Voluntary Millennial Holiness

At some point in the past, a commenter on this blog pointed out the resemblance between MSLN and Mormonism with regard to soteriology and eschatology. Having read Gospel Principles, an introduction to Mormon doctrine put out by the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), I think that Mormonism does fit the two basic ideas of millennial holiness of 1) Everyone must become completely holy before going to heaven, and 2) there is a long but finite time in which to complete this process. (I am less sure, but suspect that at least to some extent this is also true of Catholic and Orthodox theology.)

In terms of the potential power of the motivational structure of MSL, I felt as I read that the Mormon perspective does not drive motivation as much as the New Wine System, or my concept of "millennial holiness" would. Millennial holiness, as I defined it before, exists, and we know about how strong it is in motivating people. Certainly the Mormon, and perhaps Catholic or Orthodox, churches are active and productive in their own ways, but they are what they are. Yet, I think that there is something else, which I think I remember from the New Wine System, and which I do see in my own "millennial holiness" doctrine, which is different than Mormonism and may not have ever been implemented in a major way, the way Mormonism has been.

I would say that I emphasize the freedom of the will to the extent that people's salvation is really up in the air. We really could decide not to trust God fully. We really could decide to harden ourselves against God, and shut down our ability to freely choose God. This would be an element of voluntariness to salvation. I can't be sure, from what I read, that Mormonism didn't support this at all "officially" or "on the books". But it was not emphasized in Gospel Principles and if I were writing the equivalent of Gospel Principles for my own beliefs, I would emphasize clearly that there is a risk of hardening, or of failing to fully repent, because this is an important thing to know, to avoid a seriously bad outcome.

So I would add "voluntary" to "millennial holiness", thus "voluntary millennial holiness". Those three words are a mouthful, but they do (I hope) now convey the essentially "New Wine" or "MSL" belief system that I think has such motivational power. I could shorten them to "VMH", which unfortunately adds to the "alphabet soup" of my writing. But at least if someone hears me say "VMH" and asks about it, I can say "it stands for 'voluntary millennial holiness'" and not have too much trouble explaining those three words. Whereas I would have a harder time doing that with "New Wine" or "MSL", and those two labels go beyond what "voluntary millennial holiness" is talking about.

Millennial Holiness

11 February 2024: superseded by "voluntary millennial holiness".

For a little bit of time, I have been unsatisfied with the terminology available to describe my writing project. "MSL", or "MSLN", sounds weird, technical, "mathematical", artificial to me. For some people, those adjectives are not a problem. (For philosophers, especially analytic, maybe some STEM people, some intellectuals who are outsiders.) Also, while the term "New Wine" is a nice-sounding one, I feel like it belongs more to Philip Brown, who coined it, than to me. Neither "MSL" nor "New Wine" signal to a casual listener the content of those belief systems.

As I think about it, I think it's fine to call my philosophy "MSL", because it's intended for philosophically literate people. But it's good to have a general, broad label for the basic idea of both MSL and the New Wine System.

The two big points that I see in both MSL and New Wine Christianity are 1) becoming completely holy, and 2) having a millennium (or something like it) in which to become completely holy. So, "holiness" and "millennium". Or, we could say "millennial holiness". This does give some idea of its content, although for most people it is more a hint. It's a term that describes both MSL and New Wine Christianity, while allowing them to be different from each other in some respects (which seemed to make less sense if I called MSL a "New Wine" thing). (It may also describe Mormonism, and possibly Catholicism is related.)

So I plan to use "millennial holiness" sometimes where I would have used "New Wine" before. The past blog is what it is, and maybe if I can leave a note somewhere in it without too much effort, which makes the correction to help future blog readers (at least it should go in MSLN), that would be worth it. But I'm guessing that my blog will not be the introduction most people get to my writing at some point in the future, or perhaps this blog will be, but increasingly so the "era" in which I habitually use "millennial holiness".

Watersheds and Divides

When I was younger, I would go on road trips with my family to Texas. Along the way, we drove down Interstate 10 through southern Arizona and southern New Mexico. Somewhere in New Mexico, we crossed the Continental Divide. On one side of the divide, water flows downhill to the Pacific Ocean. On the other side, it flows downhill to the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps two drops of water from the same thunderstorm that land just a few inches away from each other could end up in radically different oceans.

In southern New Mexico along Interstate 10, the Divide is apparently flat. I would not guess that there is a divide there, but the sign on the side of the road says there is.

A divide is a (possibly subtle) change in gradient that causes something, over the long run and in general, to flow toward a different (potentially radically different) destination, than it would have before crossing the divide. A watershed is a "gradient regime" (a kingdom of flow?) that leads toward a particular end.

Secular Life, Millennial Life, Heavenly Life

I have found myself saying "this life", to refer to the life that each of us lives between physical birth and death. What follows "this life" is to wait for resurrection. Then, to be resurrected in the Resurrection which can also be called the Millennium. I like being able to say "millennial" about what goes on in the Millennium. But "this-lifely" is awkward.

Another term for "this life" could be "secular life", the time that is lived in this world. An atheist, Muslim, Christian, and even a Buddhist or Hindu would agree that there is a thing that we live in on some level, agree on that same thing, in which people are born (and registered as having been born if they live in a time and place where birth certificates are kept), and we can all interact politically and modern medicine staves off problems that we all recognize as problems. In this world, where perhaps we only expect to live 60 or 80 years, time flows linearly.

The Millennium, I assume, and this would be the natural assumption from natural theology, I think, flows linearly as well. Some people talk about non-linear time (kairos), versus linear time (chronos). Maybe kairos runs parallel to both secular and Millennial time, which are forms of chronos.

(My understanding of kairos in this post is that it is "gathered time" (every Christmas is linked to every Christmas you ever experienced). If the past currently exists, we can be close to all the Christmases at once at each Christmastime (kairos), even if otherwise things proceed according to chronos (where we are closest to the moment that just entered the past).)

Hell, ultimately, becomes non-existent and thus I guess timeless. Heaven, according to MSL, if I recall correctly, has a chronos component (repeated outworkings of life that proceed linearly), but perhaps also a kairos component. Certainly restful time lends itself to contact with kairos or the timeless, and heaven is a time of rest.

I don't know what to say about times before creation (the beginning of secular time).

Indexing Things to Other Things

I use sentences like "People are indexed to their culture and not to God", but I realized that this isn't a completely common term, and lightweight search engine use may not give a clear answer as to what I mean by "indexed to".

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly where I got that term from or the (I think) illuminating specificity of how it was used in that original context or in the definition given there. But I can say how I understand it, and that might help readers of this blog.

Indexing has to do with reference points. One meaning that I may use is "linking yourself to another reality, on a literal one-to-one correspondence, or a correspondence which resembles a literal one-to-one correspondence". On some level you automatically follow the reality of the other thing, perhaps because you choose to be linked that way, or you chose it and it has become a habit, or without realizing it you developed or inherited the habit. Sometimes though the intention to be true to it is a habit, to actually be true to it requires conscious thought and volition, to successfully execute the intention.

You tend to have to update yourself to new knowledge about the reference reality. You aren't necessarily in one-to-one correspondence with the thing as it is, but you are with the thing as it has revealed itself, and your intention, or habit, is to correspond with the thing as it is.

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A meaning similar to this (probably the source of me knowing about it) is found in math and related fields (economics/finance). If I recall correctly, Kurt Gödel used indexing in developing his Incompleteness Theorem.

Structure and Change

Sometimes, I have idly thought about what I would do if I were president. I think the last time I thought about this much, I decided I would run on a platform of keeping everything the same, except making high-expected-value changes aimed at a long-term payoff. For instance, investing in programs to seed civil society, or mental health education and training in public schools (and/or teaching young people how to deal with life and not just numbers and words), and probably other things I can't remember now.

Here we see a duality of "structure" and "change". The numerous possibly somewhat misguided or even maybe corrupt government tendencies and programs are the "structure" which keeps things the same and helps keep them from falling apart. Then, whatever creative things I want to do to make things better in the long-term, are the "change" that one would hope would make my hypothetical presidency worth it -- going beyond the mean.

I think about churches, and how sometimes they are good at finding people to fill the role of "structure", but in some cases, they don't find people who are oriented toward change. "Change" in a church is not just "congregational vision" where the church tries to do things that look kind of like when businesses or nations try to change, or what activists are going for when they protest, but rather also disciple-making -- encouraging, promoting, modeling-for-imitation, etc. holiness, -- which is change in the individual's life.

People in an individual's life can be structure, change, or perhaps a mixture of the two.

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There is a connection between creativity and "change", and between technical proficiency and "structure". You can be technically proficient and lack inspiration, and also you can work for structure without inspiration. But (generally, or even always) when you work for change and creativity, you need inspiration to be successful, or even to attempt to do anything. So it might be useful for those who pursue change to pursue creativity, so that through creativity, they can get connected to inspiration. Or, to ask God for a spirit, for the same purpose.

Habitus; Misremembering

I watched an Alice Cappelle video (unfortunately, I don't remember which one) in which she related something to the concept of "habitus", from sociology.

I don't always faithfully remember what I pick up from other people, but sometimes prefer to use my own memory or misremembering of a concept in my own writing, as though my writing is my own world suited to my own mind, the way the misremembering is. I suspect I have done this with a similar concept, sarkar, which I got from a B. K. Shivani video (unfortunately, I also don't remember which one).

My memory of "habitus" is that it is the way in which the people around you in a given social setting (peer group, scene, organization, nation) condition you to play your role in it -- and, if you play your role, you are conditioning the other people in that social setting to play their role.

The conditioning could be a mindset, vibe, or sarkar. Or could come from having to be responsible for certain things, or meeting certain expectations. People might not be intentional when they condition you into your/their habitus -- probably often or usually aren't.

Habitus is like a reciprocating engine, which vibrates at a certain frequency and is self-sustaining. Maybe habitus is the sarkar, or part of the sarkar, of groups of people.

The instinct to respond (which sometimes is "responsibility" as we normally term it, or it could be something else, like a self-interested hunger) is, perhaps, what makes habitus run. So bad societies can run on bad responsibility.

Horror Math

Here is a Twitter thread that I wrote that I wanted to put on this blog:

Has anyone made math that doesn't (always) resolve? E.g. X + -X that can't be made 0, but which is always X + -X.

I got this idea from the horror of something that is simultaneously good and bad without resolving to a "shade of grey". (The horror of forcing two opposites into one thing without resolving them.) So it could be "horror math".

I'm not sure it would be that useful, but I note that 2N/(4(X + -X)) resolves to N/(2(X + -X)) in horror math, while in regular math it resolves to "undefined".

Since math is often talking about reality, there may be cases where X + -X talks about reality more accurately than reducing them down to 0. So they should be immune, or partially immune, to mathematical processing.

A Meaning of "Human Freedom"

It's possible to ask what human freedom is.

Here's an answer:

To be free is to be yourself. Who you are is up to you to choose. What you choose is valid.

If you want to maximize your own freedom, then you want to be free for as long as possible. You don't want to die the second death. So, the way to maximize your freedom is to become fully in tune with God so that you don't have to die the second death. Otherwise, to maximize your freedom is to do/be whatever your heart tells you and whatever you set your heart to be.

Ethical Theism

Humanism is the ethical orientation toward human beings, and in parallel there is an ethical orientation toward God which can be called "ethical theism". An ethical theist believes not just that God exists, but that God is a person, someone who has his own personality, thoughts, feelings, history, his own preferred name or names, his own preferences, his own trustings. To an extent, God is the way he is and we have to come to love him as he is. He does not exist solely for our own benefit, but instead exists in his own right. He is someone who can receive love, be lonely, be driven half-insane with the pain of love, of dealing with our rejection of him (and the pain of seeing and feeling what we do to each other).

There is an atheism that denies that God exists, but another that denies that God is a person, the kind of being who can be seen as a personal being, someone who can really suffer, have needs, have personhood. I'm not sure any existing religion really sees God as a person -- maybe so, somewhere. What I tend to hear is people who think of God as a professional, or an awe-inspiring power, or a king, or a father -- but not the king whose head hangs down at the end of the day, or the father whose feelings can be hurt. It seems often that we want God to be a dispenser of goods, and that God is not someone to be loved in a deep way, the way that we love people we know, or even distant or past oppressed people groups. And because we can't love God that way, for ethical purposes he tends to cease to exist for us.

If we, as ethical people, ignore God in his personhood and suffering, we do something that we find deplorable when done to human beings.

Naturally, human suffering and personhood is widely believed in and undeniable. For those who do not claim to know God, they might say "we know that human suffering and personhood are real, but God we are not so sure about". That uncertainty should not lead us to dismiss the topic, but to have concern that we may be leaving a sensitive being out in the cold. And ethical theism worries that we are misunderstanding human well-being, which is a humanistic concern, but also a concern of God and thus part of ethical theism. If human well-being (what it is or how it is pursued) necessarily involves proper relationship with God, then maybe humans can come to harm if we don't take God's existence and personhood into account. Should God lose his children?

Whether a person ends up believing that the person God exists or not, to not undertake the serious pursuit of the question doesn't fit with the moral logic of campaigning for justice for the marginalized, or of the doing of good for all existing sentient beings.

For those who do claim to believe in God, the question arises of what the facts about God really are. Does God hurt? Does he need? Do we have any reason to believe that? Do we have any reason to not believe that? To want to know the answers to these questions goes along with the desire to love God with all of your being.

Normative Externality

Let's say you want to say whether art is good. Well, there are different criteria of what good is in art. If something is very hedonic, it's good. But maybe at the same time it could be very anti-theistic, so it's bad.

There are cases when making art hedonic (or theistic) could make it anti-theistic (or anti-hedonic).

When a factory produces a product, that's (generally) a good thing in itself. But it could produce a dangerous byproduct in the process of doing that, and dump it in the river. We could call that an "externality".

A normative externality is when achieving a good state according to one value leads to a bad state according to another. Often, by "winning" in your own opinion, you might cause "losing" in someone else's opinion.

Spirit of Rejection and Rebellion

Some people understand what's wrong with having a spirit of rebellion against God, but other people may think that idea is just conservative religious language that really says "don't rebel against anything, least of all me (the religious authority)". It is possible for religious language to be a complicated metaphor for human life, and for talk of rebellion, or any other spiritual danger, to simply be a way for religious authorities to exert control over people. However, even if those authorities are using that language that way, and it is taken up by their listeners that way, it is still possible that rebellion against God is spiritually dangerous.

How could that be? One point is that if God is really right, and we rebel against him, we will have to act, trust, and prefer the wrong things. And our rebellion will keep us from him.

If the advice to "avoid rebellion against God" is too authoritarian, consider the word "rejection". When we rebel and we reject we often have the spirit of "f--- you". I wanted to find another way to make the point (and maybe I've softened it by not writing the word out directly), but I think the profanity captures the spirit in words in a way no non-profane words can. We have a spirit that says "f--- you" to authority, "f--- you" to people in authority, and, possibly, "f--- you" to God.

(Authoritarians can also have the spirit of "f--- you" to people who oppose them.)

The spirit of rebellion affects God as king, but the spirit of rejection affects him as father, friend, and personal being.

(Deceptive) Experiential Truth

Sharon Rawlette claims that the feeling of "ought-to-be-ness" just is goodness. She writes from a utilitarian point of view, a simplistic view of life, which is somewhat inhuman.

But we can clothe the feeling of "ought-to-be-ness" in more familiar and less alien clothing. For instance, the feelings of love, joy, and peace have no law against them. They are or have in them the feeling of ought-to-be, so of course there is no law against them.

We can call the feeling of love an experiential truth. Just to experience it is to connect to a truth, an absolute truth which can't be refuted. Perhaps that truth can be expressed in words, perhaps not. But either way, the feeling of love is 100% true.

If the feeling of love (or of joy, or peace, or whatever else) is not connected with reality properly (for instance if the feeling of love does not connect to actions or intentions of love, or the feelings of joy and peace blind us to other people's suffering, which is a truth in itself) then those experiential truths -- 100% true in themselves -- can deceive. Because of how we are, we draw false conclusions from their 100% reliable evidence. They are then like any other deceptive truth.

Who You Are vs. What You Are

Epistemic status: provisional.

What is the difference between "who" you are and "what" you are? Who you are is your true preferences and identity and the expression of these through you. Ultimately you choose to be who you are. Maybe you start life with some innate preferences, and are given some identities by your parents or other older people. But by the end of your life (perhaps this process isn't finished until the end of the Millennium) you have thought through who you are a fair amount, have chosen new preferences and identities or chose the given ones for yourself, and have implicitly affirmed whatever innate preferences or early-given identities you didn't choose. Or you have done your best to reject them as far as you are able, this being your rejection of them.

God is omnipotent, two exceptions being the choices that other personal beings make to assert themselves (he can override their choices in the moment, but not the choices that express who they really are), and that he cannot do what is wrong. "What" a person is largely falls in the domain of God's omnipotence. That they have bodies, physical strengths, emotional tendencies, and so on is under his control. Except the choices that they make as themselves (as expressions of "who" they are) can sometimes override this.

God has partial control or influence over the "what" of being in a given social role. Social relationships could be completely engineered by God, but if they are to express the "who" of the people involved, that "who" limits God's power. God can orchestrate real social relationships (for instance, put people in positions to interact with each other, or override their unwise attempts to flee from each other) but not force them.

The bedrock of reality is, who personal beings are, and what they are emerges in how they relate to each other. God creates what a person is, but people modify the what of each other and are to some extent like creators as well.

Will-Nature Ontology

I ran across a concept in Trust of People, Words, and God by Joseph Godfrey, (a concept which is original to him, it seems), called "will-nature ontology". I haven't read the book in a long time and probably am misremembering what I read about it. But my mismemory might be interesting. So I'll explain what the concept means to me now, and then go back and see what he said it meant.

My explanation: When you encounter an object, at first it's a blank slate and you can't interact with it. Maybe you see an old-fashioned tool and can't imagine what it's for. Or you meet a person but all you know is their name and face at first. Then, as you understand more of the properties of the object, or as you grasp intuitively more about the object (as when mentalizing a person), you develop desires toward interacting with the thing, and the confidence that you can (something like the concept of favor). It is as though the nature of the object you apprehend halfway (or sometimes completely?) causes you to act [to will]. Understanding things, getting to know them, forming an idea of them (whether accurate or trustworthy or not) gives you a kind of psychological power or fuel, opens up motivation, could halfway force you to commit [to them, or some other course of action]. Therefore seeking to understand things could be life-changing, or sometimes dangerous.

(There might be more that I could develop here, but in the interests of time, I'll just say that's what I think and see what Godfrey said.)

Godfrey (informed by Trust of People, Words, and God, Ch. 7, "Ontology: Two Models for Reliance Trust and I-Thou Trust" and "The Will-Nature Model" (pp. 222-225)): The will is the subject, not only as knower, but as will-er, doer, truster, etc. Nature is the way an object is, that which makes it capable of "being modified, used, and known" (p. 224). The will finds the environment (objects in it?) to be allied, opposed, or neutral, to its interests.

This is different from my version of the idea, but my version might mostly be an elaboration or set of instantiations of his.

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I like my misremembering, and wonder if that's a good strategy for coming up with new ideas. Maybe if I'm in a mood for adventure, and making the most of reality, I might try that deliberately.

Kingdom and Civilization

Originally written November 2020.

Epistemic status: provisional, particularly in my definition of "Kingdom".

The Kingdom (for a Christian), is the kingdom of heaven, the domain ruled by God according to his righteousness. The Kingdom exists in heaven, and to an extent on earth. It is as though each Christian is partly in heaven while they live on earth. So they bear the Kingdom with them. The Kingdom is made up of those who do the will of God. It is made up of its subjects.

Civilization is a process -- has no king. It is the sum of all the nations on earth. Civilization drifts, evolves. It grows and may not be able to stop growing. Civilization is the interaction of human desires, is the field for history.

In Weilian terms, civilization tends to be made up of her "gravity", and driven by it, while the Kingdom could be seen as made up of and driven by her "grace".

[October 2021: Kingdom's subjects (persons) vs. civilization's human desires, which happen to be bundled into what we label as "persons".]

[October 2021: Church as both civilization and Kingdom. It aspires to being part of the Kingdom and perhaps "forensically" is, but its mind and flesh can be the same as civilization, when it lets human desires (or their semi-impersonal interactions) rule it, rather than God.]

Attractive vs. Coercive Law

One way to look at a law is to see it as something which obligates and coerces, as though we might die if we don't obey it, or cause some kind of irrevocable harm right now. There is a forceful urgency to coercive law. The law is an impersonal force. We are slaves to the law, and so is everyone else, and this is how we can live together in harmony, if the law is good.

Another way to look at a law is to see it as almost a living being that draws a person toward compliance with it. The law can be turned away from, from time to time, so that a person is drawn toward some other attractive principle. But as the person turns from one thing to another, they will eventually look at the law again, and because the law is attractive, they will be drawn toward it.

An attractive law can be just as necessary as a coercive law. That is, it can feel just as necessary, and that the law be observed may be just as necessary. But the difference is that in an attractive law, or a law that is approached in an attractive way, it feels like you are drawn toward the necessity, instead of, as with coercive law, or law approached in a coercive way, being forced to observe the necessity right now. A coercive law is one as though you're already behind on observing, while an attractive law is one as though it pulls you toward a future of full observance.

A coercive law goes against what you want, and you are forced to observe it, but an attractive law, or the thing which enables you to approach a law in an attractive way, changes you so that the observance of the law is something you genuinely value, love.

The MSLN view of laws is that there really are absolute laws which must be observed "or else", but that there is a long process, or journey, where we are drawn toward observing them. The "or else" is a note of coercion, but we must leave coercion behind if we are truly to avoid the "or else". The "or else" is a gateway into feeling the necessity behind what we observe out of love. But a law that we observe out of coercion is not one that we love, and in order to be in tune with legitimacy, we must value what it values, love its laws as much as it does. So, in MSLN, law is something that we are drawn toward, over time, attractive law.

Value Drift

The effective altruists have a concept called "value drift". The idea is that passionate people over time lose their passion and stop being altruists. It is valuable to add a person to an altruistic movement, but also perhaps equally valuable to keep a person from leaving one.

Drift is something that you don't always understand at the time. Some people might decisively quit altruistic pursuits, but the danger is more that you will go lukewarm and then cold over time, sinking into the default without catching yourself.

Epistemology of Obeying God

One might be afraid of death or emotional pain or of not thinking in a socially-acceptable way, or have other fears related to values like love or altruism, or have some other practical epistemology posted here before, but you might also be afraid of failing to obey God, of not acting when there was some task he wanted (or even needed) you to perform, and that could found your practical epistemology.

Epistemology of Avoiding Scams (vs. Avoiding Bias)

One practical epistemology is avoiding being scammed.

A scammer is an intelligent being who wants to take something away from you. People may worry about their biases fooling them, and guard against bias. But biases and scammers are different, in that biases are relatively simple, can't be expected to be devious.

We could say that epistemology (one angle to it) is knowing how to guard against the things that get us to believe falsehoods. An epistemology of avoiding bias will not pick up on the same threats as an epistemology of avoiding being scammed.

A bias epistemologist might be concerned that scam epistemology could be paranoid, vulnerable to "paranoia bias". The scam epistemologist should be concerned about the threat of scam epistemology itself, because a scammer can use all kinds of different ideas as part of a scam, including scam epistemology -- and bias epistemology.