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Conformity or Transformation?

6/29/2025

Christianity is, or should be, a transformative religion, in the late 14th-century sense of the word, transformen—that is, to alter or change the form of supernaturally. The Latin root trans signifies across or beyond, while formare remains innately comprehensible in the modern use form.

What Jesus offers is definitely across or beyond mortal life, and it has everything to do with changing form in that beyond. Those who choose to follow Jesus may experience some transformative effects in mortal life, but the bulk of the transformation occurs in the beyond, after death.

Unfortunately, Christianity has become a religion of seeking transformation in mortal life—of disregarding the beyond or across in favor of some alteration in the here and now.

Somewhere in Christianity’s history, the aim of supernatural, next-worldly change gave way to desiring natural changes and improvements in this world in the form of better lives, improved societies, the conquest of social ills, altruism, good citizenship, and all the rest. Changing forms in the beyond quickly became somewhat of an afterthought.

Christianity also quickly became a religion of conformity. At first, this conformity centered on obedience to God and complying with his Will; however, as the churches rose in temporal and political power, they demanded adherence to doctrines and laws that aimed to make Christians compliant and tractable in this world. The churches taught that the supernatural change in form Jesus offers in the beyond depended exclusively on this-worldly conformity to churches.

The power and influence that Christianity and its churches enjoyed in this world faded long ago. Contemporary worldly power and politics not only reject transformation in the supernatural, next-worldly sense, but they are positively antagonist toward it. And the churches? Well, the churches now conform almost entirely to that antagonistic worldly power.

So, what do Christians conform to when they willingly conform to churches?

Christianity is, or should be, a transformative religion rather than a conformative religion.

Anyone who argues otherwise is focusing on the wrong form.

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Daily Blogging Resumes Tomorrow

6/28/2025

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I haven't felt all that motivated to post consistently over the past two months, but the winds have changed.

Daily (or close to daily) blogging resumes tomorrow.

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Midsummer Eve

6/21/2025

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Midsummer Eve - Edward Robert Hughes - 1908

I still don't fully understand my fascination with solstices and equinoxes, but today is the summer solstice or Midsummer Day or Litha or whatever you wish to call the longest day (or close to the longest day) in the northern hemisphere.

For reasons I can't explain, I've always associated solstices and equinoxes with spirits, elves, and fairies. Probably Shakespeare's influence; however, I sense something deeper. Whatever the case, the painting above is a good representation of the sort of "feeling" I get every summer solstice.

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A New Anthropodicy is Needed

6/21/2025

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The first bits are from a comment exchange with Dr. Charlton from this post:

Bruce: By my understanding, creation of everything from nothing means that actual human beings are of negligible significance - since we are all merely contingent aspects of the one creator; because there is nothing else we can be.

This seems to me a mere variant on the idea that our mortal reality is illusory - and since it is futile, it is an evil illusion.

The whole underlying tendency of Christianity is thereby denied.
For my mind, unless beings, including human beings, are primary realities, they cannot be the focus of creation.

Me: The sad thing is most human beings do not want to be primary realities or foci of creation. For many, it's far too burdensome to contemplate. Better to be of negligible significance. After all, contingency is far more comforting and palatable than freedom.

Bruce: Seemingly not - and neither do most religions encourage them in the slightest. Even so great a creative, and creation encouraging, Christian as Tolkien, got himself (and readers) terrible confused about the nature and importance of human creating, because of the ex nihilo assumption he accepted from the RCC. No matter how many words JRRT expended on praising creation - the bottom line would always be that none of this was necessary, and none of it made any ultimate difference - since creation had already been wholly accomplished and was wholly God's.

The comment exchange reminded me of Berdyaev's “anthropodicy”—his justification of man. Berdyaev posits that human beings are not just creations of God, but also co-creators in God's ongoing work of creation. He highlights the creative act as the crux of human existence.

For Berdyaev, the creative act is not limited to conventional forms of creativity via the arts but a vivid expression of freedom and spiritual striving in which human beings are able realize their potential and contribute to the divine purpose.

This justification of man is rooted in Berdyaev’s insistence on the fundamental significance of every human being, emphasizing the unique and unrepeatable value and dignity of each human person as a spiritual being.

I think Berdyaev was looking in the right direction with his anthropodicy; however, his metaphysics could not properly flesh out the significance of man, and all beings, as primary realities.

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Implications and Entailments Are Secondary-Thinking Entanglements

6/19/2025

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In yesterday’s post, I suggested that the continuous deterioration of secondary thinking is most evident in the apparent increase in the need to question what symbolic communication in the form of language, writing, and images actually refers to or means.

The most blatant examples of this occur when people begin arguments with statements like, “Well, it depends on what you mean by X.” Case in point, is the short clip below featuring the Jordan Peterson of theology, William Lane Craig.

When asked if Genesis 1:1 teaches creatio ex nihilo, Craig immediately resorts to the following line to preface his line of thinking: “A lot depends on what you mean by the word teach.” Sounds eerily similar to Peterson’s cautious bafflegab when asked if he believes in God. What do you mean “do?” What do you mean by “you?” And so forth.

Like Peterson, Craig could have simply answered the question posed to him with a yes or no, but he chooses the old “a lot depends on” evasion to frame the argument he eventually lands on—Genesis 1:1 does not explicitly assert creation ex nihilo, but it does imply it because it is a logical entailment.

A logical entailment of what exactly? For the sake of brevity, let’s just say a logical entailment of assumptions that exclude the possibility of creation from something. Thus, Craig concludes that creatio ex nihilo is an entailment of Genesis 1:1 and argues that if you take the teaching of scripture to include not only what it explicitly asserts but also what it entails, then yes, Genesis 1:1 does teach creatio ex nihilo even if it doesn’t explicitly assert it. He then alludes to several other passages in the Bible that confirm the validity of this entailment.

No explicit assertion but plenty of implication and entailment, which is interesting if one considers the etymology of imply and entail.

Imply is from Latin and was used in Old French to mean “to entangle, to enfold, and enwrap”. Craig’s assertion that Genesis 1:1 implies creatio ex nihilo suggests that creation from nothing is somehow folded up in the passage and that the right sort of reading or awareness will disentangle the implicit and make it explicit. In other words, even though the passage does not explicitly affirm creatio ex nihilo, it leads to that conclusion via the process of implication.

Entailment is a bit trickier. Entail originates from the 14th century and refers to feudum talliatium, an old legal practice of converting an estate into “fee tail” or a legal limitation ruling that decided property ownership matters in inheritance and prevented property from being sold off until the ownership question was settled. From the 19th century onwards, it was used most often to refer to an inseparable connection. In philosophy and logic, entailment refers to a relationship between statements where the truth of one statement (the antecedent) confirms the truth of another (the consequent).

In a nutshell, Craig’s argument can be boiled down to the following: God created the heavens and the earth, which is true. God's creating the heavens and the earth implies that nothing else existed before that act of Creation. Since nothing else existed, God must have created ex nihilo.

That’s it.

Now, how difficult would it be to form similar types of implications and entailments against creatio ex nihilo? Not hard at all. In fact, many have put forth coherent arguments in favor of creation from something; however, at the end of the day, such arguments all play the same sort of games Craig and others like him engage in. Implications and entailments through and through.

In the end, approaching assumptions like creatio ex nihilo requires direct knowing and primary thinking—the disentanglement of thinking from all the implications and entailments of secondary thinking.

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Every Word a Mystery; Or, the Utter Insufficiency of Secondary Thinking Today

6/18/2025

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I have argued for the necessity of direct knowledge and primary thinking in this time and place, primarily due to the ongoing erosion and perhaps inevitable collapse of secondary-level thinking as a sincere and trustworthy source of knowledge and thought.

The continuous deterioration of secondary thinking is most evident in the apparent increase in the need to question what symbolic communication in the form of language, writing, and images actually refers to or means.

The worst offenders in this realm are the contemporary sophists, word-charmers, hucksters, and other assorted slippery sorts looking to monetize their own secondary thinking via various platforms and the media. That most of these communication shysters come off as smarmy door-to-door salesmen adds little comfort.

The short video below provides an example of what I mean.

You know secondary thinking is in big trouble when simple words like “do” and “you” embedded within a fairly straightforward question are singled out for their “mystery.”

All this is set against the backdrop of System-promoted AI, which seeks to further blur, confuse, and obliterate whatever inherent meaning symbolic communication attempts to deliver.

As far as I can tell, we are faced with two options. The first involves reforming and restoring secondary thinking in the hope of conserving and preserving it.

The other entails moving beyond secondary thinking to pursue primary thinking and direct knowledge, particularly as it pertains to questions like “Do you believe in God?”

The utter failure of reformers, restorers, conservatives, and preservationists to reform, restore, conserve, or preserve anything in the past two centuries (or more) suggests that the present, future, and eternity dwell in the second option.

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Imagining No Heaven Only Easy If You Can Imagine This-Worldy Utopia

6/7/2025

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Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
- John Lennon, Imagine

Imagining there's no heaven has become remarkably easy for modern people, many self-identified Christians included.

Why it is easy for self-proclaimed materialists and atheists to reject the reality of heaven is simple enough to understand. Why the same is also easy for Christians becomes a bit trickier and the subject of another post.

John Lennon got one thing right in his insipid communist utopia anthem— the unreality of heaven is easy to imagine, but only if one can imagine the reality of creating a brotherhood of man utopia where hunger, greed, and killing are all eradicated by the world living as one.

In this sense, imagining no heaven offers some potential solutions to this-worldly problems; however, it does not and cannot address death.

And what happens if one can imagine neither heaven nor this-worldly utopia? What then?

I suppose you could downgrade the utopia from a worldly scale to a more individual scale and strive to carve out your personal heaven-on-earth amidst the backdrop of the much more encompassing not-heaven-on-earth.

However, what happens if the grand this-worldly utopia makers actively destroy and deny your chance at your individual heaven on earth in favor of their more global plan?

What are you left with then? Well, the three D's—destruction, despair, and death—and not much else, I'm afraid.

If Zdzisław Beksiński's oeuvre of mostly untitled nightmare visions attests to anything, it attests to the despondency of imagining no other-worldly heaven and the peril of imagining only a this-worldly one.

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Virtually All Self-Promotion Is False-Self Promotion

6/6/2025

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About a year ago, I explored the dangers of magnifying and amplifying false selves, in reference to William Arkle’s insights, succinctly summarized by Dr. Charlton below:

One of William Arkle's core insights is that - in normal, everyday life - people act from a multitude of false selves. The true self, which is of divine origin and potentially able to become a god, is what makes us what we are - but it may be completely buried beneath false selves; the true self may be utterly ineffectual.

These false selves are of many types. Some are the collections of traits - hereditary and socialised - that constitute our 'personality' as described and measured by psychology. Others are that mass of automatic, robotic skills and responses that we learn to deal with the problems of living; including skills like typing or driving, small-talk and routine social interaction.

You can see that false selves are the totality of what a person presents to the world; and usually also everything that a person is aware of in himself, insofar as he is aware of anything. So, our consciousness is not the same thing as our true self, because it may be unaware of the true self, may even deny the reality of any such thing as a true self.

False selves are therefore necessary but a problem, because whenever we make an effort to change ourselves in any way, the probability is that this will be a matter of one or more of the false selves trying to change us in a superficial and false direction.

As I noted in that earlier post, the last paragraph above is crucial. People sometimes feel that they need to change themselves in some way; however, more often than not, the changes they attempt or implement emanate from false selves rather than the true self, which is primal and eternal. Changes motivated entirely by false selves usually lead to false or specious orientations that end up maintaining or increasing the distance from the true self.

Dr. Charlton adds:

So, a basic problem is that most people, most of the time, do not know their true selves, and are not living from their true selves; but are instead (more or less unconsciously) simply doing and thinking whatever the process of these superficial selves are churning-out.

It is this which makes it counter-productive always to ‘do what comes naturally’ – since what seems ‘natural’ to us in this modern world is very often artificial, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, despair-inducing…

The insights above started my thinking about self-promotion, which I regard as the overriding motivation fueling most modern people.

We live in an era of unrelenting and ubiquitous advertising, marketing, peddling, branding, and hyping. Pervasive pinwheels of publicity, plugging, puffery, propaganda, and promotion pummel us at every turn.

None of this is new. It has existed and intensified since the Industrial Revolution. Mass production requires mass marketing for the masses. Simple enough; however, the conventional mass marketing of products now shares the stage with self-promotion; that is, the promoting, marketing, platforming, and branding of the self, amplified and expanded by the ever-increasing accessibility, expansion, and utilization of social media and portable IT technology.

Oscar Wilde once quipped that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. Modern people have made that witticism their guiding star and engage in levels of self-promotion earlier generations could have barely envisioned.

Yet the obsessive focus on self-promotion immediately begs the question of which selves one is promoting when engaging in self-promotion. Therein lies a great challenge of our time and place.

Our current stage of consciousness development must involve true-self-promotion—the discovery and bolstering of the true self through consciousness and intuition, yet this is predominantly a matter of looking inward and self-observing.

However, given the conditions of mortal life, such introspection and self-observation do not and cannot happen in the vacuum of space or somewhere out there in the ether but within a dynamic and changing world populated by a myriad of beings and the amplification of billions of false selves.

At the same time, it would be erroneous to assume that true-self-promotion could ever effectively occur via false-self-promotion thinking or activities, save perhaps negatively.

Some level of false-self-promotion in mortal life appears unavoidable—I am not blind to the fact that I engage in it myself.

With this in mind, a key challenge of our time and place is recognizing and acknowledging such self-promotion as false-self-promotion rather than regarding or justifying it as true-self-promotion.

Also, we should strive to acknowledge that any false-self-promotion that is artificial, hedonistic, expedient, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, or despair-inducing reduces the possibility of true self discovery and promotion.

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More Roof Progress

6/1/2025

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The weather has slowed us down a bit here and there, but we are making good progress on the roof overall. About 60% of the tiles are up. If all goes well, we should finish the project this week.

The new tiles are anthracite in color. My wife insisted on something dark, and I think her instincts were right. The darker tiles lend the house a whole new character. (See photo below for comparison.)

I plan to return to more consistent blogging once this roof project is done.

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