Platonism we don’t remove observable objects, including man, from the equation.  We simply reverse the thinking.  Instead of what actually exists as a part of the material universe giving value to the otherwise infinite conceptual abstractions (like determinism and free; up and down; space and time; red and blue), we declare that those infinite, unobservable concepts somehow give value to what is material.  But the problem is that this does not mitigate the infinity of the concepts…they are still infinite and thus cannot be said to exist with respect to us.  Why?  Because the concepts cannot be observed…only material objects are observed.  And if they cannot be observed by man, then man has no way to qualify or quantify them.  They are still limitless, by definition…and determined is still infinitely determined, free is still infinitely free, red is still infinitely red, and so on.  All we’ve done is declared that man’s senses–the tools of his observation–are irrelevant.  Useless for declaring truth.  Truth is a function of the infinite unobservable forces which drive the material objects in the universe…and these forces, again, we concede are beyond man’s capacity to KNOW; perhaps we say that we can know the objects they absolutely control, but that avails man nothing in terms of defining what exactly the objects ARE or what they are DOING; for indeed, the objects are, as Plato declares, merely “shadows”…insufficient representations of the all determining forces, or as I call them, the concepts. And…actually,  I would submit that declaring them “shadows” is not in fact a reasonable description.  Because the concepts themselves which govern them do so absolutely, there can be no quantifiable/quantifiable distinction made between the concepts and the objects.  If the concepts are indeed infinite and absolute, then there can be NO separation between the concepts and what they control…because infinity can have no limit.  Thus, man cannot declare the objects shadows.  Man cannot declare them anything at all.  He has no idea and no capacity to explain just what he is observing.  Man’s entire existence is a lie.

Man’s definitions of these concepts then are always and perpetually false…an illusion, or a lie.  Because if man cannot see that which gives value to everything that exists, then man cannot see anything by definition.  If an object he observes is given a value by an infinite concept he cannot see, and thus cannot declare exists, then how does man exactly define the object he is observing? It is impossible.  All of reality is an illusion.  And if all reality is an illusion brought on a determining force which is utterly infinite because it is beyond the scope of man’s senses, then what exactly is man?  How do we even define the human SELF? To say that man is determined by the forces which drive the existence of all material objects in the universe means that man is a product of determinism, and therefore he cannot observe himself in any real way any more than he can observe other objects.  Because observation implies a free agent who can apprehend the truth/reality of what he/she is observing.  If man is determined, then so must be his ability to observe, which means that he cannot freely observe, which means that he cannot separate himself from what he observes…he, like the objects, is merely a product of the determining force.  He can no more apprehend SELF than he can apprehend the TRUTH of the things he observes.

What is my point?  The point is that NO ONE and nothing, not even God, can freely observe that which is determined.  Because “free” and “determined” are mutually exclusive concepts, which, if taken to be actual (that is, existing beyond the abstract value of them applied to material objects man and God observe), must be infinite and absolute.  And, like I said in my second quote above, the coupling of mutually exclusive infinite concepts within a singular existential framework is a complete contradiction in terms.

This contradictory thinking is, unfortunately, the foundational assumption of the most popular philosophy in the world today, I submit:  Platonism, functioning as determinism via the gnostic acceptance of the Primacy of Consciousness.  And the worst part is that it infects the church like an incurable cancer.  It is a totally impossible lie, and yet, it is this which is precisely taught almost categorically, in one form or another, in every single Christian church in America, and likely the world.

Why is this important to understand?  Because I firmly believe that this is a philosophy which denies salvation to the human race because it specifically denies the human race an identity.  And even worse, it makes God utterly unknowable.  The resistance to reason we see in the church is the resistance to the reality of God.  And any philosophy which denies God, can promise salvation…er, how, exactly?  It cannot.

Narrow is the road.  And that is why this is important.  We have generations upon generations who don’t know God and aren’t known by God because they OBSERVE and BELIEVE–which are the fundamentals of human existential reality–that they do not have an existence which is knowable!  There is no THEM to exist…and this is why a omniscient God can declare without contradiction “Depart from Me, for I never knew you.”

“God isn’t up there scratching His head saying, ‘Why did so and so lose his job; why did such and such get diagnosed with cancer?’ God has every day of your life already planned out.”

So said the popular TV preacher to his sprawling audience this morning as I was channel surfing while girding my lions for our family’s weekly excursion into metaphysical madness and epistemological insanity (church…it’s a long story, don’t ask).

This is nothing new.  I have heard a variation of this bullshit dozens of times over the course of my Christian life.  The idea that you are merely an irrelevant observer to your own existence is completely within the pale of orthodoxy with respect to Protestant Christianity.  And, as I stated above, being an irrelevant observer is not really observing at all.  And if you cannot observe, you cannot know, which means you cannot actually define existence, either God’s or your own.  And this is the insidious lie running like a burning thread through the theology of millions and likely billions of people around the world, propagated by the mystics who stand in the surety, and often the wealth, of their lies before those who have decided that they cannot make any rational decision at all save one:  to accept that some mystic behind a podium is more qualified to judge their lives than they are; that truth is not learned, nor applied, but bestowed and ridden like a wave by submitting one’s very SELF to the unobservable force of divine  determinism.

But let’s bring this down to the chalk board of philosophy, removing the vestiges of mysticism and the trappings of lights, and rock-band worship, and annoying, heavily-affected sermons.

How exactly can God be a free witness to the Creation He has determined?  How can man be a free witness to his life, which exists in an environment which is wholly determined?  How can this scenario–the free interacting with the determined–be possible?  How can two mutually exclusive ideas co-exist?  Well, the simple answer is that they cannot, and so this notion that God has planned all your days for you before you knew them must be false.  It cannot be true, at least, not in the determined sense that the neo-Calvinists always mean…and no, one cannot even appeal to God’s mystery to make them true.  The fact is that ideas are either reconcilable or not.  If we make what cannot be true according to man’s observable reality true, then we declare that man can know nothing and therefore, cannot possibly know truth from farce.

Never mind the simple fact that something cannot happen before it happens; it cannot exist before it exists.  To say that God plans your days BEFORE you go through them is precisely a declaration of this impossible idea.  God cannot plan what does not yet exist.  And, further, it cannot exist to God and NOT exist to you because it is your ability to observe objects and conceptualize their relative existence with one another and yourself which is the root of all TRUTH; thus if something doesn’t exist to YOU then it cannot exist period because only YOU are the absolute, inexorable frame of reference for all you know and accept as TRUTH because there can be no distinction between YOU and your LIFE, and you know anything you know and believe anything you believe and define anything you define inexorably and absolutely by your LIFE, and nothing else.  Moreover, existence and non-existence are mutually exclusive concepts which cannot be reconciled in a single object…meaning, your environment, your LIFE, cannot both exist and not exist at the same time.  If your day is not YET, then it does not exist.  And if it does not exist it cannot be planned…it cannot be anything, because NOTHING by definition cannot be something, no matter how hard we may try to make this idea work logically.  Certainly God can have plans, but they can be no more inexorable and inevitable than yours, because inevitability is merely an abstract concept.  A day of your life is a day when it exists, and not one minute before.  Thus, if you are a free agent and God is a free agent (remembering that like infinite concepts are the only ones which can co-relate) then there is no day which IS absolutely before it is.  You and God co-exist in the days together…they exist only after they are manifest as a function of your LIFE.  And if it is your life then YOU are the single most salient component of your day, just like God is the most salient component of His day.  Remember, when God interacts with man He must interact with him on man’s level, and that is the level of the conceptual abstraction.  God having “plans” does not in any way, nor can it, imply determinism…of existence of something before it exists to man.  God declaring He has plans is thus the exact same thing (conceptual) as you declaring that YOU have plans.  Thus, God freely planning for your life is only efficacious if you freely exist within your life…the plans then are not “determined”, that is, existing because you are nothing more than an extension of a determining force, but the plans God has indicate the relationship of two free, self-aware agents.  God acting, and man recognizing the actions through the objects he observes (which can include God, Himself), valuing those actions by the efficacious use of conceptual abstractions measured by the standard of his LIFE, and then acting in accordance or contrary to those plans as man’s free, self-volition decides.   Thus, the plans are nothing more than an idea of how God sees the “future”…but the actuality of those plans (and the “future”) must involve the free agency of man.  God is not deemed a liar or hypocrite if man freely thwarts those plans in accordance with his own free will…for plans are nothing more than conceptualizations God uses in order to relate to man as a function of man’s existential frame of reference.  The concept of plan does not actually exist for God to violate or affirm based on His own free actions.  And this is then the problem with this notion that God is not a conceptual Being, but a determining One.  If God determines, then the logical consistency of the idea demands that God is just as much as slave to the predetermined “future”, or plans, or reality as man is.  God can no more deny a future which is determined than man can.  Thus, if determinism is the force in play–if the concept of “plan” becomes a real thing in and of itself, apart from being merely a means by with the self-aware agents organize their existence with respect to a mutually efficacious relationship–then BOTH God and man must be determined by whatever is declared to exist inexorably, regardless of whatever God or man thinks or wants, because whatever God wants or thinks must be subservient to that which is determined.  Determinism is absolute, and thus ANYTHING that happens must have been determined to happen, and could not have happened any other way.  All of God’s and man’s thoughts and actions are merely extensions of the determining force.  To say that God determines contradicts His own existence as a free thinking, free acting Agent.

But on an even more pragmatic level…how is it a free agent can observe a determined object?  It contradicts the notions, again.  For in the moment it is observed, the determined object must be declared a freely observed determined object.  But this would have to mean that the determined object was irrevocably determined to be at that place at that time in order to be observed by that particular observer.  And if that particular observer had to observe the determined object at that time and at that place, then the observer could not have been free to observe it.  The observer is just as much a part of the determining equation governing the determined object as the determined object is.  The object had to be observed at that time and place by that observer which means the observer had to be there to observe it.  The observer could not have been free to be there or not; his or her life must have inexorably led them to that particular place and time in order that the determined object could be observed by them.    This is the absolute nature of determinism, and is why if man is determined, then the God who creates and sees man must be determined as well.

The converse is then true.  If the observing agent is truly free, then what he or she observes must be free to be wherever it is to be observed in equal measure.  Follow the logic through the same way.  If the agent is freely observing from a time and place which they have freely chosen, of their own free volition, then the object observed could not have been determined to be where it was observed.  The object must have likewise arrived at the time and place of its observation according to is own free ability to be there, of itself alone.  For if the observer is freely observing, and freedom is absolute, then whatever they are observing must be a function of that freedom.  If there is no external law or equation which demands that they must have inevitably arrived at that time and place to observe this or that thing, then there is no guarantee  that they would have been there at all.  Therefore, that they were there is completely by “chance” so to speak…a random manifestation of their freedom to act…which means that whatever they are observing may or may not have been observed by them at any given time up to the event; therefore, the object observed could not have been determined to be there.  It is observed then and there for no other reason than that is where it just so happened to be.

And finally, consider this argument as well:  How do you qualify or quantify cause and effect if you are a free agent observing the interaction of two (or more) determined objects?  That one acts and one responds (that one causes an effect upon another) is purely an illusion…for there can be no such thing as cause and effect if both objects are equally determined, and determinism is, again, absolute.  If one ball strikes another ball, for example, then the force of one, we would say caused the other to move.  But if the balls are both determined, then both the striking of the first ball and the resultant movement of the second ball were going to happen no matter what, regardless of what either one did.  That is the nature of determinism…it is the declaration that any act observed by man is inevitable.  In effect, existing before it exists, regardless of whether it is observed or not; the action IS, infinitely, and absolute.  Observation is irrelevant in the matter.

The determined action of the first ball is infinite and absolute.  The determined reaction of the second ball is infinite and absolute.  Therefore, there is no actual relationship between the two actions…they ARE determined effects and objects wholly in and of themselves.  Thus, what one might observe as a cause and effect interaction is merely a lie.  There is no actual interaction because both action and reaction are infinite and singular determined events.  What if the first ball had missed the second ball?  Well, if we say that the second ball would not have moved we have conceded that the resultant movement of the second ball was not in fact, determined:  If the ball had missed it, it would not have moved.  And if we accept this as a plausible event–that the first ball could have missed the second ball–then we cannot by definition concede that the second ball was determined; it only moved because it was acted upon by the first ball, and until it was struck by the second ball it may or may not have moved, because it could or could not have been struck in the first place.  And if it could or could not have been struck in the first place, then the the first ball is likewise not determined.  The movement of the second ball is a free response by to being struck by the first one, which was a free action.

What one will argue then is that the first ball could not have missed the second because it was determined to strike it; in which case the second ball must have been determined to move in response.  Thus, the determining force is threaded equally and absolutely through both balls, denying any actual relationship between the two, and rendering man’s qualification of cause and effect purely illusory, as well as dismantling man’s ability to make any actual distinction between the two balls.  They are utterly identical in terms of being  subservient to the determining force.  There is no distinction between first ball and second ball, because you cannot sequentially order what is absolutely and infinitely determined.  If there is no relationship between objects, then man cannot possibly identify an object, because the ability to identify an object means it must be seen as distinct from other objects.  But if there is NO relationship, then then can be NO distinction.  Man cannot actually say what it is he observes.  His very language-that which he uses to label and define–is perfectly useless and categorically insufficient for anything.   Again…to reiterate: there can be no separation in the movement/actions of objects which can be declared valid, and so there can be no valid separation between objects themselves.  Both balls in this example are nothing more than illusions…extensions of the determining force which not only controls, but must BE in ESSENCE the objects in question.

The point is this:  if determinism is a fact, then man cannot possibly conceptualize effectively his environment because man can never make an actual distinction between this object or that.  Both are singularities of the determining force.  What man qualifies as a cause is not actually any different than what he qualifies as an effect.  What man qualifies as up is not actually any different as down.  Left or right, two or seven.  There is no means by which man can organize his environment that isn’t a total lie.  There is no truth because the truth is hidden behind the objects which man observes to move relative to one another, but which man cannot actually qualify or quantify as moving at all.  The movement of each object is the determined force, which is unobservable because it is absolute and infinite.

And if man cannot really know his environment according to his own created conceptual abstractions which are given value by the objects themselves (that is, man can actually declare that the objects he observes ACT according to their own infinite ability to BE what they are, and that this ability is rooted in themselves alone), instead of the other way around, then man cannot define himSELF.

And this means that there is no YOU which you can declare exists.  And if there is no YOU, then how can YOU be saved?

This may seem like complicated semantics; a mere mincing of philosophy; the calculus of metaphysics.  Interesting, or confusing, but irrelevant to real life.  I assure you it is not…the only reason this is difficult for us to understand is because we have evolved from several thousand years of Platonist farce.  Our inability to perceive the difference between what are abstract concepts we create to organize what we observe and the actuality of the things we observe is what clouds our thinking in these matters.

All truth must stem from this idea first:  YOU ARE YOU, and you are no other.  Thus, all truth starts with the existence of yourSELF.  YOU are the object by which all TRUTH must conform…the standard of life is the admission that you actually exist, and are NOT a function of anything except your own physical ability to BE ( (from which extends your self-aware consciousness) .

This is the first axiom you must concede.  If you do not, you will never escape the bonds of false ideas, false religion, and false existence.

“It might the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor.  🙂  Maybe?”

-Wade Burleson

The implicit assumption in this comment is that the pastor, regardless of his moral atrocities, can never be disqualified from his position of ecclesiastical leadership (i.e. his job) because he can always appeal to the “sin nature” of the congregation as an excuse for his evil actions.  “Just look what you made me do” has been the defense of many a psychopathic abuser.  It is the ultimate appeal to a “truth” outside of man, of moral relativism, and of a separation between God and humanity.  That these words should have even crossed the mind of a Christian teacher is disturbing, and should prove to anyone interested that those who would call themselves shepherds of God’s people need to have their doctrine thoroughly vetted in accordance with the plumb line of human lives.  If what they believe demands that humanity be sacrificed upon the alter of their philosophy, then they should be cast out the door.

The plain truth is that human life is the singular, absolute source and context and meaning and TRUTH for all we as Christians hold dear:  the Bible, the Prophets, the Lord, the Spirit, the Messiah, the GOOD.  Without human life, none of these things has any meaning or purpose.  It is axiomatic that all TRUTH (value and morality) can only be a function of the HUMAN frame of reference.  It is categorically impossible to declare any TRUTH beyond the context of human life.  We are all human beings, and thus we all have the exact same frame of reference.  Thus, TRUTH, even Christian TRUTH, and God’s TRUTH, both begins and ends with human life.  Thus, and again, any philosophy/theology/doctrine which demands otherwise…which demands, in any form (e.g. a “biblical role”, a “law”, a “collective…like ‘church body’ or ‘the party'”, a determining force like “sin nature” or “God’s sovereignty”), that man’s life is to be subverted in order that absolute “truth” can reign absolutely…well, this must be declared a lie; for it is impossible to make a rational argument that man can either pursue it, or even know it.  Anything claimed to be truth outside of man’s five senses cannot possibly be known, and therefore, it cannot possibly be truth.

And this is a fact that many Christians refuse to swallow…and this is why I submit that there will be fewer “Christians” in heaven than we might otherwise assume.  And this is a dreadful and terrifying thought.

I do not say this to bludgeon people with fear of fire and brimstone…I do not need to do that, for I have developed rational arguments for the defense of my ideas.  I don’t need to scare you; I’ll leave that for the Calvinist mystics who peddle Platonist Gnosticism for Christ’s love.  I only need to lead you (the Calvinist/Reformed Protestant/Augustinian Catholic) right where your false philosophy is dying to go…literally and figuratively:  to rank contradiction.  Once you have been forced to punt your fundamental assumptions into the great cosmic abyss of God’s mystery, my work is finished.  Thus, I do not cry hell to frighten you.  I do it to reason with you.

Look at my mock conversation between the King and Christian, which I posted a couple of weeks ago.  What is my point?  What does King’s last statement declare?  It declares that God is unable to save that which He cannot know because it has no actual LIFE to it.  In other words, God cannot save that which is NOTHING according to the philosophy which is presented to Him.  Since it is impossible for God to possess man–for it is axiomatic to say that God cannot BE what he is NOT–we must concede that man is man, and God is NOT man.  Thus, there must be a way in which man can truly exist to God so that God can declare him TRUE and thus GOOD by virtue of the saving sacrifice of Messiah.  But if man willingly denies himself in service to a philosophy that demands he cannot possibly EXIST, in service to the absolute-ness of the philosophy, then there is nothing for God to save, by definition.  For we greatly underestimate how what we THINK and what we BELIEVE defines our reality for us.  This is not subjectivity…this is reality.  This is actuality.  For if you observe all life through a prism of non-existence, then by definition you cannot actually exist, since existence is a function of observation and your philosophy explicitly DENIES observation as the means to TRUTH; which means to LIFE, which is YOUR REALITY…and there is no other.

But you might say that God can see you for what you really are, and so it is perfectly within His power to save you.  You might argue that it is what God observes that matters, not what you observe (never mind that you cannot make that argument without the ability to observe your environment and then create conceptualizations in order that you can define what you will accept as truth or false in accordance with those conceptualizations…but Platonism is rife with contradictions).  But this doesn’t lionize God, nor appeal to His absolute power and sovereignty (which are completely misrepresented in Reformed Theology anyway).  This is a lie. This demands that God make Himself a hypocrite and utterly remove Himself from the context of his own Creation and humanity itself. It demands that God become wholly unknowable to His children…and herein lies the crux of Calvinism’s evil:  That God is put away from His children and the power of His salvation and Truth, all of which are thieved by men who are obsessed with being God for Him.  It is the same sin as Satan’s.

To deny your senses and your observable reality in favor of “God’s truth” is nothing more than demanding that God contradict His own existence.  That God be a God of nothing.  Or, more poignantly, that God be a God of DEATH.  For implicit in its Platonist/Gnostic roots, Calvinism declares that man’s DEATH bring life, thus creating the contradiction of all contradictions:  that God Himself is responsible for bringing DEATH to the world; which implicates him in all evil and sin.  They, that is, the modern day Reformers, will argue that doctrine of God’s sovereignty elevates His goodness and power.  In truth, what it does is makes this goodness and power, and God himself, unable to be known at all by man, since man, in the context of an absolutely controlling God, cannot exist.  It demands that God possess man, and thus violate His holy perfect and absolute I AM in the interest of BEING that which He is not.  And when we claim that He is what He is not, we implicate Him in the violation of the human SELF, which thus violates man’s ability to know Him as God, which is a direct violation of God’s SELF.

Now, I ask you, how exactly are we asking God to “save” a people who function unequivocally from such an understanding of the universe? Who is it God shall save?  Who ultimately are we declaring does the saving?  There is no actual answer to this, and thus there can be no actual salvation.

We would do well to consider such a thing before we affirm what our modern mystics would teach us.

And if you don’t, well…yeah…maybe you should be a little frightened.

I wasn’t going to skip down this yellow brick road of Judaism vs. Christianity (more properly, Platonist gnosticism/Kantian collectivism vs. Christianity), but this topic is too important to back-burner, I suppose.  The truth is, the thrust of my metaphysics (and physics) and epistemology hinges upon my assertions in this matter.  It is good for me to fine tune my argument…for I utterly accept the efficacy and reason of my beliefs; but organizing the thoughts into words takes practice, and that is what debate is.

After all, philosophers don’t avoid philosophizing any more than Angus Young avoids rocking.

And debate is also about being right according to logically reconcilable ideas.  As such, both sides cannot be true.  One side is reasonable, one is not.  If James is reasonable, then Christ would indeed be superfluous, and likely, the swansong of all historic farces.  The problem is that Jame’s ideas are rooted in Gnosticism…the very thing he accuses me and Calvinists of, ironically (and in only one of these is he actually right). And this–Jame’s idea– is nothing more than the assertion:  TRUTH is only found outside of man.  Man is either the source of TRUTH or he is a slave/sacrifice to it, which makes his entire existence irrelevant.  I know this is hard for people to accept, but after thousands of years of Platonist conditioning, peoples’ brains are simply not wired to see the obvious anymore.  Like I said, try to find one physicists who declares that the “vacuum” (nothing”) doesn’t actually exist as “something”.  Even our science is rooted in impossible Platonist ideas.

And yet, science “works”…from a certain point of view.  And that is why these ideas are so wily, and so alluring.  They “work”…in a manner of speaking.  They satisfy.  For a while.  But we won’t get into that cluttered  closet yet.

So, James is not right, and I maintain my previous assertion:  Either the Law culminates in its obvious conclusion:  Jesus Christ as the final chapter in the saga of Man AS GOOD (and in this, in a manner of speaking I actually agree with the “historical redemptive hermeneutic”…but not in service to the tyranny the Calvinists crave, and not really by the same interpretive premises); or, man must be mass murdered in favor of the Law’s inexorable, infallible “TRUTH”.

There is no other option, regardless of how anyone wants to qualify their “logic”.  There is NO other actual logic available.  There is no “agree to disagree”.  Either man dies so that TRUTH can be revealed as utterly and perfectly true, and it is no longer necessary to inevitably apply it in the context of totally depraved man’s individual life, or man IS truth.

Any other notion is nothing more than a glorious and stupefying example of hope over reason.

Here is Jame’s latest comment.  A typical knee-jerk product of Platonist western thinking.  Unable to separate the illusions of truth for the real thing–of abstractions from the physical universe–we all, via Jame’s latest arguments and accusations–all move one step closer to the “collective” as the central rule of the barbarian masses.  For if abstractions like “law” are THE source of their own “truth” (people like Jame’s pretend to say God is the source of the Law, but this turns God into nothing more than your run of the mill Consciousness Prime), then there is only one absolute truth:  Marx’s Utopian Workers Paradise.  Otherwise known as the the destruction of the individual; otherwise know as the singularity of Platonist logic:  man is destroyed as a means of reconciling himself to the ineffable TRUTH which cannot be “perfect” by definition as long as it must suffer communion with the total depravity of human beings.

And so I declare that if I am an atheist, as James accuses, then James is a rank communist.

Here is his comment:

As I see it )and Argo seems to explicitly argue it this way) existentialism is nothing but the secularization of justification by faith alone into justification by existence alone.

So in Argo’s Sept 15th post “Man as the Singularity of Moral Truth: Another defense of Christ” he says at the end “Man’s existence is the key to his perfection, and that is why the temple curtain was torn in two. There is no more sanctification; there is no more justification necessary for man.”

No justification needed. No sanctification needed. That’s what Argo said.

Why? Because the moronic doctrine of Paul “justification by faith alone” and the moronic doctrine of the Calvinists “sanctification by faith alone” has been secularized in existentialism into justification and sanctification by existence alone.

Argue all you want that Jesus would have approved of this, but he certainly not have.

This secularization of the two most moronic doctrines ever contrived is responsibly for the total meltdown of society. In reality, despite teaching it in a putitively theistic way and making assertions about a determinist god, this is precisely what Calvinists actually believe. By buying into this secularization of their whole scheme, Argo is becoming a Calvinist, just a more secular one.

And if its true that you really believe we are both justified and sanctified by mere existence, then you really are nothing but an atheist pretending to theism exactly like the Calvinists.

And here is my response:

The debate about God’s existence is not one of morality.  This is a common mistake Christians make…and why they lose constantly in the face of learned atheists.  For the assertion that morality cannot exist without God is an assertion that Ayn Rand decisively vanguished in her philosophy of Objectivism.  It is really a red herring that Christians constantly fall for…it isn’t the point, and never was, and a lot of atheists know this, which is why they pounce on the nonsense that man cannot declare value without God.  It is akin to the maddening and ludicrous argument made by reformation Christians who don’t like to think:  “I can’t debate with you because my truth cannot be learned…God must give it to you.  So the only way you can understand me is if you agree that I’m right FIRST.”

Oh.  Good.  Fucking. Grief.

No wonder we are laughed out of government and schools.

For what is morality?  Morality is nothing more than the choice of one thing over another in service to the abstraction of “good and evil”.  In other words, morality is simply a value judgment.  Who makes the choice?  Man makes the choice…for otherwise, you are a determinist and YOU cannot exist in your own existential construct. For if man doesn’t  make the choice, something else is making the choice for him.  And since life is observed by choice, where do we see man?

That’s right.  Nowhere.

But if it is man making the choice based on what he observes to have some kind of value, then morality is nothing more than the utterly logical notion that THINGS have VALUE.  Big whoop.  Yes, any atheist can see this.  By your definition a Jew can be an atheist.  Who needs God when we have the Law.  If the Law is the source of TRUTH…of categorical moral value, then what does God have to do with anything? The Law, not the SELF, becomes the source of itself.

James, your need to re-evaluate your arguments.  You even said yourself that God still blessed Israel even when they failed to uphold the Law perfectly.  If the Law IS truth, then how can this possibly be?  The only answer is that the Law is NOT the source of ultimate moral value.  Man is. But you prefer to argue out of both sides of your mouth…to have your metaphysical cake and eat it to.  And you accuse me of being a Calvinist.  That’s a hardy har har.

The distinction is not then in what “law” we “follow”, for law by definition is an abstraction…an idea of values that MAN decides is true or not, based on what?  Well, based on whatever MAN affirms as having the highest value.  But what man constantly misses is that the only thing that can have value objective value (value that is not ultimately an illusion OUTSIDE of man, like the Law)  is that which actually exists as THE source of all truth.  The source of all truth is not God, the SOURCE of all truth is man.  Man becomes the plumb line for value then, because only man is in a position to SEE value in a way that drives choice; that drives “law”.

The argument about God is an argument involving how the SELF can exist if it is, at its root, infinite (and this is something I’ve not gone into on the blog).  If we argue that self cannot exist without God, then obviously, the perpetuation of the SELF (which then by extension must be that which is of the greatest and only objective moral value) becomes GOD’S purpose for man by definition.

In other words, If God is the sustainer of the SELF, then the SELF must BE VALUE by direct divine decree.

So James, you can jump up and down and foam at the mouth and froth and beat the air and scream and yell and use the “f” word and sing Camptown Races in racy French, but the fact of the matter is that all truth of any kind, be it a natural physical “law” or moral truth is a direct function of SELF, man, and whatever other physical object can be observed to exist…but again, only by man’s direct and conscious observation.  There is simply no way to get around this fact.  You can rant and rave and heave and ho and spit and shake, but your frustration I suspect is little more than realizing that this is an axiom that is unavoidable.  If YOU claim to have a truth, then YOU must be the source of it…otherwise, you are a determinist for one, and also you concede NON-EXSTENCE is the source of “your” truth.  Period.  This is obviously rank fallacy…at least if any kind of thinking even approximating reason is your guide.

If truth and meaning is “bestowed” upon you, then you have destroyed all metaphysical and existential distinctions between yourself and whatever “force” of “truth” has seen fit to give you the “grace to perceive” (whatever the hell that means, because you can’t exist…you can’t know what is GIVEN to you to know, not as a function of yourself, but of something outside you).  And given to you to perceive based on whatever arbitrary reason that you can’t possibly understand, because again, there is no you.

And finally, this goes in the last paragraph, because you read backwards (boy, do you ever):  If calling me names like “secular”, or “atheist”, or “existentialist” makes you feel better about your own irrational argument, go for it.  The fact is that none of my ideas work without God.  Your accusations could not be more false or backwards if you uttered them standing on your head in front of a mirror.

For context, I refer readers to the comments thread under the previous post.  This is a follow up to that one…originally a comment on that thread which just got too lone.  As usual.

Warning:  Rant alert

James,

I sometimes wonder…do you actually read comments here or the posts?  I get the feeling that you perhaps skim them at best, and then pick at them in parts.

Do you not understand my perspective at all after all this back and forth.  Do you not understand that I REJECT an EXTERNAL standard as an illusion of truth; I reject it as an abstract notion of VALUE and not value itself.

I cannot make myself any clearer.  You ask “do we need to be perfect?”…you are either not hearing me, not understanding me, or ignoring me. I do NOT agree with you that this is what Jesus means.  We disagree on the interpretation James…you continue to proceed as though you and I agree on the interpretation and the definitions.  We do not.  If there is to be a reasonable debate, with some kind of relevant outcome hovering anywhere even remotely near the light of day, then we need to debate the interpretation/definitions first, rather than proceed down a road that takes us to the dead end of Not Really Listening To The Other Side Lane.

At any rate, for now, I’ll join you for a walk.  Or, I have a scooter you can borrow.

What is perfect?  You speak of perfection as yet another plumb line or value that is NOT man.  What is happening here then is you are ignoring my oft and clearly stated definition of “standard of value is SELF”, then proceeding to make up your own definition for me, and then denying it.  It’s like you are disagreeing with yourself.  Are you?  Because I was right in the middle of “The People Under the Stairs”, a pretty good Wes Craven horror flick, so I can, like, head on back to it if you two need to be alone.

(Wink…just kidding, James.  You know I love you.  And I’m not being sarcastic.  I do love you.  As long as we agree that it is YOU, not your external self.)

I am saying that man IS perfection IN HIMSELF.  That is Jesus’s point and that is the ONLY reason God has mercy on humanity.  It is the only reason that the Jew, though he did not keep the law perfectly as you correctly point out, was pardoned by God for his lack of faithfulness.  The reason that the Jews were pardoned is because the Law is FOR man…which is a point Jesus outright declares, Himself.  This is, for me, the wisest thing I have ever heard in my life.  It is the single greatest utterance of TRUTH in the history of the world.  It is a rank declaration that EVERY notion in existence is designed for one thing:  to serve man.  Period.  MAN, or more properly, man’s LIFE, is that which gets to decide whether ANY “law” is true or not.  Man is subject to nothing except himself; and nothing subjects man to TRUTH.  (Even God is a TRUTH which is revealed through the context of man’s life; this doesn’t make God less than God, but it does make man of equal existential BEING and WORTH as God.  And I can hear computers leaving this site as I type this, LOL.  Well, yes, I suppose after three thousand years of gnostic Platonism infecting the whole of Western thought, my ideas would seem quite controversial.)  The fact that Jesus declares this says that Jesus is in no way obsessing about the afterlife as you accuse Christianity of doing.  Jesus’s obsession is LIFE, full stop.

Man is not for the Law, and so God cannot condemn man for ignoring the law in service to the inherent right of man to EXIST…to be Himself.  This is shown a thousand times in the old testament, and STILL you want to claim LAW as the superior standard to MAN…it is like you are rejecting the very argument you are making to prove YOUR point.  Incredible. 

But anyway, this is precisely why the law inevitably points to Jesus.  Jesus is the culmination of the absolute truth of MAN as PERFECT VALUE.  Thus, the only real morality is that object which affirms man’s life unequivocally and observationally:  MAN, HIMSELF.  And nothing else.  Not the law.  Not God’s “Word”, not the Church. Not the “collective”.  Not the government…nothing.

And this is what Jesus means by “perfect”.  He does not mean what appears to be your indefatigable determination to declare it merely another Platonist “form”; the truth which is beyond man, but which contradictorily determines him, and gives his very being meaning (the contradiction being that if Plato is right, and man is a shadow, then man is not really man, but a mere manifestation of the “form”).  The whole point of Christ is to show man that perfection is in being man, not DOING the law (works), because value cannot ever be outside humanity. This is simply a metaphysical fact.  All truth is derived from man, it is never bestowed upon him, because if TRUTH is bestowed upon man then there is no actual purpose to man, for TRUTH is more pure by itself, not bastardized by the “untruth” of man’s SELF.  Further, man cannot himself really ever be declared as a separate entity from that which bestows the value, a point I have made many times in citing Argo’s Universal Truth Number Seven:  Anything which proceeds directly from an absolute IS the absolute .  So, man is either nothing more than an extension of the “external” truth, or man MUST be destroyed in service to it.  There is NO OTHER OPTION.  The Law either culminates in Christ, or man must DIE in service to it.  That is your only choice, James.  Pick one.  Any other choice is only an illusion of logic.  And a red herring.

Either the law culminates with the Christ, or the law makes man MOOT.  This is indisputable.  Continuing to seek value in an outside standard means that YOU, as a person, can never actually claim TRUTH because TRUTH can have no communion with you.

The observation of the Christ as the permanent atonement for man’s rejection of SELF makes perfect sense if you understand where I’m coming from.  It not only makes perfect sense, it is undeniable.  OBSERVATION is how we know anything IS.  The observable reality of God as HUMAN proves that morality…or better said, GOOD, is LIFE, not death.

Who’s life?

MAN’S life.

That God IS man is proof of man’s inherent moral value.  The law is satisfied when Christ is put to DEATH, for this–death–is the end of the law, inexorably.  Man’s VALUE is observed as triumphant when Christ, the man, is resurrected. Why didn’t Christ stay dead?  Because nothing can kill man, because man is not at the mercy of ANY notion except his own self.  Not even death. Man is the beginning and end of himself…this was God’s intention from the very beginning.  And this is why Christians do not fear death.  For death is merely another way we quantify the movement of the SELF relative to other objects, nothing more.  In reality, the self cannot be destroyed…because all that IS is a function of the SELF, never the other way around.  And if the self IS, the self cannot die, because it is impossible for the self to both BE and NOT BE at the same time…and this contradiction is the contradiction which the SELF cannot abide.  The only way out of this inexorable truth is to, in fact, choose to contradict it, which cannot lead to a harmony of SELF and NOT SELF…it cannot even lead to “paradox”.  It can only lead to death…which is the conscious rejection of SELF.  Now, what does this look like in the “afterlife”, I don’t really know, but I can imagine some kind of “hell”.  Perhaps not the fire and brimstone kind, but an eternity of rejecting SELF in favor of what is ultimately DEATH (an external standard, like the Law)?  I’m guessing it’s not great.

If man willingly capitulates and sacrifices SELF to STANDARD, what is God to do?  Man has a right to act.  If he acts to his own destruction, then God cannot interfere.  You want to put TRUTH outside of you, fine.  But know this:  a denial of self as THE source of all meaning, value, and existence is is a rejection of life.  And if you are not alive NOW, why should we expect you will be alive EVER.  (Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead.”)

ANY other standard except for man, observed in Christ, is death, period.  Without Christ, the Law can only destroy humanity.  Like any other “law”, it MUST condemn; it has no other purpose!!  It cannot save.  It only KILLS.  Left to its own, as a sparkling example of  the rank circular logic of being both the declaration and source of its own truth, it can only commit mass murder! 

(You see this trend in Calvinism:  the Bible is the infallible “Law”; and ritualistic Communion is the “sin sacrifice”.  It is a distortion of the Jewish practices and religion, but make no mistake:  their own brand of “mystic” Judaism is the object of the Calvinist thrust in the world today.)

But now, for the non-reformed Christian (for reformation theology is nothing more than a return to the the death of Law, which is why neo-Calvinists are the modern day Pharisees and Judiazers, dressed however in antinomian garb…Paul Dohse rightly points out, much to the chagrin of Calvinist despots everywhere, that their theology is as works-based as it comes; again, they are modern day Pharisees to a T)…for the non-reformed Christian all of man is seen through Christ, not the Law any longer.  Man’s existence is the key to his perfection, and that is why the temple curtain was torn in two.  There is no more sanctification; there is no more justification necessary for man.

There is just SELF.