Friday, July 28, 2023

Long Links #3

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take (or take me) more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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Recently (in the last 6 months) I watched the following movies (among others):

My Name is Sarah (a woman finds community and romantic love in an Alcoholics Anonymous group even though she doesn't drink)

The Book Shop (a woman opens a book store in small-town coastal England, has to deal with enemies)

Detroit Unleaded (Two Arab-Americans in the Detroit area -- a young man, who works in a gas station convenience store, and a young woman, who comes from a rich family -- meet and fall in love)

Nowadays, I watch movies to pass the time, not to explore the world of human experience or rewire my brain (more what I was going for when I was in my 20s). I think these movies are not great movies in the way that Citizen Kane, Last Year at Marienbad, Stalker, or Testament are great. But if I wanted to rewatch those great movies, I could, and I could probably find more like them. Nothing really prevents me. But I actually prefer to watch these unassuming movies.

Actually, I think that there is more going on under the surface in these movies that I don't catch because I don't process audiovisual information quickly enough. Films do a lot of hinting because they don't have time to flesh out everything they're trying to portray, and subtle things like that go over my head, although I can see the hints happening and say to myself "they're trying to say something". The films, being unassuming, don't strike my brain hard to make it notice. Perhaps I would understand their ideas better if I rewatched them. I'm not sure I would want to rewatch them, but I could imagine myself doing so if I owned them on DVD and had a hard time getting new media. (Like kids back in the day watching the same VHSes.)

I think it's exactly the fact that these movies don't strike my brain that hard, or engage in too-strong of visceral engagement, that makes me open to them and like watching them enough to finish them.

I do think that despite that I find them "just to be a way to pass the time", on one level I think even then they do important cultural work by expressing an aesthetic. People can find each other through aesthetics and are encouraged to continue in their personal vibes/aesthetics/sarkars by the bits of time they can spend watching films congenial to them.

These movies are small, quiet, and unassuming. (Not necessarily that the characters or their experiences are, but more that the films themselves don't assert themselves the way that "hard-hitting", "exciting", "sexy", "weighty", "important" movies do.) Although it would not be small, quiet, and unassuming of them, what if those three vibes became greater, or dared to try harder and do bigger things, without losing their roots? I think people carried along by those vibes might be good at doing things that other people are not.

(I think that that last paragraph connects to my own writing a lot. To take one example, I think my book Letters to People who Care would fit in to that same set of vibes.)

(Maybe someone who knows more about movies could list some unassuming movies that do something great.)

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I watched two video essays by biz barclay.. One of them on the binding of Isaac, God is Not Dead, and Midnight Mass, the other on the phenomenon of Snapewives.

The Snapewives one presents the question "what is religion?" and shows a particular new religion. I think its value for me was in showing my own relationship with God in an alien light. The Snapewives' relationships with Snape (their god) sound similar but different from my relationship with God, at least insofar as they hear from Snape and have some degree of devotion to him. The "varieties of religious experience" are profuse and it can seem as though we should give up the search for the real God, since it looks like there's a separate version for each group of people, made in the image of what would serve them. Can I really believe that I am in touch with a person, who is God, rather than am under some kind of force that produces religious experiences of whatever form suit my mind?

I can recommend the other video more highly, especially if, like me, you are someone who is modernist-leaning (i.e. not postmodernist), in favor of being active, in favor of listening to God's voice (an evangelical in some sense of the word?), because it presents the binding of Isaac, a story which in itself shows those pursuits to be dangerous. (The Bible sets dangerous precedents. Also (a la Kierkegaard?) the Bible at least in this story frustrates logical ethical thought processing (even though overall it supports it). "Formulalessness", perhaps.)

Modernism/activist religion is dangerous. Postmodernism is also dangerous (the inability to be excellent, the inability to do what needs to be done, to coordinate cultural activity, the danger of settling for socially-convenient shared values rather than asking about the possibility of causing harm not currently part of consensus reality, such as harming God, or harming humans in ways the social consensus doesn't recognize.) Is there a counterpoint to the binding of Isaac that shows the dangers of postmodernism or other anti-activity philosophies/cultural drifts? Perhaps the rest of the Old Testament, as a whole, is about that. A counterpart to this video could be one about the call of Abraham (in Genesis 12 and renewed later in Genesis), and the need for society to have crazy (literally mentally ill like we might diagnose Abraham), outsider antagonists to the social order to drive moral progress forward.

Both videos are 3 hours long. I think the video essay format, especially the longer the essays get, lends itself to imparting energy to the viewer and giving them time to think about things. As mentioned above, I don't process audiovisual things the best, so I would latch on to some ideas as they were repeated throughout the video, and then think about them for myself. Maybe part of the comparative advantage of video essays is in this energetic transfer and stewing tendency.

(If you combine the two videos, you get the question "how can you know that God (a specific God) is talking such that you should trust and/or obey the voice you hear?")

Should We Believe Voices, as Though They are From God?

It's not uncommon for people to hear voices in their head. Are these the voices of the unconscious self or evolved neural patterns (materialist atheist explanation)? Are these the voices of demons, angels, and/or God? Are these the voices of other spirits (perhaps Severus Snape?)?

Given all those options, it might seem like, who can know where these voices come from?

(I could add in any other kind of communicative signal, like the things that people say that don't make sense in context of the conversation but which speak to your life, or the animals that behave strangely around you and whose natures communicate symbolically about realities inside you.)

Are these from a trustworthy source, or an untrustworthy source? Could we come to the conclusion that a voice is from God (either spoken directly by him or by a faithful messenger)?

Then, if they are from a trustworthy source, can we trust the voice enough to obey it?

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If we can figure out the nature of the world, we can rule out some possibilities. If we can somehow know that materialism is correct, it commits us to the "unconscious self / evolved neural patterns" view. If we can somehow know that God doesn't exist, it rules out the possibility that he is speaking.

Also, if we rule out the possibility of non-personal beings being agents (I think this is a logical conclusion of the belief that everything is consciousness) and if we can know when it is that we do things (I think this makes sense -- if I do something I didn't intend, it wasn't I who did it), then all things are caused by conscious personal beings: humans, animals, angels, demons, other spirits, or God, and it wasn't somehow secretly I who produced the voice in my head that I didn't manufacture and didn't feel like me.

I believe in (trust, find trustworthy to believe in) the world of the previous paragraph and not the one before that. So I rule out the possibility of it being somehow "me" or some "unconscious self", and this leaves open the possibility of it being an angel or God (or a demon or some other spirit).

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What is "intuition"? Intuition is something that enables us to know when people are scamming us. It enables us to sense what people are thinking and feeling. A trained intuition can be used for many different tasks, depending on how it was trained. But intuition is just a feeling that something is so, something is to be done, etc. Sometimes we can figure out rationalizations for our intuitions, and sometimes we can't. Much of knowledge is intuitive at its foundation (for instance, the way reason works). We have to rely on intuition. But intuition is opaque as to its sources and inner workings. It's a black box. A spirit could easily work through it.

Where do ideas come from? Many creative and intellectual people report ideas coming to them -- something else was working through them when the idea came. So probably ideas can come from spirits (unless we can prove materialism or some equivalent) and according to the philosophy I believe, certainly do.

The world is full of people who trust intuition or the ideas that come from intuition. But evil spirits could be poisoning our collective thinking through those two sources. Yet, good spirits could be guiding and enlightening us. Once an evil spirit uses these channels to deceive us, perhaps we will need the good spirits to use the same channels to help balance things out.

We have some way of sorting out intuition and/or ideas, into "trustworthy, less trustworthy, somewhat untrustworthy, evil" or similar categories.

So a voice in your head that says something: does it say something trustworthy or not? Often, you can sort something like this out, since often you can sort out which intuitions or ideas are trustworthy or untrustworthy.

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Now, can we know that a particular voice is from God? Any voice that is trustworthy might be from God. A doubter can say "you don't know if it's from God" and if they mean "but it really might be, you have a point", then they are on the side of reason. (Unless they can prove that God doesn't exist, a difficult task.) But if a doubter wants to close off the possibility that it could be from God, then they are not on the side of reason. They close off that possibility as a knee-jerk reaction, or perhaps because they want to control your thinking.

If God exists, and loves us, why wouldn't he want to talk to us? But then, why doesn't he speak in a very clear way to us? If you're really skeptical, you can always doubt that it's God talking to you. Sure, it's a superpowerful being, like an alien or angel. Sure, it knows a lot. But is it really God? Couldn't it be some kind of scam? Maybe a very good angel who passes himself off as God, but secretly has a dark side? You may never get to certainty even with a God you talk to face to face.

I do think it's possible to prove that God exists (in the sense that the task is one worth attempting), and the particular God that I see a way to prove is one who is bound by his own holiness to allow the world to be worse than he would ordinarily intend. This could mean that he is prevented from talking to us as clearly as he would otherwise want to. It's also possible sometimes that his distance is better for us. We can't "feed" on him the way we do on people, whose words and gestures are solid to us, flesh and blood. So we can have a (perhaps our only) non-vampiric relationship, with him.

Given these constraints, I think we could still expect God to want to communicate to us sometimes, in a more specific way than just "do what is right, which you know to do from logic, experience, and whatever bodies of trustworthy wisdom you might have available" (like the Bible). If he wants to, he probably does sometimes, and when he does, he would do so in a way that at least we would trust what he said, even if we couldn't know 100% that it was him.

In the Bible, Abraham trusts in two notable ways. His overall life story is one of coming to trust God when God says "go to a foreign country" (a demanding thing for Abraham to do) "and I will make you a great nation to bless all the families of the earth". Abraham is being asked to do something that is personally demanding and which is grandiose in its ambitions to make the world a better place. This faith of Abraham is constructive, positive (if crazy) and I feel basically okay with recommending it to people in general. If what the voice calls you to is something like the Abrahamic promise, (assuming that you understand things well enough to know or reasonably guess that what you're doing will "bless all the families of the earth"), even if it was from some other source than God, you would be attempting to do God's work, and if God does say things like this to someone sometimes, that person should be prepared to listen, otherwise great good will not result.

Abraham's other faith is a sort of paradoxical / recursive occasion where God commands him to kill his son Isaac (through whom the promise of his great nation is to come). I call this paradoxical and recursive because it's how in order to pursue something trustworthy, you need to let go of it, not affirm it. The process of blessing the world is outward facing, laminar, positive; but it must purify itself and it's counter-intuitive when it does so.

I don't know all the effects on Abraham of being tested to the point of being willing to give up his son and risk stopping the very promise that he invested his life in. But one might have been for him to value God more than the promise, and God's provision of well-being more than physical life. Isaac's life could be guaranteed by the fact that he had a functioning body, what atheists could count on. Or it could be guaranteed by God -- somehow -- what atheists would not count on. (Incidentally, on a meta-textual level, the Bible is a text that can be trusted in, wants you to trust in it, but includes a difficult passage (or a few more), difficult even by its own account (the Bible is against child sacrifice). Follow the Bible, but don't grip to it too hard, if you want to obey God.) (Maybe all this is a message for those given to "wretched evangelicalism".)

Now, if taken as a myth, this story is easily digested. If you are going down the path of the promise, God will identify some part of the promise in your life, through which it will come, and push you to the point where you have to decide whether to sacrifice it. It won't be your literal child or anything on that level of disturbingness. If you are willing to sacrifice it, he will give it back to you just like he gave Isaac back to Abraham. The Bible can be read as a collection of existing life patterns (stories, perhaps continually playing out somewhere in the imaginal world) that instantiate themselves in our lives sometimes, used by God to shape us and communicate with us.

But we do not always take it as myth, but rather imagine, what if it really was God, really commanding us to sacrifice our literal children? In that case, I can't recommend obeying such a voice. I think you should assume that it is not from God, because whatever justification could be come up with for God doing that with Abraham (Hebrews 11:17-19 says that Abraham expected God to resurrect Isaac, (my thought:) so confidently that it wouldn't count as murder or God tempting him to murder), nowadays it would go down so poorly, make religion look so bad, that it's not worth it and God wouldn't command it.

When you hear a voice, consider the possibility it's coming from Satan. Some voices are worth obeying even if they prove someday to have been from Satan, especially if we implement what the voices call for in an anti-Satanic way. Other voices are not.

These are some easy answers as to which things to think are from the voice of God, for practical purposes of obedience or investing in promises. (Leaving your home country to bless the world -- generally worth it. Sacrificing your child -- don't do it.) In between, I guess we are left with needing to train our individual intuitive and rational grasping of the nature of God, so that when we hear voices, we can tell which ones are from God. However, there will probably always be times when we are uncertain. (Maybe technically we are always uncertain. But we can be more certain than uncertain, sometimes, while other times we are more uncertain than certain.)

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If what a voice says is trustworthy and could be from God, why not obey it like it is and see where it takes you? You wouldn't want to not obey God if he was trying to get you to do something. It's possible that you're wrong that it's trustworthy, or from God, but sometimes, you should trust your judgment and obey.

Consensus Reality and Psychological Warfare

This is an essay.

Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other people in a society (for instance, Western society) disagree about many things. But some things, they all (or seemingly all) agree on. There is a span of life between birth and "physical death" (the last breath in the bodies we currently have) which all of them acknowledge. In that span, there is the need for food, shelter, clothing, transportation and so on. Food, shelter, clothing, and transportation exist and we have to deal with them -- even enlightened people have to get on the bus if they want to ride it. In Western society, there are schools to go to and for most, jobs to work. There are bureaucracies to deal with. This is all real. This (and similar things) make up consensus reality.

(I thought about putting "science" in that list, but there are "science-deniers" who would not deny the existence of the above. Science is widely favored, but it's not quite literally consensus reality. Maybe we could say that it is near-consensus reality?)

The rest of reality is controversial. Is there such a thing as material substance (or something effectively like that) as atheists often believe? Idealists dispute that. Each of the Gods (or sets of Gods) of the theistic religions is different. Christianity insists on Jesus (God and human in one) as the only way to God, the Father, while Islam insists that you can't associate anyone with God -- perhaps this is a controversy. Hinduism says everything is one thing, while Buddhism sort of says it's all nothing -- perhaps another controversy. Many of us seem to like morality and think it should have binding force on us -- so it would be weird if we thought it didn't exist -- but Nietzscheans officially don't like morality, and moral anti-realists think that it doesn't exist. Academic philosophy has people arguing on different sides of different questions.

It is convenient for us to center our thinking on consensus reality. We can argue about all of those controversial things all day and not persuade each other (that's what it means for them to be controversial). So we think that the solid, real, good truth is consensus reality.

How likely is it that consensus reality exhausts all of what's real and what matters? At first glance, it sounds like that's not very likely. Why should it be the case that all of the things we agree on are real, and none of the things we don't agree on are real? It's probably a good sign if we all agree on something, but I wouldn't trust that completely. Maybe we could all agree on some moral value that was actually invalid, just because that's what made society run smoothly.

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism all posit the existence of spirits other than humans. Spirits might be able to affect the minds of people. (Have you ever seen a spirit come over someone, or experienced that yourself?) Spirits might not be all on the same side. Humans disagree and form blocs that want to defeat each other. It doesn't seem unlikely that spirits would do the same.

How would spirits fight? Partly by psychological warfare, trying to convince us of different random things. If they can win us over, we will do their bidding. Or our trust might be the prize in itself. The profusion of non-consensus reality beliefs is something that would make sense if there are different blocs of spirits trying to control our minds with the beliefs that they favor. The difficulty of us being certain about "spiritual" (ethical, metaphysical, religious, etc.) things being in part the result of the damage done by warring beings on the noetic equipment of our minds.

Sometimes I have told non-Christians that I believe in God because of meaning. I can remember two different people who heard that having a knee-jerk "that doesn't work" kind of reaction. They did not say "huh, that's interesting" -- a more philosophical response. They did not seem open to hearing my argument. The people (those two and four others) I can remember talking to about my theories of or interest in proving the existence of God did not react in a philosophical way, nor did they seem eager to explore to see if I was right. One of them even implied that proving the existence of God was impossible (but he would say things he didn't really believe in order to put ideas in my head, I later realized.)

This, in itself, is interesting. Why were they so reactive against the idea of the proof of the existence of God, or a particular way to prove it? Why weren't they interested in learning more? Why isn't this like any other topic where one might think about what is?

I can say that the effect of their reactions to me has got me really questioning my own beliefs sometimes. Sometimes I believe and move forward, other times I don't. After a few of these strange reactions, it breaks down my (sometimes fragile) natural sense of what's true. I can use my intellectual discipline to believe what I do, but my brain is always traumatized by the strange reactions -- I don't want to say they are literally "gaslighting" since I don't want to (always) impute manipulative intent, but what's going on is very much like gaslighting. That trauma makes me "not really believe", doubt my intellectual vision.

Why do the other people traumatize me? They have been through the same thing as me, perhaps, traumatized by other people. So they refuse to listen to me, not trusting me. They believe what they do in a fragile way, and now that they don't know what to believe, they rigidly shut out competitors to what they already believe.

It could also be that we want to believe things -- that beliefs about religion, God, and the lack of religious truth or the non-existence of God, are precious things. They are so foundational that we build our lives around them, and to change your foundations threatens self-destruction. We keep ourselves alive through our inner beliefs.

It may be as frightening to be offered a way to believe in something that you dearly wish to be true, as to be offered a disproof of it.

I probably made the mistake of talking to people who were as old or older than me. Older people lose the ability to really think and question, and instead operate as machines, stable and strong, which just do whatever they were programmed to do while growing up. People can resist this tendency, and it's not universal, but I can feel it in me now. To really question whether God exists requires research -- too much for most mature adults. Immature people have a chance at coming to know what is true. You have to have that immature spirit of adventure in you in order to keep your mind oriented toward knowing what is, rather than becoming aggressively or sadly dogmatic.

Perhaps I misunderstand maturity, and many mature people misunderstand it. It is virtuous to become more mature, not inevitable. It may (seemingly) be inevitable for the young to struggle against the many voices that try to control their minds, and their own inner instability, to try to reach a kind of promised land of being functional in society, stable and secure in mind, patient and emotionally self-regulating. But if this is the "inevitable maturity", the virtuous process of maturity requires that people who (more or less) attain "inevitable maturity" push on to the next stage, which requires them to recover the adventure needed to be in touch with reality.

Where do spirits come in? Spirits can engineer and disseminate new ideas. Time after time, intellectuals, artists, inventors, and so on receive brilliant ideas in "flashes of inspiration". They don't know where they come from. Well, if they don't know where it comes from, it's probably not from them. Where else can it come from? If we insist on materialism, it must come from the "unconscious self". But I don't see why we should insist on materialism -- at best it's one of multiple live options for how the world could work. In any of the others (I'm thinking of dualism and idealism), where spirits are possible, the most natural explanation is that spirits implant these brilliant ideas in these creative people.

I see spirits at play in some of the strange reactions I have to things. I feel like I'm, for better or worse, sick with the same mental sickness as "everyone else" (Western non-Christians). I hear God's voice and see his purpose in my life. But then, sometimes, I read someone saying "humans are really good at seeing patterns in things, humans make meaning". And then that's all I can see in my purported "hearing God's voice".

Why does this seem instantaneously and devastatingly true? Rationally speaking, it's no more weighty than pointing out that sometimes people (seemingly) falsify their own memories. The faculty of memory is not perfect. But I don't think "Oh no! None of my memories are valid!" So the faculty of "finding patterns" is imperfect. But sometimes it shows us things that really are there. Why am I so quick to distrust one faculty and not another? (Actually, now that I write that out, I don't see why I should distrust my instincts of pattern finding, bearing in mind that they are imperfect.)

People say "humans make meaning" in a certain way that implies something. And I fall for it. Why do I fall for it? Is it because I "know", deep down, that it's true? Or is it that I'm under the power of the same spirit as them? Why do they fall for it? I think neither they nor I are being rational. If we were we would see that pattern finding ("meaning making") is something that is basically reliable but with exceptions. Maybe pattern finding when we want something to be true or when the stakes are personal is less reliable? But it could be valid. If you really want someone to be romantically interested in you, it's possible to accurately perceive that they are. But when the implying and the subtext are ruling, I can't even consider that. So there's something fishy going on.

If people are being irrational, or in other words if they are making decisions based on subtext, psychological powers that live in the darkness of intuition, then that world of intuition is a black box. Spirits could take natural intuitions and feed them to produce "reasoning" that the spirits like. Or they could implant entirely new ones.

Does this sound paranoid or crazy? Why does belief in spirits or spirit conspiracies sound paranoid or crazy? Is it weird to think spirits might exist? Not under dualism or idealism. If they do exist, is it weird to think they would behave in concerted ways -- conspiracies? No, because that's how humans sometimes act. It's possible for thoughts of concerted intelligent action to mislead us or make us behave or feel badly. But reality exists regardless of whether we manage to safely believe the truths that correspond to it. Can we approach spiritual warfare in a philosophical way, rather than with heuristics that reject possibilities a priori due to a stigma (nor with spirits possessing us in the very contemplation of those spirits' conspiracies)?

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Whether through natural psychological mechanisms (traumatization and trying to maintain a coherent worldview) or direct spiritual manipulation, the psychological environment for coming to believe the truth about ultimate reality is not ideal. So we have to pay extra attention to what goes on, have more focus, keep our heads together, and have more courage, so that we can come to know the ultimate truth.

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Note: How Many Speakers Can There Be?

This note was originally written to go with Testing / Improving MSL.

How many Speakers can there be? There must be at least one. This one consists of "experience bodies", units of experience. Currently, as I type this in my bedroom, I am experiencing one field of experience. I hear a helicopter outside and feel the chair I sit in. This is all one experience body. It's the whole world I live in, and I know of outside things because of what happens in it.

When the Speaker experiences all other beings in order to speak the word of the universe to us, it may be the case that it incorporates all experience bodies into itself. In that case, it is the universe, but in a sense is distinct from many parts of the universe. In that case, there is only one universe, and one Speaker.

Or, it may be the case that the Speaker only contacts, but does not incorporate, all other beings. How would that connection work? I think that contact (mere touching rather than incorporation), between conscious beings, would involve the two beings having experience bodies with identical contents (one being's experience body being reflected by at least one of the other being's), that would necessarily track each other. The will of one being could affect the contents of both experience bodies.

In the case that the Speaker only contacts, rather than incorporates, everything that exists in the universe, then it contains its own experience bodies (those peculiar to it) as well as a reflection of everything else. A second Speaker has to contain its own experience bodies, as well as a reflection of everything else -- which includes the reflections made by the first Speaker. But once the second Speaker makes those reflections, the first Speaker has to reflect all of the second Speaker's new reflections. This rapidly increases the number of experience bodies that have to exist.

Is there an infinite supply of experience bodies? If not, then the supply would rapidly run out, and one or both Speakers could not speak the universe to people. I tend to think there are no actual infinities, and that the burden of proof is on people who want to say that there are, or could be.

So this gets us to lean toward saying there's only one Speaker, but doesn't get us all the way, since someone may show that actual infinities exist, or could exist.

Do Speakers constantly speak the word of the universe? Or could they just take breaks from it? I feel like I have an intuitive sense of the whole of reality, whatever that cashes out to. In my most "in the moment" moments, it might just be my own experience body that I'm in with its present experiences. Other times that whole of reality image expands to include things I don't see at the time, perhaps even to the distant past and future, stars, quarks, all other minds. But I always relate in some way to the whole of reality, no matter how I construe it in the moment. I think this is a fundamental part of being a conscious being, that you see what you see, sensorily, noetically, and imaginally, and see that it is everything. The word of the whole of reality is being spoken to everyone, which connects to all that there is -- the word of the universe.

Another thought: imagine that there are two Speakers who speak the universe to people. How different could they be? They would experience each other, and thus have the exact same thoughts and feelings. If they did, how could they intend different things? What else is there to a person other than their experiences? Perhaps the decisions that those experiences make (their free wills). In other words, if there are two experience bodies that are contacting each other and thus have identical contents, they differ by having different wills, and these two wills negotiate depending on their power to determine the experience within the two experience bodies. So if there were two persons who had exactly the same experiences, who contacted each other, but had opposing wills, what would that look like? Maybe the two wills would be like adding two vectors, and reduce to one new vector, one new will. In that case, any two Speakers who speak the universe at the same time would automatically merge into one person with the same experiences and will. Maybe there could in some sense be internal conflict in them due to the two non-aligned wills that make up the one resultant will, but like any person with internal conflict, they could relate to the outside world as one person, and experience themselves as one person albeit with inner conflict. Or it may be the case that two free wills that merge leave no conscious trace of their conflict.

Friday, July 14, 2023

MSLN and Evangelicalism

I am thinking of posting links to this post on outside sites. If you have come from one of those links, this post is about the New Wine System (a system of Biblical doctrines) developed/discovered by Philip Brown. I last read the comprehensive book on the subject that he wrote, New Wine for the End Times, about 10 years ago (when I was 25) and though it seemed to be convincing to me at the time, I haven't been able to reassess it from my more critical, older-self perspective. I will suggest that it is probably at least as Biblical as Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, etc. doctrinal systems, possibly more so. In other words, it has at least as good a claim as any of those to being what was originally meant by the Biblical writers (or by God in his role as author of the Bible), possibly more so.

Being more philosophical than scholarly, I believe in the New Wine System more through reasoning, this taking up much of my efforts as a writer. My project called "MSLN" attempts to prove the existence of God (one whose nature requires/implies the New Wine System), is more complicated, more of a work in progress. However, I have also written up a simpler argument for the New Wine System which presupposes that the reader believes in God (a certain kind of God that many Christians and possibly some non-Christians would accept as the one they believe in), in an 8 page booklet called Simple New Wine System.

I'm not sure how Philip Brown would summarize the New Wine System (I mention that as some degree of deference to him since the label "New Wine System" originates with him.) I will summarize it as I understand it as being the following two ideas: 1) we must become completely holy (repent 100%, come to have God's values and heart 100%, love God with 100% of our beings, overcome our sinful habits in partnership with God 100%, perform any positive acts that God requires, maybe other things like that) in order to enter heaven (or else we must be destroyed in hell (annihilationism)), 2) there is a realistic amount of time for us to complete our part of this process, in the Millennium/Resurrection.

To some extent this post may be unwelcoming in the sense that I don't discuss it in terms that would make the most sense to someone unfamiliar with my writing. I think that writers try to be trust-producing (so that they have an audience), but sometimes that outstrips their trustworthiness. Someday maybe I will be so confident in the trustworthiness of what I say that I will present what I say in a more popular way. I think I'm moving in that direction, even with this post.

I'm trying not to get into the Bible or Christianity too much at this point in my writing life. However, MSL, the natural theology I do want to talk about, shares many structural similarities with Christianity (and with legitimism (the "L" in "MSL") could be seen as a proto-Christianity or minimalist Christianity).

So this post is trying to talk about "evangelicalism", which is a phenomenon in MSL, but also a phenomenon in Biblical Christianity. So talking about "evangelicalism" is something that serves the purpose of understanding MSL, but also shows how New Wine Christianity might "reform" or "restore" existing Biblical Christianity, perhaps solving some practical problems the church faces, and thus helps me explain the appeal of MSLN to some Christians.

"Evangelicalism", here, is not about cultural affiliation with "Evangelicals", but rather is a basic attitude, which could be something like this:

1. People are at risk for something other than loss of secular life. (Usually, for loss of eternal life.)
2. The way to deal with that risk involves that we care about others' well-being and act on that.
3. There are consequences to our inaction (or misguided action) with respect to #1. (People being lost from eternal life, usually.)
4. We should care about those consequences and feel and act accordingly.

Does MSL commit me to evangelicalism?

Does MSL commit me to evangelicalism? I think so. One interpretation of MSL would imply that if people don't do their part in "anti-tempting" people so that they turn toward God, God can do it in the Millennium. Therefore, under that interpretation, people would not have to care for other people's salvation. I suppose that's possible. But another possibility is that tragedy is possible. God is not so much in control that he can make up for all our deficiencies. This may sound impious, lacking in regard for God. A God who is great should be powerful, right? Who are we to not think God is great? So we must think he is powerful.

But what is the truth? Not everything that happens in this life seems like it comes from God. Maybe it's as simple as, it's not something God wants. (Atheists can provide strong examples of horror and suffering. Jews have had to struggle with the Holocaust as a religious fact, and it should concern us just as it does them.) But if God doesn't want it, then it's possible for things to happen that go against God's plan. My belief is that God always has a plan for everyone's life. But people's choices (whether their own, or other people's) send their lives down different tracks, so that God's first-choice plan ("plan A") gets replaced with his second-place plan ("plan B") or eventually further down the alphabet. And some of those plans that are far from plan A have to involve horror, lies, and suffering, and temptations to despair, delusion, and rejection of God.

What force compels God to allow our lives to become gratuitously bad? God is a holy God, so he can't will us to sin. He is unable to tempt us. But temptations help produce holiness (part of being like God is to turn against sin, ourselves -- so sin has to be presented as a positive thing for us to really strongly do that). Who will tempt us except evil beings? These evil beings then can refuse to work for God in their roles as tempters unless they get concessions, concessions such as a world that contains gratuitous evil. One of these evils might be that God is contractually not allowed to do all of the work he would otherwise do himself (more competently than we would), so we have to do some of it ourselves. Of course, it's good for us to do some of the work, for our own sakes. We anti-tempt ourselves when we care for other people. But there are times when we are not competent in doing our job (or not willing to do it), and there are consequences to that, which fall outside God's desires (and thus are tragic).

While it's always possible that God and Satan negotiate a world where God can do all the anti-tempting necessary, so that if someone rejects him it's 100% their decision, I don't know of any reason from MSL that would make me say I could assume that was the case. So there is uncertainty.

According to this post, God must do everything he can do to save us. Any lack of salvation is due to us, and he must provide us the ideal environment to be saved. So how could God fail to make up for our deficiencies in anti-tempting?

God cares about the salvation of his creatures. In order to have his heart, we must do the same. In order to be saved, we must have his heart. So we must care about the salvation of his creatures to be saved. The best way to do this is through practice.

It may also be the case that the most effective way for us to take this practice seriously is for us to be responsible in some way for others' salvation, in a way that does not get made up by God. After all, nobody makes up for what God does, so God's heart has to face that level of responsibility.

There's a trade-off between the benefit to the worker (who needs to have a reason to take the work seriously) and a risk to the one helped (or who should have been helped, if the worker doesn't do their job). God balances these two, and the result is that to some extent we are responsible for the eternal well-being of other people.

This makes sense to me, and I'm at least provisionally inclined to believe that it simply is the case. But if I want to doubt it, I think I still have to see it as a live possibility.

What is the best way to handle uncertainty? I can think of two natural intuitions. One is to say something like "agnosticism about the existence of God should lead to practical atheism" -- if you can't know about something, assume it doesn't matter. I think this is a fairly common one in culture. But, for people into risk management (some businesses, government, the military, effective altruism), certain uncertain outcomes are worth preparing for or trying to prevent. Practically speaking, if you have a solid-enough idea that God might exist, and of what that would entail, you should act as though God exists (in keeping with how likely you think God might exist), even if you are agnostic.

So which approach should we take, with respect to the possibility that people are needed to produce the best outcome with respect to the salvation of other people? If people aren't needed, and we try anyway, and we do a good job, then there are no downsides. And, if people aren't needed and we try, and do a bad job, whatever mistakes we make will be offset by good decisions God makes in anti-tempting them. (At least, in terms of whether people reach heaven, our mistakes will cause no lasting harm.)

But consider the case where people are needed. If we don't try (or don't do a good job), then there could be tragic consequences.

So I think the natural choice for a believer of MSL is to value evangelicalism. I would say "the natural choice is to live it", and I think most should, but perhaps some could lack competence or good-heartedness to the extent that they might feel it wisest to do nothing evangelical. But, if so they would be doing so for an evangelical cause (by getting out of the way).

What if we are uncertain whether MSL is true or not? To the extent that we think it might not be true, we should consider other goods besides eternal life. But to the extent that we think it probably is true, we should be evangelicals.

What kind of evangelicalism would MSL produce?

Michael Spencer's "Wretched Urgency" talks about evangelical (in the sense I use) church culture that is sort of "crazy". (It's a fleshed-out example from someone who saw that world better than I have.) I would use the term "dishonest" (people forcing themselves to care about things they don't naturally care about). Also, people who are focused heavily on conversions and not the moral life.

Isn't the moral truth that we should save people from hell, and go about it by converting them? But why does that go against what the New Testament seems to exemplify? Spencer makes the point that there isn't much about preaching to the lost in the New Testament. It happens, but the emphasis is more on morality.

The MSLN answer is: if you don't focus on morality, you could be one of the lost. The person you have the greatest chance of reaching to prevent eternal loss is yourself. We know ourselves the best of anyone (although we can sometimes be self-deceived or misguided), and we have the advantage of being able to just obey ourselves when we tell ourselves to repent, with an act of unilateral will. In some sense we can will that other people repent, but also, we are powerless. A mistake that evangelicalism can make is to try to push people to the point of repenting, using pressure and manipulation. MSL and New Wine evangelicals should not do that, and it doesn't make as much sense for them to do so, unlike in some non-New Wine Christianity where it does more so.

In MSLN, while the need and call for holiness is absolute, the time period in which people can pursue holiness is greatly expanded over what we get in secular time. So it doesn't make as much sense to be "wretchedly" urgent. You can dilute your urgency, not to the point that there is none, but you aren't forced into "wretchedness" by the fact of the brevity of secular life -- instead of saying "if this person doesn't change before the end of this life, they will go to hell" you say "if this person doesn't change before the end of this life, that's not the best sign but it's not certain they will go to hell". Because your urgency is diluted, you don't have to drive yourselves and other people as hard in response.

I grew up in a church that in my memory was "practically non-evangelical". This is a term I made up -- "practical non-evangelicalism" (PNE) parallel to "practical atheism". A nominal Christian may really be atheistic in how they prefer, act, and trust ("practically atheistic"), and a nominal evangelical may be non-evangelical in how they prefer, act, and trust. PNE can happen when you have all the doctrinal ingredients necessary to be evangelical, but you just don't derive evangelicalism from them. You might do this by technically still believing in hell and lostness, but just never preaching about it. Maybe the older half of the congregation has memories of the "wretched days", so the Spencer-like preachers emphasize all the things Spencer does (including spiritual maturity, and feeling OK instead of guilty all the time), and the younger half of the congregation, having only heard Spencer-like preachers and not the culture Spencer-like preachers are responding to, again, may have some technical sense that hell exists (it's mentioned in the Bible, after all), but has no real concept that that's a real thing, no concept that people have eternal as opposed to secular well-being, and thus do not care about their own or other people's eternal well-being. It has seemed to me that this sets up two problems: 1) we love people less because less is at stake, 2) we make secular well-being our real concern, and then as soon as the secular world cares for this well-being better than religious people do, religion will have no purpose and die out. #2 matters if there's some reason why God is supposed to matter to us, and we come to know God through people having concern for people (concern in the name of God / religion).

Typically, I like to solve as much of my problems as I can with principles, and avoid laws and practical wisdom. If you can found your thought structure on good basic truths, then everything should follow well. Get your basic truths right, if you possibly can, to save you work in the law-writing and practical wisdom phases. I think it's hard to avoid laws and the need for practical wisdom, though. But with better principles, I think MSLN should do a better job than traditional evangelicalism.

However, traditional evangelicalism isn't totally a failure from an MSL/New Wine perspective. That is, from my natural-theological point of view, it does some good, and probably more good than bad, and even from Spencer's Biblical point of view, it was successful in conveying at least some concern for morality and it did transmit the Bible which he uses to correct "wretched evangelicalism". The messed-up, simplistic version of something might be popular and powerful, at least for a time. I don't think it makes sense to ignore the special genius of "wretched evangelicalism", which is that, though "wretchedly urgent", it actually was urgent. That's not something to dismiss lightly, and it is not good to substitute "wretched urgency" with a "wretched apathy".

What we want is excellence. How do we achieve that? An athlete has to train hard, and even risk injury, in order to be excellent. But, they have to have good technique in order to be excellent. I think that traditional evangelicalism lends itself to bad technique. But being too concerned with health leads to lack of effort. I think MSLN brings better technique in that morality (holiness, spiritual maturity) is part of the goal. You can singlemindedly pursue the goal of salvation of the lost and still attend to morality. That takes care of one of the failure modes of traditional evangelicalism, that "consequentialism" (evangelicalism) "tempts us to sacrifice deontology/virtue ethics" (tempts us to sin, fail to be good, fail to expect goodness from others).

It's possible to associate "spiritual maturity" with healthy living (with secular well-being), such that healthiness (especially mental health) is an inherent part of spiritual maturity. I think it is more dangerous to overemphasize health than to overemphasize effort (because if health is your idol you might not get punished for it like you probably will with effort). But health is a valid concern, and does play into the longevity of a religious movement (if everyone burns out, the movement loses ability to expend effort in the long run). I don't know if I've written about this on this blog, but my belief is that legitimism implies that, since the good is the best thing, we should put the good first, and be willing to sacrifice everything to the good. (Legitimacy is the good, God is the good, and both MSL's "Father" and "Son" persons of Legitimacy (the good) risk their existences in order to conform to Legitimacy. God is self-obedient.) This implies that willingness to pursue "the cross" (risking yourself for the sake of the good) is essential to salvation. We can't let health get in the way of that, and MSLN calls for the cross more clearly than non-New Wine Christianity. But, you pursue the cross attempting not to destroy yourself but to be effective, and effectiveness calls for a concern for health. I don't think MSLN clears up this on the level of principle, occasioning law and/or practical wisdom to make sense of this. (Maybe Jesus' example of only dying on one cross and avoiding all the others is helpful.) (Also "Give to health what is health's and to God what is God's" as in this story)

What MSLN does do is say that if you're pushing too hard, in your pursuit of working for your salvation or others' salvation, and you are starting to burn out, you can say "Well, there's time in the Millennium, so I don't have to make this effect happen now, so I can take a break". But if you're becoming too apathetic, you can say "Wait, there's something real at stake, I need to go to work. Who can say if my work won't help someone escape hell?" MSLN's ideas about how reality is set up allow us to move away from either extreme position of "there is no work to be done for God, only to attend to secular well-being, if that" and "the work for God is so urgent that we need to pursue it dishonestly, insanely, etc.". MSLN is in the middle, motivating work for God without too often leading to "wretched urgency".

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Perhaps, to sum up so far, the problem with evangelicalisms are that they can be unhealthy, dishonest, immoral, "wretched", and thus be counterproductive.

A traditional evangelical could keep their "heaven or hell when you die" perspective and say "while it looks as though there is an intense, burning urgency to help people find God, what actually works to achieve that is to not think about that or in those terms, otherwise you become unhealthy, dishonest, immoral, 'wretched', etc.". In other words, things are "not what they say on the tin". You might naively think that you should care about other people and feel the feelings, think the thoughts, etc., that go along with their objective state, and then act on those feelings/thoughts. But actually, you shouldn't care about other people, nor feel those feelings, think those thoughts. Actually, to "really" care about other people is like not caring. Caring is "not what it says on the tin".

When I admired traditional evangelicalism's possession of urgency earlier (even if it might be "wretched"), part of what I thought was good was the way that urgency gets us to actually do things. The doing of things follows from objective reality. Just to see someone as lost gives you a power and direction to do something. Their lostness is a moral truth. How will you respond to that truth? If you don't respond to moral truth, what kind of person are you? Probably someone lacking in moral sensitivity -- having a heart unlike God's.

Perhaps in some grim world the best we can do is live the paradox. Maybe the paradox lurks in non-New Wine evangelicalism (at least all the non-"wretched" varieties), and the best we can do is be paradoxical.

With MSLN, you don't need to distance yourself from the objective fact of someone else's lostness in order to relate to it in a healthy, honest, moral, non-"wretched" way. So then the "MSLian" or New Wine Christian can better maintain their connection to the fact of lostness. They can trust the category of "objective truth" more. They can derive strength from the truth in a way that a paradox-minded person can't. They can be more passionate, and thus will probably be more fruitful than they would have been as "paradoxical traditional evangelicals" or "practical non-evangelicals".

This assumes that MSLN (a set of ideas) is well-implemented by the people who adopt it. And like anything, it might not be well-implemented if its adherents do a bad-enough job. But MSLN itself isn't starting them off at as much of a disadvantage as the other views do.

Can MSL evangelicalism be trusted by traditional evangelicals?

This post is written at least in part so that non-New Wine evangelicals might consider New Wine evangelicalism. One question such people might have is "We think that what matters is that people make a decision for Jesus -- that they are converted. Could the New Wine System be a scam that gets us to no longer emphasize that thing, which we have always thought mattered? What if we mistakenly believe the New Wine System, although it is false, and fail to do work we should have done, and people go to hell who otherwise would not have?"

I do think that being concerned about intellectual scams is valid, and that a change in the beliefs that affect what you consider highest is one to make carefully and aware of the risk. A New Wine person like myself, considering traditional evangelicalism's arguments if they were presented to me, might feel like they are a scam, to get me to give up my concern over holiness's role in salvation. Traditional evangelicalism at its worst produces shallow believers who think they are 100% OK in the eyes of God (effectively -- they know "they are sinners" but don't think being a sinner is really a bad thing since they are guaranteed to go to heaven). In this regime of moral shallowness, people can harden on little sins that they like, and in some areas become deaf to the voice of Jesus. So traditional evangelicalism, when it succeeds at what it thinks is sufficient to save people, could bias some people toward choosing hell, if in fact New Wine evangelicalism is correct. Both evangelicalisms are potential scams, depending on your perspective.

How can you choose between two potential scams? (Especially when, in this area, all the alternatives are potential scams, things that if you adopt them might cause you to take focus off of what really matters.)

How much are New Wine and traditional evangelicalism in tension, practically speaking? Maybe in practice they achieve the same ends, more or less.

Conversion matters to a New Wine person because it enables people to point themselves in a better direction with respect to God. It's part of holiness as I understand it. Can you reach God without a conscious trusting relationship to him? No. Likewise traditional evangelicals (despite "wretchedness") still teach holiness.

It's true that MSL doesn't require a person to trust in Jesus by that name. In some languages, Jesus is known as "Yeshua" or "Isa", not "Jesus", so it's not the string of letters that is essential to the name of Jesus, but rather some minimal set of traits in the person associated with that name, that makes the name really the name of Jesus. MSL does require trust in Legitimacy/the good/God in multiple persons, does require that that God take on the form of a limited personal being such as we are and die, and I think (although I'd have to check), most of what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount (one exception being his call to keep the Law) are implied by MSL. I think if you want to implement the idea of a good God, and a good God in human form, according to MSL's view of God and goodness, you might well recreate many or most of the sets of traits of Jesus, when looking at the person of Legitimacy who takes on limited form, such that it makes sense to give that person the name of Jesus. However, not having spelled out all of the essential traits of Jesus, nor of all the implications of MSL, I can't say that MSL preaches Jesus, exactly. If it doesn't, it gets people relatively close to trust in Jesus, but that might not be close enough for the comfort of some traditional evangelicals.

(If the name "Jesus" or something etymologically similar is one of the minimal essential traits that identify Jesus, then MSLians could easily use that name to refer to the person of Legitimacy that resembles the Biblical Jesus. I've used "the Son" before in MSL contexts, which might also be adequate. I suppose this is only a fair thing to do if we can identify the other minimal essential traits of the Biblical Jesus as well as the full MSL conception of its "Son", and the two line up sufficiently that they refer to the same being.)

However, New Wine Christianity (as opposed to the MSL natural theology) holds Jesus as high as any other kind of Christianity. Evangelical Christians do not need to convert to MSL, but rather to New Wine Christianity, if they find the ideas held in common between MSL and the New Wine System convincing.

Yet they still might be concerned about the existence of MSL. Could MSL be leading people astray, to 99% of what it takes to be saved (having an understanding of the limited person of God that almost amounts to the Jesus that is the way, truth, and life), but stop them before going 100% (really believing in Jesus)? From one perspective, we could say "well, among all the not-100% versions of the truth that are out there, this one is better than most". But I'm sensitive to concerns about coming up with something that is 99% right and therefore highly trust-producing but which is fatal by not going the full distance. I think (I hope I've said this before and say it later by way of emphasis) that MSL naturally calls us to say "we don't know everything that we might need to know about God and we're listening to hear the answer". An MSLian certainly should listen to a traditional evangelical talk about Jesus, and I think naturally would welcome hearing about their ideas and considering adopting them. Why not become a Christian, at least in some minimal sense? Hopefully that (if put into practice as much as it should be) would reduce the danger of MSLians not hearing the truth about Jesus that traditional evangelicals possess. I don't think the world (in this life, at least) is ever completely safe, nor is any state of affairs not at all apt for concern. The traditional evangelical must consider the danger that they are wrong and MSL is right, just as the MSLian should consider the danger that they are wrong and traditional evangelicalism is right.

What if the New Wine System causes us to not be as concerned with converting non-believers, given that they can be converted in the next life (according to the New Wine System), and we miss opportunities to convert them in this life which is all we get for this task (according to traditional evangelicalism)? This is a fair concern, and I can see a real risk here. One way to resolve the tension is epistemic. If the truth says the danger is "here" and not "there", then that settles what to do. (Though I'm trying to talk about risk management in this section, ultimately you should believe what's true rather than focusing on trying to be safe.) I think the New Wine System is favored by the truth, but the reader should make up their own mind.

It may be the case that the New Wine System is more effective at producing conversions than traditional evangelicalism. Traditional evangelical conversionism is something I would expect to produce a strong feeling at one point in life which may or may not lead to a lifelong commitment. It's a good way to increase a church's size in the short run. But what kind of people become leaders in a church?

What if churches were full of people who were leaders, who were examples of people living like there's something other than human flourishing that matters or in some other way were deeply and genuinely living like God exists, and who were deeply and genuinely concerned about their neighbors' spiritual lives (that they aim toward the person of God consciously, and that they come into tune with God morally even if they sometimes do that unconscious of the person of God). The New Wine System might be expected to increase congregants' seriousness as Christians at the same time as it decreased (but not to zero) their emphasis on having to convert people in this life. Possibly more people would become the kind of people who could convert others, by increasing their own trustworthiness through the pursuit of holiness, and by taking their faith seriously enough to love and reach out to the people who don't have it, even if their individual urgency to convert decreased. It could be the case that the New Wine System would perform well from a conversionist point of view (although that remains to be seen).

Another perspective is that the church universal is an ecosystem. Traditional evangelicals are effective at conversionism, but they sometimes are "wretched". People who are converted by traditional evangelicalism but don't do well in traditional evangelical churches leave -- perhaps they leave Christianity entirely. Or perhaps they go to a PNE, liberal/mainline, progressive, Catholic, or Orthodox church (maybe even fundamentalism would sound better than traditional evangelicalism to some). Each of these variants of Christianity provide homes that people might like to stay in -- they are not all in line with the truth (they couldn't all be since they differ from each other doctrinally), but they serve a purpose.

The existence of New Wine doctrine allows PNE, and possibly also liberal/mainline and progressive Christianity to move in a more evangelical direction -- and thus as a byproduct produce more conversions. The New Wine System is more congruent with PNE (and maybe some liberal/mainline and progressive) Christian cultures, would be more fitting for the kind of people attending there.

From this, a committed traditional evangelical might look on the New Wine System as being among a number of doctrines that are not completely valid, but not the worst of them. And possibly also as a less-risky thing to consider believing and recommending to others.

Some editing issues explain the redundancy of the following paragraph:

That goes for New Wine Christianity. But MSL might sound risky, still, if it does not insist on the name of Jesus. I think that the exact same belief can move one person closer to the truth, and another person further. It's possible for MSL to move people from atheism and non-Christian spirituality toward theism, and while MSL does not force people to accept the Bible logically, it does recommend the Bible to some extent, I think. (I haven't done all the thinking that I feel I should on this subject, but on the surface, because MSL sounds like a proto-Christianity or minimalist Christianity, it makes Christian scriptures seem like they might be from God. And, as I said before, an MSLian should have the sense that they may not know enough about God.) Depending on how things turn out, this could lead non-Christians to become Christians who otherwise wouldn't have, although the risk remains that some people would think that the name of Jesus wasn't necessary for salvation, given that an intermediate step in becoming a Christian did not insist on that.

Maybe practically speaking, we should seek to prefer, act, and trust according to both MSL and traditional evangelicalism (should both aim for complete holiness and seek to convert and be converted). If those were the only two versions of the purported truth out there, I think it would be easy for me to try to satisfy both personally, and emphasize both in my behavior to other people. I feel like MSL "has nothing against" conversion, and traditional evangelicalism "has nothing against" holiness. I personally find MSL and the Bible the only options I'm interested in obeying, and so that doesn't seem like a huge leap to me, and perhaps the reader is in the same situation. Then, neither belief system is practically speaking risky from the other's perspective.

But, if I'm trying to be openminded, I consider the possibility of views like Islam, or "Christianity+" religions like Roman Catholicism and Mormonism. Do I have to satisfy Muslim doctrine? I think MSL rules out Islam's insistence on its version of the oneness of God (this is not my official opinion, but seems like a safe guess about the Islam I've heard of). I can't satisfy both Islam and Christianity at the same time. But could I satisfy Catholic or Mormon Christianity along with the Christianity of the 66 book canon I grew up with? I don't know. What if there was some little sect of Christianity, 200 members strong, in some obscure part of the world, that taught that salvation requires a certain kind of faith in God, the real faith that died out in the first century, a specific kind of faith that they know about, and this is the only way to avoid hell? So I have to have their kind of faith? What if it conflicts with MSL and traditional evangelical faith? Can I know that such a sect does not exist and that they are not right? Sure, they are small and thus I might claim are insignificant, but the church was small in the first century.

Is it easy to know the truth, and know that you know the truth, sufficient to prefer, act, and trust so that you are saved? Maybe not. If not, and God exists, and God loves you, and God wants to achieve what satisfies his desires, wouldn't he provide you a way to come to know whatever truth is needed for salvation, whether in this life or a later one? This is essentially an argument against traditional evangelicalism and for something like MSL. This doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what we believe in this life, but that the significance of, what kind of beliefs we believe in this life, is diluted by the provision of God for an afterlife where hopefully the epistemic environment for our trusting of God is more favorable. (If it's useful in saving us, I think we will be given clarity someday.)

Are traditional evangelicals more afraid of hell than they believe that God exists, loves us, and wants to achieve what satisfies his desires? If so, then it makes sense to be suspicious of MSL and the New Wine System. Otherwise, no.

What about "dark evangelicalism"?

This section is somewhat of a footnote or note to myself, not as well-thought-out, and weirder.

Someone could object that maybe God is not ultimately in control enough of the process of salvation, such that he can't guarantee a clearing-up of salvation doctrine later. This does not sound like traditional evangelicalism, whose God is simply omnipotent. But one could imagine a dark evangelicalism, where people need to hear about God in this life to be saved, and God is powerless to give them a second chance.

God really loves, and God doesn't want any of us to be lost. He doesn't create any of us to go to hell. God would not create us if he knew that there was a chance any of us were bound for hell at the time of creation, which would be the case if he didn't provide a way for us to be saved (like an afterlife where we could hear the truth adequately). We might end up going to hell, through the mishaps of life and our turning away from him, but to not provide something like the Millennium would be an unforced error on his part.

So now the "dark evangelical" has to claim that God is not fully or sufficiently loving. But this contradicts the Bible. The Bible says (1 John 4:8) that "God is love". If God was not fully loving, love itself would not be fully loving. Or, if "God is love" is a figure of speech for "God is loving", the love that we have comes from God (1 John 4:7), so we can't exceed God in being loving. And I would assume we can't exceed God in practical wisdom. (Although maybe a "dark evangelical" would contest that? I think creating the world would require a lot more practical wisdom than living one human life.) So if a human can figure out that it doesn't make sense to make an unforced error that prevents people from going to heaven, and doesn't do it out of love, God would also be able to figure that out, and wouldn't do it. So the Bible does not give support to the idea that God is insufficiently loving to avoid "dark evangelicalism".

A traditional evangelical (we will say) believes in "sola scriptura" and so would reject the dark position for being unbiblical. But an "MSLian" might take the dark evangelical position seriously. Is there evidence for dark evangelicalism?

Possibly some can be found in MSLN itself, at least in the first two arguments (the Metaphysical Organism (M) and simantism) (S). The idea that God has to be fully loving is developed in legitimism (L), where love is a form of value, everything that exists is at least temporarily legitimate, Legitimacy has to value what is deserving, everything that is legitimate is deserving, and so everything that is not illegitimate (something like "sinful") is something that Legitimacy must value/love/will-to-exist-forever. But if a student of MSLN does not accept L but only M or MS (S implies M), would they have any reason to think that God is loving, sufficient that he would have to be competent in choosing whether to create us?

The Metaphysical Organism, and by extension the Speaker, is a being of perfect empathy. They feel exactly what we feel. While I don't know how to measure how much unbearable pain there is in our world, I think there is a lot of it, probably unrelenting for thousands (or perhaps millions?) of years. The Metaphysical Organism/Speaker would likely understand this long duration, unrelentingness -- perhaps understand after a few weeks of the load of pain, and then think "is it worth going on?" If they decided to, it would be an action of love, tested over the years by the constant or near-constant barrage of qualia of unbearability. They would show their value for creation by the pain they were willing to bear for us. So the pain and tragedy of creation gives us a reason to think they love us enough to not create if things were going to be really hopeless.

Under M or MS, why would the MO/Speaker need us to accept Jesus as our savior? I don't know of a reason off the top of my head. Why would they require any particular thing for salvation? I can understand them not being able to keep us around if we insist on doing unbearable things or being unbearable to them. But otherwise, why would we have to do any particular thing, like make a decision for Jesus? In MSL, it makes some sense because part of being legitimate is to trust/follow Legitimacy and if Jesus is who he says he is, he is part of Legitimacy. Accepting someone like Jesus is part of MSL. But it's not as clearly a part of M or MS.

A reason why the Speaker could be known to love us is because he created the simantic word of "love", and so understands it deeply himself. Thus, if we can apprehend it and participate in it, we know what he knows. If we know that love is greater than its competitors, he knows that, and will see love as we do, so that he will only create if there is a chance for each of us to be saved. (He know sadism (for instance) as well, but perhaps if you understand love and sadism perfectly, you will always automatically choose love as the best, and sadism as not measuring up.)

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People think they have experiences of God. Probably they do sometimes, if it's sufficiently possible that God exists. Is God loving? I think for most people (maybe even in different religions?) he is. God is supposed to be trustworthy, and somehow he tells us he is. Not everyone experiences him this way necessarily, but I would guess it's the majority view and maybe that should count for some kind of evidence.

Maybe we could view religious experience as experience with spirits (some of whom claim to be God, or working for God), as opposed to with God. If the spirits are trustworthy (we know from relating to them), maybe if they tell us that God is loving, we should believe them?

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If something claims our practical attention (our trust and/or obedience), if the credence we can give it is below a certain amount, it's as likely as so many other conflicting things that it's not worth worrying about. Can dark evangelicalism rise above that threshold? It's an open question. Can it be deemed likely enough, and also recommend a clear-enough course of action, that we can trust and/or obey it?

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Long Links #2

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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I read Maxine Bédat's Unraveled.

Subtitle: "The Life and Death of a Garment" (from farm, to fabric-making, to cut-and-sew, to retailer and consumer, to disposal and secondhand sale). A long time ago I got into fair trade clothing consuming: buying fair trade and thrift store clothes more. I wanted to see if this still made sense, so I took the opportunity to pick up this book from a "little library".

I am pretty sure it makes sense to buy from thrift stores. I had been concerned that I was taking affordable clothes away from people who had less money than me by buying from thrift stores. I remembered that there were situations where bales of clothes were dumped in developing countries' clothes markets which was bad for their attempts to start their own textile industries. Was this still true? It seems like as of 2021 (date of publication), yes. So I can take one garment at a time out of that stream. Maybe I'm taking good clothes away from consumers in developing countries? Possibly.

The book makes it seem like overproduction of clothes is a bad thing. Certainly it's costly environmentally (clothes become trash, resources are consumed to make extra clothes). But (my thought) then there's an abundance of clothes in developing countries.

In terms of fair trade (manufacturing clothing with a fair wage), I think the situation is that some are caught in Molochian races to the bottom (developing countries, factory owners, maybe the brands to some extent), but some people stand outside the struggle to survive and can make unforced errors (the brands, perhaps; certainly their CEOs who could give up some compensation to pay workers more; consumers) or more positively put, can just decide to make things better. Fair trade is a way for consumers to signal that they want things to be better, and make things marginally better. But maybe unions, regulation, are more effective? (One semi-self-regulation described is something called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, mentioned in ch. 4 on p. 111 (hardback first ed.) and following) Maybe if a brand saw the PR gain of selling to consumers who have already signalled their desire to pay for clothes that are made with better wages (maybe signalled through fair trade purchases), they would pay workers more / push for better working conditions so as to make the other brands look bad by comparison? *** *** (An) EA perspective: take care of extreme poverty so that no one will work at bad factories and thus they have pressure to get better. On the other hand, pricing in fair wages into clothes could get people to "donate" there who wouldn't think to donate to extreme poverty charities. I feel like the comparison of all these ideas is beyond me, but I would be interested in seeing a collaboration (an adversarial collaboration?) between Bédat and an EA to see what they would come up with. I feel like Bédat is a non-EA who might interface OK with EAs (does research, acknowledges complexities). She has her own think tank ("think and do tank"), New Standard Institute.

The book advances a racial, feminist, and anti-elite narrative, as well as an anti-neoliberalism narrative.

The book has a chapter on psychological manipulation of consumers and the psychological costs of materialism. My thought: from the book it looks like there's a "non-mindfulness" (a differently loaded term than "mindlessness") in people's consumption. Perhaps the enemy to consumers making better choices is a kind of innocence (a non-mindfulness of "I'm just doing what one does" as a small person). Do we dare shatter (or even less-violently reform) that innocence? Sometimes it feels like it just "should not be done" for some reason, like people should be left in the dark. That's interesting.

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For some reason I felt like re-reading Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip series by Bill Watterson). So I read a collection, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. I think the last time I read more than a few strips of Calvin and Hobbes was back... in high school? in elementary school? So I had a different perspective reading it now.

I liked the comic strip when I was a kid. I followed Calvin's lead in both good and bad ways, because of the power of the visuals and writing. Reading it now, there is a way that it "sings", there is life in it.

Here's what I think after reading that one collection:

I see Calvin as being the most real character out of all of them. He seems to be the most passionate.

Calvin is the most likely to someday really love God in this life. The others are too cool (Hobbes), too normal and nice (Susie), or too far along in their path of life (Calvin's parents).

I was surprised by my feelings toward Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a kid, I guess I thought they were kids doing kid things, just like I did. Calvin and Hobbes was an adventure comic, showing the adventures of a boy and his tiger friend. But now I see Calvin as a (tragically) heroic figure in a world of fakeness (and, in the long run, insanity), and Hobbes I now dislike, a clever pragmatist who sits outside of Calvin's passions, plays along, but knows better the whole time. Calvin meets Hobbes in brotherhood, but Hobbes offers brotherhood with an asterisk on it. Hobbes thinks Calvin is cute and immature -- disrespects him -- and Calvin does not suspect it.

Calvin and Hobbes bears some resemblance to Don Quixote. A lone madman lives in his delusions in a real world that is somewhat unforgiving of him. But who is the real fool in quixotic books? Is it the delusional loner? Or is it all the people around him? From a secular perspective (a practically-atheistic one), obviously it's Don Quixote and Calvin. Everyone's going to die at age 80 and so you should do what's popular, pro-social, socially supported, "consensusly real", in the short run -- there is no afterlife in which to fulfill the fantasies fed you by comic books or chivalrous romances, or to imagine that you can stand outside the social order, live in your own world, as Calvin (and maybe Don Quixote?) effectively does when he daydreams.

Perhaps many theists would side with the secular people, but my theism causes me to say that it's the normal, mainstream, functional people who are fools for not seeking true excellence. While Calvin himself isn't exactly seeking excellence of any sort at this point in his life, he is still clean from the fake-spiritedness of (it seems) everyone around him. He is unwise in many ways, but still not a fool in the fatal way that is most successful in this world. Satan could tempt you with the promise of a slushball to the back of a girl's head, or he could tempt you with an easy life, the approval of others, the sense that you're doing what you're supposed to according to society. Calvin's temptations are ones he is fairly likely to grow out of (certainly he will receive plenty of negative feedback on them). But the temptations of the other characters are ones they may succumb to semiconsciously, never truly confronting them. They may slide toward a state where there is a 1% of ungodliness in them that they never want to get rid of, hardening them. Calvin's sinfulness is accessible and blatant, but theirs does not stand out, and they are acceptable in their community.

My theory of the worldview of Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin is a daydreamer but also in touch with the world of spirits. Hobbes being the main proof, a "friend" who knows better than Calvin.

Is it possible that Calvin's subconscious is more mature than Calvin and can create Hobbes? What is the subconscious self? Is it really you? If you're a materialist (like Freud?) and you have to stuff all phenomena that does not come from the material world surrounding a person into the operations of a person's material brain, there being no other place to locate it, and for some reason you have to say that "the mind is what the brain does" and somehow that the self is identical to the mind, I guess you're forced to say that. But as a philosophical idealist, I don't think that's a very natural way of looking at phenomena like Hobbes. I think the subconscious self is "not you", something other than you, unless you adopt it as your own. If the subconscious self is wiser than you, is on another level, then there is a wiser spirit (wise like God, or wise like Satan) operating in your life. For Calvin this spirit is visible to him in the imaginal world.

Why is Hobbes in Calvin's life? Perhaps Hobbes, like most things, is a negotiation between God and Satan. God wants Calvin, the world's most alone person, to have a friend to comfort him. Calvin, like Job, is a thorn in Satan's side, someone who has not yet confirmed one of Satan's theories about human nature. Satan then exacts a concession from God: this friend will have to disrespect Calvin behind his back, and feed Calvin society's wine of fakeness through his nagging hints that Calvin is a fool, in such a way that Calvin doesn't realize what's going on. (Hobbes is sensible, moderate, wise, and in favor of romance -- exactly the sorts of things that will win a young man praise from his society.) Because of the power of Satan in Job-like situations, God makes the concession, and a spirit is chosen to do the job, a spirit to be called "Hobbes".

Serious Becomes Rational

When people get more serious about something, they tend to want to be more rational. They want to consider all the evidence and how it interrelates, looking into whatever concrete particulars are involved, trying to get a good idea of exactly what good and bad could come of that thing, what the consequences of that thing will be in their life, and what consequences their actions might have in the life of that thing.

For instance, two lovers as they go toward marriage, or a parent and a child, or investors with a business.

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Conscience; Fiducial Conscience

I read L. John Van Til's Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea. I can't say I followed it very closely, but it did introduce me to thinking about conscience.

My idea of conscience is that it is an intuition which in some way is the voice of truth or God, but isn't necessarily infallible. It could be the voice of God because a person has trained themselves to think the way that God does, so they naturally react the way he would. Or, it could be the voice of God because when they see something, God directly causes them to feel that way about it. It could be the voice of truth, because by thinking through and experiencing the way things are, we come to react to things intuitively according to how they really are. Or, it could be the voice of truth because some truths are conveyed intuitively, directly. (Or it could be that God or some other being tells us these truths directly.)

What is interesting about conscience is this ambiguity as to what produces it. Normally when we talk about conscience, we are talking about moral conscience (sometimes also intellectual conscience). Your moral conscience tells you that something is wrong. Should you do it anyway? There's some chance that your conscience is malformed. But it could be well-formed and thus in touch with reality. And it could be the voice of God telling you not to do something. It is never totally safe to ignore your conscience, although it may be fallible.

Another variant of conscience, beside intellectual and moral, which I am making up here, perhaps is new, is "fiducial conscience". We have a sense that certain things are trustworthy or not. It's an intuition, and thus it can't be fully justified in words. It is not necessarily irrational, as I define "rational", but it is not fully legible. It is produced by the same kinds of things as moral conscience. Should you trust your fiducial conscience? Probably, although it may sometimes be wrong.

Some matters may only be resolved by appeals to fiducial conscience. You sense that something is wrong but can't put its wrongness into words -- some people who trust your intuition based on prior experience should trust your intuition, and probably you should just on the basis of it being your own fiducial conscience. But this doesn't scale up as aptly as verbal, textual reasoning and evidence. It is less suitable for governing a nation or even a congregation of a church, although it is reasonably well-suited for governing an individual or group of close friends and family. (And, perhaps many of the individual votes that are cast in nations or churches depend on people's experiences and leadings from God that inform the "black box" of their conscience.)

The concept of conscience allows us to both trust and not overtrust intuition, and potentially have some idea that we can train it.

What the concept of conscience introduces is that everyone is a witness to the truth, in a way that they are uniquely qualified to be. They can experience intuitions that no one else does or can look into and debunk. However, these intuitions and witnesses are only binding on those who trust them, and by default the only person who (probably) should find them binding is the witness themselves. It is not the case that these intuitions are necessarily reflective of the truth, but they may be and it's hard or perhaps impossible in some cases to completely rule them out.

There is an absolute truth, and we can partially know it, and to some extent each of us is in a unique position to know the truth. I guess this could be a midpoint between "everyone has their own truth and perspective" and "there is one absolute, objective truth".