Long Links #4

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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I started playing a DOS RPG called Aethra by Michael Lawrence. It's been a while since I've played a computer game seriously.

I did most of my computer game (and video game) playing between maybe the age of 11 and 20. I had a somewhat superficial understanding of what was going on in the games and in me when I played. Now, many years and many experiences later, I get a lot more out of this game than I expect I would have then.

For instance, the idea of forming an adventuring party seems to be an image for a process in everyday life. The adventuring party is made up of people with their advantages and drawbacks. Then, over time, it is necessary to mitigate the drawbacks and make use of the advantages. There is a degree of complementarity between the members of the party, but they each have to hold their own in a fight, to some extent, because the other characters can't always help them.

I've played a lot of Angband. In a roguelike, like Angband, there is only one adventurer, one whom I never really saw as a person -- really he or she was just me, I was the one in the dungeon, and when their game was over ("death") it was really just my project that was over ("try to see how far I can get in the game"). There can be a real sense of loss when you lose a character in a roguelike, but it's not the loss of a person, rather the loss of a venture. In this game, I can't identify with just one person, since the party has three members, so they seem more like separate persons to me. It's too soon to say how this will affect how I play the game or what I get out of it.

I feel more like these are real people than novel or movie characters do to me. In a novel or movie, to me, people are just images, living in a completely different universe. But in an RPG, I'm involved in the characters' world, making decisions. This is one of the comparative advantages of games, in that they get a person to live in the imaginary, or imaginal, world.

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I watched Millennium Actress, directed by Satoshi Kon. It's a good movie. At first I found its "beautiful dream"/past-oriented aesthetic too powerful, and found that it took me away from doing things I needed to do in my life in the present (helping a friend). So its beauty was kind of untrustworthy. But for me, the "beautiful dream" feeling faded, and I was left with a kind of simantic word or imaginal symbol that I think could be helpful in everyday life, in working to do good. The movie is basically about a moth who flies to a star.

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I watched We Are Not Ghouls, directed by Chris James Thompson, a documentary about a US military lawyer's representation of a Guantanamo Bay suspect. It has some relevance to "the cross" (suspect undergoes torture, the lawyer goes against the system, endures stress). The lawyer (Yvonne Bradley) was the main person interviewed and I think she had a good presence that's worth watching.

Giving Yourself up to God for Salvation

What if we could give ourselves up to God, and he could make us holy? (This idea inspired by New Wine for the End Times.) Does this make sense in MSL?

We have bodies that tempt us to sin. Also, evil spirits can tempt us to sin. We are powerless over these two things -- or at least, not too powerful. God can clothe us with bodies that don't sin. (The body is mostly the same (i.e. orthogonal to sin or holiness, so left unchanged), but the part of the brain that tempts is bypassed.) This is a useful thing. When God takes over us, we are more effective tools for him. Also evil spirits can be blocked by God.

Why doesn't God do this for all of us all the time? Wouldn't the world be a better place? It would be, in many ways. But we would lose the ability to face temptations ourselves. So we could not develop our love of God to its full (thus, necessary) extent (which comes through rejecting sins). Maybe some of us don't need to be tempted much to develop this love. But some of us do, and so we are not protected by the spirit of God all the time.

Perhaps strong love is something developed by loving against a resistance, like a temptation, and strong love makes the world a better place in a unique way. (Analogy with physical training where muscles become stronger by moving against a resistance.)

It's sometimes better to live a harder life, and sometimes better to live an easy one. The harder life teaches you to love, and the easy life gives you rest and lets you be effective. Too much rest leads to "ease" instead of engagement with reality and too much effectiveness-orientation leads to "pragmatism", where our hearts lose sight or turn away from desiring what's actually good, and from us really loving God. Difficulty tells you it's too much, but ease does not.

It's necessary on some level to give ourselves up to God, in order to be holy. Even if we can engineer human bodies that aren't prone to sinful desires (not necessarily a good idea given the above), the bodies we get in the Resurrection and in heaven will not be ones we engineer, so we will need to be the kind of people who accept new bodies from God. And an attitude of generosity toward God, and of receiving his gifts, is necessary for salvation. But holiness requires that we live our own lives sometimes, on many levels struggling with our own resources.

The Unpardonable Sin; Satanic Miracles; Love and Trust de Re

I re-read New Wine for the End Times recently, which serves as a reminder of what kinds of New Wine teachings are in the Bible. The New Wine component of MSL can be illuminated by New Wine for the End Times.

One teaching is that of the "unpardonable sin", which is "blasphemy of the Holy Spirit". What does this mean, and should we expect that teaching to be true if all we believe is MSL and not the Bible?

Apparently, according to Philip Brown (author of New Wine for the End Times), it's when you see the miracles that attest to Jesus being the Messiah but you deny to yourself what you see. You say it's from Satan rather than from God. (This from Ch. 7 of the book. Ch. 8, which I read after drafting this, is also on the subject, but didn't change my views as expressed in here. (10th ed. of the book.)).

What Brown says seems like a reasonable inference from the Bible. But does the Bible make sense in this area?

Here's one Biblical passage, for reference (Matthew 12:18-32):

12:18 "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen; my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased: I will put my Spirit on him. He will proclaim justice to the nations. 12:19 He will not strive, nor shout; neither will anyone hear his voice in the streets. 12:20 He won't break a bruised reed. He won't quench a smoking flax, until he leads justice to victory. 12:21 In his name, the nations will hope." 12:22 Then one possessed by a demon, blind and mute, was brought to him and he healed him, so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw. 12:23 All the multitudes were amazed, and said, "Can this be the son of David?" 12:24 But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, "This man does not cast out demons, except by Beelzebul, the prince of the demons."

12:25 Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. 12:26 If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? 12:27 If I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. 12:28 But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you. 12:29 Or how can one enter into the house of the strong man, and plunder his goods, unless he first bind the strong man? Then he will plunder his house.

12:30 "He who is not with me is against me, and he who doesn't gather with me, scatters. 12:31 Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. 12:32 Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, neither in this age, nor in that which is to come.

If I saw a miracle, why would I be sure it was from God, or the particular God that is Jesus? Jesus seems confident that Satan couldn't, or wouldn't, drive out demons. But that seems like something I would expect Satan to be able to do (he's the leader of demons) and would want to do (it could be useful in deceiving people). I would say, from an MSL perspective, that we should be cautious in assuming miracles are always done by good beings.

However, being confident that a miracle is from Satan also seems like a bad idea. Satan can use the belief in Satan to deceive people. I think the Jewish religious leaders described in the Gospels were not being rational if they were sure that Jesus' miracles were from Satan. So if they were confident he wasn't doing God's work, they were choosing to see reality a certain way, rather than what was there. That choice could have been made because they wanted to reject Jesus, a priori, and did not want to see the moral fact that he was a good person, doing God's work. (Seeing a moral fact can call for a change in heart.) An enmity against God, whoever he really is, taken far enough, leads a person to reject God permanently. This is a concern in MSL. (Being the enemy of anyone or anything is dangerous if God reminds you too much of them, or turns out to remind you too much of them, or in some other way by being an enemy of them, you become an enemy of God.)

Probably we should lean toward thinking God was behind a miracle if it did something that as far as we can tell favors God's interests. Maybe it makes sense to assume that such a miracle is from God unless we have a good reason to think otherwise. Did the Jewish religious leaders have a good reason to think otherwise? If not, then they should have ascribed Jesus' miracles to God, and trusted Jesus. However, it is reasonable to be cautious in trusting a miracle-worker and only tentatively ascribe miracles to God, watchful for signs that the miracle-worker actually isn't working for God.

If we take Jesus to be authoritative in everything he said (and believe that the Bible is so accurate in reporting what he said that its words are authoritative as a result), and assume that he literally meant what he said here about "a house divided against itself will not stand", then perhaps we conclude that Jesus knew something about the strange nature of demons, how they don't do strategic things like letting evil people cast them out for deceptive purposes. We might imagine demonic miracles happening (as in Midnight Mass, which I know through this video), but actually, they don't happen. All miracles advance the kingdom of God. Maybe they just happen in bad contexts, are deceptive experiential truths. All miracle-workers are from God -- somehow or other, even if they further horror and evil. Or maybe Midnight Mass is fictional to the point that there just aren't miracle-workers in real life who bear such bad fruit as the priest character's miracle-working. Bad miracle-workers in real life are all frauds who fake their miracles. No actual miracles are done by bad miracle-workers.

I don't know enough to say on this issue. Perhaps as a Christian I should bias myself against calling miracle-workers bad. Certainly if I have no reason to think that they are really working for Satan. But I think without assuming that Jesus is authoritative and literally meant what he said (maybe instead he meant "generally Satan doesn't drive out Satan and if you think he's doing that here, you have been ignoring my character and the quality/spirit of my teachings which indicate that this isn't what's going on here"), the "MSLian" should assume that Satan can drive out Satan, and possibly perform other miracles, although they (Satan) would prefer not to, generally, since they don't like benefiting humans. (I use "they" as both singular and plural since "Satan" could be a collective of demons that is coherently led by one of them.)

Aren't we surrounded by miracles? Some laugh at the simplicity of people who see the world that way, but perhaps the simple see reality closer to what it really is, unjaded. What about the miracle of an argument that comes to a valid conclusion and is true in all relevant contexts? Perhaps the one that proves the existence of God would be a miracle, a noetic rather than sensory miracle. People "see but do not see" both what is in the sensory world and in the noetic world.

Brown thinks that when we see God work in undeniable ways, we are forced to either follow God or reject God. (More specifically in Brown's words, follow Christ or reject Christ.) My thoughts: To know God (to really know God) is to love God, or at least to be strongly called to love God. To see God is to be called to love God. When Satan's deceptions are taken away (all the noetic padding we have to protect us from seeing God), we are stuck with God and our hearts, and if our hearts aren't well-trained, we have a higher likelihood of choosing to reject God rather than love God in that decisive moment.

So we have to be protected from God -- this makes some sense from an MSL perspective. Does this mean that I shouldn't try to prove the existence of God? MSL does not spell out everything about God. It is intentionally incomplete, pointing toward what goes beyond public reason (we can only come to fully know God through our own individual experience, following intellectual conscience rather than what can be argued and established publicly). It sort of does, but doesn't fully, preach Jesus. When it talks about God, does it talk about Jesus? I think in a sense (if Jesus is God) then it must (de re), but at the same time, in another sense, even if he is, it doesn't (de dicto), or doesn't narrow down its "Son" person to being the Jesus of the Bible. So the reader of MSL can turn away from believing in Jesus, as such. Also people who only believe in the Metaphysical Organism, or Speaker, may stop before trying to apply the arguments of legitimism. There is room for people to be irrational (assuming that belief in God is the correct conclusion to rational thinking). Irrationality is not ideal, but it's better than hardening. There is the irrationality that leads to hardening or just is hardening, and there is the irrationality that protects against hardening.

So I would say that in trying to convey the truth, we should be respectful, notably, not forceful (nor, by the way, be any other disrespects, like malicious, lazy, or merciless). A forceful conveyer of beliefs can push another person to build a wall of Satanic deception to protect that other person from God. I'm not sure it's likely or possible to force someone to meet God through words (maybe only miracles like Jesus' can force people to meet God?) but the defense mechanism of believing Satanic deceptions protects people from committing the unpardonable sin, and that defense mechanism, or the beliefs formed as a result of that mechanism, can themselves become part of the spiritual calculus that hardens inside them, creating an obstacle to them coming to love God fully.

From Jesus' example, it does seem like it's better to not be sure, rather than deciding to go all in on a theory that rejects the possibility that someone is from God or is good. There are different kinds of unsureness. "Skepticism" may be loaded against believing that someone is from God. Perhaps a "skeptic" has really already decided that someone is not from God, although on the surface they are openminded. There is an unsureness that effectively ignores that the possibilities might each be real, versus one that effectively assumes that each of them might be real. The latter is safer than the former, since it does not close itself to the possibility that the person in question is from God. (One skepticism/doubting/unsureness closes the discussion, but the other seeks to keep investigating.)

So openmindedness is a virtue that can save you from destruction in hell. Wicked people (those who have sold themselves out to opposing God) can be virulently, irrationally committed to their point of view. Some of them manipulate, intimidate, and deceive openminded people, seemingly because they are deeply sure that they are doing the right thing by doing so. Those that they pressure with non-truth-aligned psychological tactics are thus tempted to closedmindedness. We need to have a definition to what we believe in order to resist lies, but that in itself can set us up to not believing the truth. This is a two-step scam of Satan -- we don't believe the lies that are blatant, and hateful to us (step one of the attack), but we do believe the lie that is closer to the truth, which resists the blatant lie more strongly in the psychological/social battlegrounds than if we are really being rational / openminded (step two of the attack).

If this makes sense so far, it doesn't address the idea of "unpardonable". Why can't God forgive this sin of completely selling ourselves out to being his enemy? Maybe "unpardonable" is a shorthand to communicate with us, but the "longhand" is "if you do this sin, you will have destroyed your own ability to repent, so while God could technically forgive you, he will still have to destroy you"? This would make sense in MSL. The unpardonable sin (hardening) is a choice you make at a discrete moment in time. Maybe it is the last in a series of choices to not see what you see and you don't fully realize what you're doing to yourself, as you go down a progression. (I think the previous sentence goes against things I've said before, so I should try resolve this as I go through my old blog posts.) You do this thing, and there is no pardon for it -- you will not seek pardon for it.

(If you love the truth, you will desire in your heart to see what you see. If there is at least a little bit of this desire, God can work with it to restore you to whatever level of love of truth that you need to be saved. If you are concerned about being out of tune with reality, if at least you consciously think you are, or try to think you are, then you have at least a little bit of the love of truth in you. Perhaps if you don't care, then you don't have it in you.)

What about people who are like Judas? Judas felt remorse for what he did to Jesus. But (Brown argues), Judas committed the unpardonable sin, by so knowingly becoming Jesus' enemy. I'm not sure what I think on this subject. I don't think from an MSL point of view that Judas could have committed the unpardonable sin unless he wasn't really repentant, though very remorseful.

(Judas felt remorse, then killed himself. Did he really repent? Maybe so, maybe no. Remorsefulness and regret are one thing, and repentance is another. Judas did not seem to have hope in himself becoming acceptable, and that lack of hope can prevent repentance.)

I've been undecided in MSL on the role of justice. Is it a primitive of reality? Or is it something socially-constructed? If the former, then maybe we have to pay for our sins, unless there is some way they can be forgiven. For us to be saved, all of our sins must be forgivable -- but perhaps there is an exception for the unpardonable sin of selling yourself out completely to being God's enemy? The Biblical explanation for why it's unpardonable is that it involves crucifying Jesus again. One sacrifice covers all sins, and that's the last sacrifice, so there's no more sacrifice if you break your covenant with God, where he says your sins are forgiven if you trust his Son.

I'm not sure what I would assume in MSL, given justice as a primitive. I have written before about how the "Son" of Legitimacy might have to die for everyone's sins (very much like some theories of the Christian Atonement). I've written before that it would make sense to only have the "Son" die once (see Legitimism Without Atonement). One innocent death balances out all sins, but a second innocent death makes the world unjust again. If the "Son" only dies once, does his death cover the sin of rejecting God intentionally? I think so. If somehow that sin weren't covered by the first death, another death could be arranged. But, a person who completely and irrevocably rejects God is not going to be saved even if they are forgiven. They will have to be destroyed in hell. They might be punished for their sins (the hellish part of being destroyed) as a deterrent to people rejecting God, although those sins would be forgiven (the deeds themselves would not be traumatic/irritating/offending/angering to God because of the restoration of justice by the "Son"'s death, but the action of punishing would still be performed for the greater good) (See Is Eternal Conscious Torment Compatible with MSLN?).

Practically speaking, what's the important thing here, that God does or doesn't forgive, or that we do or do not reject him? Sometimes God is much more powerful than we are. He decides what the world looks like, whom we meet, what ideas we encounter, what our brains are like, etc. (There are other actors influencing that as well, but God is the greatest determiner of things.) However, we are the rulers of our own hearts. We can choose to reject God or follow God, and in this we are the ones who have power over God, forcing him to live with the consequences of our decisions.

Whether rejecting God completely and irrevocably (closing our minds to what we really see so that we can no longer be anti-tempted, knowingly calling good things evil so that we don't have to trust God, or whatever else might effectively accomplish that rejection) is pardonable or not by God, is almost a red herring. What is clear, and of greatest practical consequence, is that our effective rejection of God condemns us to destruction.

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On re-reading, I see that there is a thread in the above that I didn't follow. I said "If I saw a miracle, why would I be sure it was from God, or the particular God that is Jesus?" In Jesus' day, it appears that the spiritual world was seen to be a binary or spectrum with Satan on one side and God on the other. This is more or less the worldview of MSL. MSL gives us (I hope) a fairly high prior belief that God exists and would work in the world, when we encounter apparent spiritual power. But what if you don't believe in the Biblical or MSL worldviews? When you encounter a miracle or a sign from God, you might justifiably not be sure which God, or spiritual being, it's from. Maybe it was Odin, the spirit of Saturn, one of the Dreaming Beings, the God of Islam -- these being spiritual beings that people trust, or have trusted, not to mention all the possible blatantly evil beings. There is an uncountable number of potential ideas about what spiritual power is, if you have no prior belief to ground you.

So in the past, I think I've written something like if your evidence for any one idea of the spiritual world is so low that you could just make up another one with equal rational support, you are not bound to do what that first idea requires of you, since there could easily be an "equal and opposite" idea of what you should do in response to the spiritual world that requires you to do the opposite of what the first one does. Is this how you should approach an apparent miracle, as potentially being explained by anything, and so no practical or fiducial response is required?

Infinities (and thus potential infinities) can be bounded. Of the natural numbers (the whole numbers counting up from 1 (1, 2, 3, ...)), there are an infinite number of odd numbers, and an infinite number of even numbers, but all natural numbers fit in one of those two categories. So the infinities are bounded. Of all the potential gods and spirits we might hypothesize, there are those who are for humans, against humans, or neutral (or we might say that there is a divide that divides the neutral into basically being for humans or being against humans).

And there are only three (or two) kinds of humans, no matter how many humans are born. So we are on the same side as the spiritual beings who are for humans, or against humans, if we are for humans, or against humans. So whatever you think about God's existence, when you see spirits who are working for humans, are you on their side? Do you allow the possibility that a miracle is being done by that spiritual nation or army? Or do you decide that you know that it is not being done by them?

(This is too simple, though. A spirit could be on the side of a certain group of people and not on the side of another. Some humans would prefer a god who favors their group and not another group. But, if we don't know anything else, to see a spirit help one person, I think we should assume that they probably are in favor of all persons, since one person is substantially like all others. Perhaps if you saw someone eating a particular salad, you might think they liked salad in general, with or without some exceptions. This idea could be overturned soon enough, but I think it's a good starting assumption. With spirits doing pro-human miracles, we should be cautiously trusting.)

We have a bias in Western culture against belief in and trust in the supernatural. We are avid consumers of ideas that come through culture, scams though they often are, and even settle on ones that we accept, believe in, and fight for. Why not do the same with supernatural voices? In fact, isn't it the case that many ideas in culture come from "flashes of inspiration"? Isn't it the case that artists feel like something other than them is working through them when they create? A natural reading of this phenomenon is that these accepted modes of being influenced are the tools of spirit beings. So, if we have our favorite bands, philosophers, and intellectual institutions and cultures, why not have our favorite spirits that we listen to? That they are our favorites does not mean they are 100% trustworthy, but we know with ideas, art, and cultures that it is better to trust something than to not trust at all. We trust and even obey our favorite ideas, art, and culture.

If you see a person who is listening to a spirit, does that spirit seem to be for or against humans? You might want to "judge a tree by its fruit". Now, as the Bible points out, people like Abraham and Sarah, and everyone else from Hebrews 11, had hard lives. Could it be the case that the spirit that told Abraham to leave his homeland was a scammer that just wanted him to suffer and make a fool of himself, all in the name of "blessing all the families of the world"? From a Biblical, or MSL, perspective, Abraham was a hero for being that kind of fool. He loved and wanted to participate in what was worth pursuing. But maybe it would have been better for him to not have listened.

Abraham and Sarah were strangers among people who did not share their vision. They probably lived with the indifference of the people around them, grating against them, quenching and starving them. Although I don't think Genesis records this, it's also possible (and likely for people in their situation) that their neighbors were hostile to them. (The experience of the prophets and the early church shows how the descendants of Abraham can experience hostility.) So, if a spirit tells you to do something that is pro-human, isn't that a pro-human spirit? It might not be, it might be some kind of scam to torture good-hearted fools. But who's doing the torture? Isn't it the people (and spirits) who are hostile or indifferent to the pro-human project? Maybe they're the problem, not the spirit that calls a person to the hard life of making things better. It would make a lot of sense for pro-human spirits to call people to fight on their side, but be unable to protect them from all the harm from the fight (if the spirits are not literally omnipotent).

Abraham was able to successfully carry out his small part in obeying the Abrahamic promise. Nothing was keeping him from doing that. Maybe if we live in a dystopia (like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where individual agency seems to be inevitably crushed by the evil status quo), then someone who hears a spirit calling them to bless the whole world should not listen -- the wisest course of action is to do the little thing that actually can work. I think a lot of people live for some reason as though in an Orwellian nightmare, in this area of their lives, and would not listen to the apparent voice of God. But I think the world we actually live in is not that strictly bounded, and we are still able to plausibly carry out the simple task of abiding by a culture and passing it on to some biological or non-biological descendants (Abraham's task). So for us, as for Abraham, it is rational to pursue the Abrahamic vision, if a voice calls to us furthering it. This doesn't mean our lives will be easy if we listen and follow it, or that we will succeed, but just that it isn't crazy to try.

Why would anti-human spirits call pro-human humans to be more pro-human? It seems like a dangerous gambit. What if the pro-human humans start a religion that is pro-human? It's possible anti-human spirits can scam people with pro-human leadings, but I think our default assumption is that pro-human leadings come from pro-human spirits.

How do we know what is pro-human, or anti-human? There are some things that are clear: dealing with the problems we all recognize, like material poverty. There may be other things that are not so obvious to all of us. Religions (and other antagonists in cultural / axiological disputes) claim to tell us which of the controversial values are actually pro-human, and some of them may be right, and it is worth investigating and potentially trusting what they say. Religions are bundles of values, goals, etc. and some bundle untruths with truths (controversies imply that someone is saying something wrong). But the truth in them probably comes from pro-human spirits, and some of the truth of them is not up for dispute, at least by us (that which aligns with consensus reality). There are certain things that humans can generally know are pro-human (as humans, we have a privileged access to knowing what is pro-human).

If you are really vehement in your rejection of the possibility that pro-human spirits are behind something (especially something that is prima facie good), then you may be closing yourself to the voice of God.

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Am I in any danger of committing the unpardonable sin? I don't know. This passage in Hebrews relates:

6:4 For concerning those who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, 6:5 and tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the age to come, 6:6 and then fell away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance; seeing they crucify the Son of God for themselves again, and put him to open shame.

Maybe I am not, because I haven't tasted "the powers of the age to come" -- or have I? Maybe I have without realizing that was it.

If I reject Christianity, but then repent, does that mean it wasn't the kind of "falling away" that is talked about in this passage? Or is it the case that if I think I repent, I'm not really repenting (in this case "repent" doesn't refer to "a change of my heart" but to something else)?

If I "fall away", does that mean that in doing so I crucify Christ again for myself, or does it mean that in order to do so, I must crucify Christ again for myself? I think that Jesus' blood covers all sins, no matter what. The thing that makes the unpardonable sin unpardonable is that for me to commit it, I have to get in the state of never being willing to ask pardon, of rejecting the forgiveness that comes from Jesus' blood. Jesus doesn't have to be crucified again, in the sense of "dying to cover sins", but he can be crucified again, for someone, when they "despise him to the point of wanting him to die". (Then, despising him so much, they see no value in what he did, and reject his forgiveness.) Am I 100% sure that I interpret things correctly when I believe all this, though?

Should I commit to Christianity out of fear, even though my noetic eyes tell me it might not be true? In that case, I would not be "seeing what I see". Not "seeing what you see" is a risk factor for hardening.

My practical concern is that I find MSL more convincing than the Bible, and yet I have believed in the Bible and had experiences that honestly seem to me to be connected to Jesus specifically, although I am currently not certain if that Jesus was literally the one mentioned in the Bible, or was rather something spoken to me by God because I grew up Christian. I have believed more firmly that they were connected to a being who literally satisfies the Gospels' description of Jesus, but now I am not sure. If I became an MSLian, I might accept the Bible as a guide to preferring, acting, and trusting (including the form of trust that is intellectual belief), out of a sense of generosity toward God, seeking ways to obey him. (The Bible is a likely source of information from God given MSL, because of its resemblance to MSL.) But then, would I have committed the unpardonable sin, by converting away from Christianity to MSL? There is some chance that the Bible is true, in a way that I must accept it in a sort of "conservative" way where I root my belief in its words, rather than rooting them in something outside the Bible. So there would be some chance I had committed the unpardonable sin.

Christians often choose to believe in the Bible more than they can rationally support. (Maybe that's the overwhelming status quo.) When they do so, they choose to obey what the Bible says God wants them to prefer, act, and trust. I don't see how I would be different than them in that. But they would call themselves Christians, and I might not. I think in a sense I would be a Christian, and in a sense I wouldn't be, and that might be enough to have committed the unpardonable sin.

(Taking the name of Jesus is necessary in order to not "fall away"?)

An MSLian believes in the "Son", the person of Legitimacy who bears the burden of finite life, and MSL leads us to think that the Son has particular attributes beyond what MSL specifies (since a person requires more than a few sentences to adequately be described). Could this Son be the Jesus of the Bible? Certainly. So an MSLian who loves and trusts the Son may be loving and trusting Jesus -- only if Jesus actually exists, though. They love and trust Jesus de re, and even de dicto. They can say (de dicto) they love and trust the Son, whoever and whatever he really is, which refers to Jesus -- if Jesus really exists. (By existing, he would fit the description of the Son.)

In that case, the Christian may choose to know less about Jesus (or acknowledge their lack of knowledge) as they identify more as an MSLian, while still being as committed as ever to the person of Jesus.

Would a Muslim object to trying to love and trust the Jesus that actually exists? (I'm not sure, but I'm guessing at least one might not -- the Muslim thinks Jesus is merely a prophet, the Christian that he is God, but the Jesus that actually exists, the way he turns out to be, who can reject?) In that case, if Jesus is God (and has the other important attributes from the Gospels) such a Muslim would have begun to be a Christian, without leaving Islam.

An atheist seeking (and trusting) the truth (the pattern of belief that is trustworthy, including what it points to) could seek and trust whatever the truth will turn out to be, and thus would begin to be a Christian, while still being an atheist.

This is a beautiful thought, and might resolve the issue -- as long as we seek the truth, and seek God as he will turn out to be, we will be okay.

There might be a simpler resolution to my dilemma, which is to say that if something other than me causes me to no longer believe as firmly in the Bible as I once did or sometimes do, then it is not I who fall away. When I see what hadn't been shown to me before (the defeater that lowers my credence in the Bible), or I see what I already should have acknowledged (a gap in my knowledge), then I see what I see, and it is something other than me that determines my reduced level of credence.

--

In MSL, Legitimacy must value what is valuable, and try to keep it existing forever. We are valuable. It is only by our power (by our free will) that we fail to exist forever. Legitimacy (God) must forgive us if there is a way. But we can "sin an unpardonable sin" by cutting off our own ability to repent and be open to God's forgiveness.

I believe I should believe in the Bible (to the extent that I should) through MSL. I also believe that I should believe in at least part of it (I don't know 100% which parts) through the connection that Jesus (the literal God or the imaginal/noetic being) has with spiritual warfare (those on Jesus' side can be trusted, and those against Jesus cannot be). If MSL says something clearly, it is true, and I adjust my interpretation of the Bible to be in harmony with it, especially where the Bible is perhaps lacking in fleshed-out detail, as I think is the case with the unpardonable sin. I think the interpretation that the unpardonable sin inherently involves the sinner cutting off their willingness to repent, and involves their permanent effective rejection of God's forgiveness through Jesus' sacrifice, is not incompatible with the Bible. That would be MSL's way of reading things, and MSL I find intellectually trustworthy. So then the question is, is MSL true?

--

On this important topic, I think it's worth it to "keep score". Why is it that someone contemplating leaving Christianity (not relying on the Bible primarily, not identifying as a Christian) for MSL would not be at risk of committing the unpardonable sin? Can I give a more organized list of reasons?

1. MSL says that God, by his nature as Legitimacy, has to validate that which is valid, and thus preserve everything that is good forever. The only thing that can get in the way of that is a person's free will. We generally do not make final decisions to reject God. Each of us can make that final decision to reject God at some point. But we would know we had done so, and be unable to (that is, unwilling to) undo that decision, forever. So if we are concerned about maybe having committed the unpardonable sin, we can try repenting. If we are still able to intend to change (and a "mere" conscious belief that we intend counts as something) then we have not committed the unpardonable sin. If Jesus is God (and MSL is valid), then all of the above applies.

2. If anyone loves and trusts the truth or God or God's Son (i.e., MSL's Son) as it/he/he really is, then they have not fallen away from whatever reality is behind our beliefs in the truth/God/God's Son. If Jesus exists, he is the truth/God/God's Son, and our beliefs in the truth/God/God's Son ultimately connect to him. If he does not exist, there is no problem.

(What about the name of Jesus? Christianity claims that Jesus is God and the truth. So if we are theists (those who seek to love and trust the God who actually is, actually turns out to be) or aletheists (those who seek to trust trustworthy beliefs (and ultimately, that which those beliefs point to)) then we take the name of Jesus ("God" and "the truth"), if he exists.)

3. Jesus' blood covers all sins. The unpardonable sin is already pardoned. We can reject that forgiveness, but that rejection is only final if we stop wanting to repent, permanently. So if we leave Christianity, for the sake of truth, we can be brought back to Christianity by better understanding. If we leave it out of enmity with God, if that enmity is not complete and final, then we can be brought back.

--

I think those three reasons make sense. Do I 100% know that they are valid? I guess I could have at least a little bit of doubt. (Similar to how I have my reasons to not believe in eternal conscious torment based on MSL, but I can't say for 100% certain that MSL is correct and thus excludes all possible reasons to believe in eternal conscious torment that are out there.)

I have to face the possibility that I could be condemned due to my rejection of Jesus (by diminishing my allegiance to Christianity, or something like that). What do I do with that thought? Suppose I am condemned due to my rejection of Christianity. God's goodness is not diminished. (I imagine some Calvinists may have gone down similar mental paths.) I don't see why I should not work for what is good, for God, even if I don't get to experience the benefits of goodness myself (or only a lifetime's worth, instead of an eternity's worth). Why should I not love and trust God? I can generously love God, even if I have lost my salvation.

It is ethically called-for to preserve your eternal life -- it's what God would want. But if it's too late to do that, there is still a lot of work to do to help others.

--

26 September 2023:

I found a fragment of a blog post that is relevant to this topic:

I think one of the strongest Biblical objections to my writing is the end of Revelation (ch. 21 - 22), where very explicitly it says (21:4) "Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more. The first things have passed away."

22:19 is a very strong statement: "If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, may God take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book." Is it the case that if I say that I have reason to think that God would mourn the lost, and that we would mourn in order to be in tune with God, that I have "taken away from the words of the book of this prophecy"? It's possible that Revelation is a vision, and thus we should not take it literally. It doesn't take away from the words of a book of poetry to read its symbolism as symbolism. Revelation is an image of a particular kind of life story: going through the cross and then living in peace and rest (like Frodo across the sea?), no longer struggling, having "overcome" like in 1 John. There can be a moment in life like the end of Revelation. And then we decide whether to return to earth to continue God's work, or remain in heavenly retirement.

One reason to think that, if Revelation is inerrant, it must have been symbolic, would be to look at 22:10-11:

22:10 He said to me, "Don't seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand. 22:11 He who acts unjustly, let him act unjustly still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him do righteousness still. He who is holy, let him be holy still."

If the time was literally at hand (i.e., the end of the world was coming in a matter of weeks or months), then this advice might make some sense. But if we take this advice literally, over centuries (the distance from the writing of Revelation to now) then we would cause, occasion, allow, etc. massive amounts of spiritual harm. Or if this is not advice, but rather a kind of blessing/curse (a powerful word that makes things so), then the fact that the unjust, over the centuries, sometimes have stopped acting unjustly, and those who were filthy, sometimes no longer are, counts against it being something God literally enacted.

I think that Revelation is either not inerrant (may contain errors), or not to be taken literally in every respect. I do think that it may be an important source of truths from God. In cases where common sense sufficiently strongly rules out it being literally (or inerrantly) true, we should go with common sense. But, as with the idea that the Millennium lasts 1,000 years, if there is no obvious problem, it's wise to consider the possibility that the text is literally true.

If Revelation has errors, should we take them as truth because Revelation threatens us with not having eternal life for "taking away from the words of the prophecy"? They aren't true, no matter how much we heed the threat. Are the errors in a prophecy really prophecy? They might be false prophecy. The prophecy worth heeding and protecting is whatever is true. So then, there is no danger in "taking away from" (failing to heed?) the errors in Revelation, if they exist, and we only need observe the true parts. Would God want us to heed the words of false prophecy?

Should texts have the ability to intimidate us into believing them? Any text that is more than a certain percent trustworthy will seem compelling to us. Then, if it says "If you take away a single word from this, you lose out on eternal life", do we have to accept that and everything else in the text? Even if the text was produced by the Library of Babel and contains some questionable content (literally "questionable", things we would ordinary reject but which we can plausibly accept given the right amount of glory given them).

The possibility of mischief through this kind of channel (some spiritual beings moving someone to write a text which then gains a kind of perennial power over people, enshrining error) seems real to me.

(It could be the case that "taking away from the words of the prophecy" is really about "not corrupting the manuscripts that transmit Revelation".)

--

Keeping score: It sounds like there's a curse on people who change the words of Revelation. If this means that you can't deny the truth of anything in Revelation, then maybe I'm in trouble. But Revelation is a vision which you're supposed to take at least somewhat non-literally. Revelation is written as though the world is supposed to end very soon, but it didn't. That's a pretty major error, if it's supposed to be overall literal. Clearly there are elements of it that are not literally true. If there is error somewhere in Revelation, are we really cursed for not believing it? Revelation can have error from a literal perspective, and if it does, it doesn't make sense for us to believe that error. Or, if Revelation has no errors, but its seeming error comes from a misinterpretation, then if it's questionable how to interpret something, whether literally or not, and how to interpret it non-literally, are we also cursed, for getting things wrong? That doesn't make sense. God doesn't want people to lose their salvation.

Overall, given what else I've written in this post on the unpardonable sin, Revelation's curse on those who alter it only makes sense if it's a case of someone irrevocably rejecting God.

Book Review: Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney

See also the preview for this review.

Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney, is a book I would recommend to some people. I think for what it is it is a good book, but where it fails to be, or where some other book fails to make up for it, there is a serious problem. I could recommend it to anyone who works with children (like parents or teachers). It may have some practical value to them. Also, the spirit of it is good and sometimes a teacher communicates more of what is value through their spirit even than the good advice they give. (Another book that is like that is The Reentry Team by Neal Pirolo.)

--

Teaching Children to Care notes

I read this book through without taking notes. That may not have been the best idea, since now I am tempted to simply say my impressions without giving references, and I don't feel like reading through the book carefully, and feel like simply quitting [rather than re-reading].

I am feeling tired of writing at this point, like I'm losing interest in the subject matter. What will happen next? Will I "love Big Brother"? There was someone in my life who steadily and systematically undermined my devotion to my beliefs and my writing. They used skillful means in an all-out attempt to gain my trust and reshape me according to their will. Their expectation was that I would quit one day (then, perhaps, I would have to validate their point of view). They had a choice, to join me in my path of life, or to try to shut me down. Because they tried to shut me down, they broke me. I can imagine them reading this, and them feeling all kinds of emotions, but their iron certainty that I will give up my writing someday does not go away. It is their expectation, and, I am fairly certain, their deep personal preference.

If my writing is correct, then they are an instrument of Satan. This may sound crazy or harsh, but it's the logical truth.

[I wrote that some days ago in a state of turmoil, but I affirm it now in a state of peace.]

So what can I do? If I can't write, how can I be true to my beliefs? No one seems to want to share them with me. By writing, I enter a world where at least I believe what I believe. The text I write and I enter a relationship and share the beliefs that we create, and the beliefs that previous texts created with me as I wrote them.

But now, if I quit writing, how can I stay true to my beliefs? I will lose that last community. But then will I have to share some kind of community? All the communities that exist are not New Wine communities. If I really share "community" (being "one-with-together" with others?), how can I possibly hold divergent beliefs from those I am "in community with"? So I will (at least seemingly) inevitably come to agree with and approve of everyone else around me. I will have no choice but to see things as my community sees things, to participate. My choices of communities are all based in lies, and they all spit in the face of God, whether through hostility to God or through fake love of God. But I must be brought to be a social person, responsive to my community, brought into tune with it.

[Similarly, although I wrote this in a state of turmoil, I think it is still factually correct when I am at peace. I still see the danger, and the lies, rejection of God, hostility, and fakeness.]

I have written that people should come into tune with God, but who and what is God? Is "God" the loving creator of the universe, who holds us to the highest standards, a person who loves and dies for us? Or is "God" community, the set of all people around us? Between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (or the Speaker and Legitimacy), and community, which is more omnipotent? Who do I fear more? God seems to be shackled by community, or by the way that community's members collectively construct how they will trust -- what the definition of "crazy" is, what images of God are socially acceptable to believe in, how hard to try to know the truth.

Defining morality as prosociality simply sets up the community as God. But if there is a real God, a person who loves us more than community can, who is the truth, then prosociality is a dangerous thing, a seductive lie.

So these are the stakes with which a person should approach a book like Teaching Children to Care, which is a book about getting children to behave, to like each other, and so on, apart from any mention of God. If Ruth Sidney Charney, the author, believes in God, she can't show it in a public school classroom. Instead, she has to deal with the behavioral issues right in front of her, or the classroom will not be a place of learning and work. So she instills in her students a responsiveness to each other and to her, and teaches them the Golden Rule -- do to other people what you would have them do to you. No mention has been made, or can be made, of Jesus, who spoke that rule. She mentions how morality is bigger than us, not something we create -- is she talking about God when she says "morality"? Or is morality really just "I want to please my teacher because I'm a child and it's a human instinct, and whatever she says, I want to do"? The teacher creates morality but doesn't teach children to love God. She doesn't explain where morality comes from, because, perhaps, if she tried, it would undermine morality. She speaks with implications rather than straight out, asks leading questions rather than baldly stating, so that children internalize what she says, and so that they can't fight back. They don't have the mental development to construct alternate systems of their own, but perhaps they could see through hers intuitively, or have the kind of powerful skepticism of those who don't understand a set of explanations, if she offered explicit explanations. But she doesn't. Implications are more psychologically effective, and she's convinced that the ends justify the means.

So children are indoctrinated to be deeply moral (or that is the attempt), and yet to find God peripheral or nonexistent. Morality, which I think is difficult to ground in anything other than God, is simply not grounded and becomes a free-floating force in people's mind. Not to be thought about explicitly -- if we did so we would either become nihilists or truly committed to morality (and thus out of tune with society). But instead this unspeakable force. I wonder if secular people who are moral realists are convinced that morality must be "out there" simply by the psychological force of having been taught to be moral when they were young, apart from rationality. And perhaps morality is, practically speaking, not seen as something that needs rational grounding, because it has been ingrained in us so much. This kind of moral education may explain both moral realism and moral anti-realism among secular people.

This may make it sound like I didn't like Charney, but I think she makes, or made, the kind of teacher I would have liked. She is a passionate teacher. I can recommend her book as a way to understand passion, something I think is essential. While her emphasis on passion could lead someone to God, her emphasis on prosocial, arational morality threatens to lead people away from God. So she is a mixed phenomenon.

Part of how I am feeling now comes from bipolar disorder, I can tell. No matter what I have going on my life, when I feel low, I feel low. This is the content of my low thinking, given what I have lived so far. When I am not blinded by the depression, I can understand fully how it is that I can keep going. But for now, I can rest a bit, knowing that I have written some of my thoughts on the book I read. I think, maybe, I won't read it again to look for the supporting quotes to what I said above. But I can recommend reading the book, for its passion, if you want to check my work.

--

One additional thing I remember thinking as I read was about how, given how beautiful and effective Charney's methods sound, why could they not be used on the elites of the world, so that, perhaps, they could bring the countries of the world in harmony with each other? I thought, maybe because the way she talks to children is something that wouldn't work on adults. It's too artificial, too skillful. Adults want the skillfulness of a poker player, to affirm their adulthood, but not the skillfulness of a professional mom.

It made me wonder, how do we make this strange creature called adult? What is this being? No child is really bad, we say, but some children grow up to become bad adults. A child can hardly set himself or herself up against his or her family. But the leader of a nation can. They can shape themselves into their own being, and shut down every human feeling, can listen to other people speak and know that they will never agree with them, and go on with their agenda. They can decide who they want to be and then be it, taking the responsibility for it, suffering for it, and still continuing to choose it, despite what other people think. Children try to say "no", but adults sometimes can actually succeed in saying "no".

--

(later)

One thing Charney talks about is how she isn't trying to punish children, simply have them see the consequences to their actions.

What if adults were shown the consequences of their actions? So often, the natural consequences of people's actions fall due not in their own lives, but in others. What if some teacher could help adults see the effects of what they do?

Adults think that being shown the moral way, having someone say "you should know better" is a thing of youth. Now that they are older, they are past that. Adults can no longer do wrong.

Now, there are certain things that an adult can do wrong. Everyone knows what those things are. We all agree on that. But the things that we don't all agree are wrong, are not to be enforced, and not even to be called wrong, so we don't have to think of them as wrong, so, in our heads, they are not wrong.

Adulthood as a collective can't be taught. It knows. A reshaping of adult values by being shown the consequences of adult behavior can't be done, it seems. So maybe the moral thing to do is to fit into the constructed adult reality, be good at being one of the tribe of adults?

But, the consequences don't go away... how will we take into account the real effects of what we do (and don't do) if we don't listen to the truth?

--

I wouldn't mind my life so much if it weren't for the bipolar disorder. Writing isn't so bad, and when I'm euthymic, I feel fine. I can hear some imaginary (or real) readers being solicitous for me when hearing about my bipolar disorder. They seem to (or really do) care about me so much and wish that I would take care of myself. But if they care about a person's well-being, I have a great opportunity for them. They can save up $5,000, donate to Against Malaria Foundation, and thereby save someone in the developing world from a painful death from malaria, which would have orphaned their children and widowed their spouse, and diminished their extended family and weakened the national economy. (It's even worth donating $50.) Or, this imaginary or real person who is moved by my bipolar disorder is a Christian and thinks that the second death is worse than the first (which, basically I agree with, although I do give money to global development), they can give a much smaller amount of money -- apparently, $1 -- to Doulos Partners and that should cause [or allow] one person to start to become a disciple of Jesus. Do you think that these charities might not be the best ones to donate to? You can look for better ones. You could even just give money directly to people who are worse off than you, if you can't find any trustworthy charities.

If you have time but not money, you can think of some way to use your time to help people. If nothing else, you can seek to make one new friend, and be a good friend to them.

But you may not have any time or money to spare. Some people don't. Then at least adopt the identity of a "person who cares", who would donate your time and money if you could, so that when someone enters your life who is more deeply involved in caring, you can offer them the welcome of your validation of what they are into, instead of passive-aggressive or blatant hostility, or indifference.

--

The title of the book I read is Teaching Children to Care. To me, I thought of "caring" as "feeling and acting strongly", more as "exerting effort to do good, work on a good-making project". But the book mostly emphasizes "seeing other people as people" and the Golden Rule. A way to reconcile these two meanings is to think of God, who is personally blessed by large-scale altruistic efforts, in the way that if you share your lunch with someone, they are personally blessed by your personal thoughtfulness and the consequence of their hunger being alleviated.

--

One thing that makes adults resistant to new morality is that they have reached the developmental stage where they are their own person and they have their own boundaries, and they are secure in themselves. Or, that they have not reached that stage yet, and are vulnerable to being hacked by other people (or demons) and thus are resistant to attempts to change them. A secure person is not threatened by morality and so does not change, while an insecure person is threatened and so shuts it down.

Somehow it is possible for a secure person to take into account morality -- maybe through a discipline of fearing being trapped by your own security. Both a secure and an insecure person can find their rest in caring, in the interrelationship of all things to each other and to them, as opposed to, in the secure person's case, their own stability and boundaries. Presumably the insecure person, on some deep level, has no place to rest.

--

[Response:]

I thought I should go into more detail about moral realism.

[Secular moral realists may have a strong intuition that morality is "out there" and this intuition is the basis of their sense that morality is real, despite whatever difficulties in grounding it rationally (or lack of having tried to do so). They would deny the intuition that people have that God exists as being valid, but they do trust and honor the intuition that morality exists.]

[Secular moral anti-realists may have no qualms, and little difficulty, in "being good people". "You know, C. denies that morality even exists. But he's a good guy." They can, in unreflective moments, feel that morality is real. They can even get mad at injustice. They can devote their lives to doing good. But then they go back to the study of their minds (like Hume's study where he can be skeptical) and say "but none of it's real!".]

[Morality is an area where we seem to have agreed to be irrational, to not try to connect all the dots or demand that all the dots be connected, even beyond the background level of irrationality that attends most human endeavors. ("This thing makes you change what you do. You spend hours and hours, thousands of dollars to comply with this thing. It's not just how you feel -- it's something you have to obey. You just know that you have to obey it, no person or other visible force or situation makes you obey it. And you can't explain what it is, how it fits into the rest of reality -- or, you even say it's an illusion?") And, perhaps that acceptance of irrationality is because we have had morality ingrained in us in a subtextual way, or the instinctualness of morality is encouraged, but not accompanied by reason, when we attend secular public schools (or even religious ones that don't make God real to students sufficiently), or have parents who are helpless in explaining a rational grounding to moral realism to us when we are young.]

[Maybe we can at least explain where moral instincts come from -- evolution? (Why should we trust how we have evolved? Evolution helped us to survive in early environments?) Or we can say that they are heuristics for survival. (Why should we survive?) But then, if we are the "1%", why redistribute wealth? The 1% could probably maximize its survival best by not redistributing wealth. Or, a related question: does promoting animal welfare really lead to human survival? Often it is orthogonal to human survival. I think morality could come from evolution but does not necessarily serve the purpose of human survival. Maybe some people have genes that make them ethically oriented? Then why not shut them off? Does morality really have value? To answer that question, I think we need a moral realism.]

[Maybe morality is just maximization of value, by definition of "morality" and "value". Then, can we explain that voice that says, for each valuable thing X, "X is valuable"? Or is that also irrational, just a random "monkey on your back"?]

[I don't think I'm being fair to secular moral realists. I should at least explain why I think moral realism is hard to ground in anything other than God. Secular moral realists may be able to come up with a satisfying account of how moral realism is grounded.]

[How would they do that? Do we start with "these are our moral intuitions, now we have to find some metaphysical belief that lets us keep them"? But what if there's something wrong with our moral intuitions? One of the main points of having a grounding for moral realism is to know what particular things are moral, now that we know where morality comes from. I am generally relatively more of a thinker and writer than a reader. So I tend to work with first principles (or personal experience). But I did read The Feeling of Value by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette and remember that I had mixed feelings about it. I thought that it probably was successful in showing that some kind of experiential states can be known to be bad, just because they feel like badness, and some can be known to be good, just because they feel like goodness. I'm not sure I would be so charitable now. At least, without going back and looking to see the details there, I think "why should our perceptions of good and bad be transcendentally valid?".]

[A moral realism needs to be usefully thick, if we are going to guide our lives by it. You can always posit something like the (unfortunately named) "morons", "moral particles", and I can say, "fine, now we know where morality comes from, some kind of ontologically real substance of morality". Now what? We need to know something about these moral particles in order to know what is actually moral to do and be.]

[I don't know if there are any better secular moral realisms than Rawlette's, but at least hers is usefully thick. Hedonism (what she advocates for) is a somewhat useful guide to life. (Maybe that is what is so seductive and dangerous about it, that it's easily agreed-on for "practical purposes" while not really being in tune with reality.)]

[My approach to moral realism, as of now, is to say, "An ontologically real substance of morality exists. Everything that, practically speaking, exists, is conscious. (Only consciousness can interact with consciousness.) This means that the ontologically real substance of morality is conscious. Morality is about a standard which applies. For something to exist, it must ought to exist. It must live up to that standard. That things exist proves that morality exists and is being satisfied. The way that conscious beings metaphysically contact other beings is for their consciousnesses to overlap, for them to experience exactly the same experience. Morality metaphysically contacts everything that exists in order to validate it so that it can exist. So morality experiences exactly what we do, and finds the 'qualia of goodness or ought-to-be-ness' ('pleasure') good, at least on a first-order level, and similarly with the 'qualia of badness or ought-not-to-be-ness' ('pain'). This validates a lot of Rawlette's account.]

["But we know a few things more about morality. For instance, morality has to be self-consistent. Like us, it has to put morality first. So it has to put itself first. But it has to put itself first as an other, as a law it submits to. Thinking of morality as having two aspects, the enforcer of the standard and the standard itself, allows us to see that morality has to be willing to put aside everything, including its own existence, for the sake of its standard. If it ceases to be willing to do that, it is not self-consistent and it ceases to be valid, destroying everything by being invalid (no longer moral, and thus unable to validate anything).]

["Part of morality's self-consistency is that it must have the same values as itself. Everything that exists has value, it ought to be, either temporarily or permanently. (What is bad must someday cease to exist.) Morality must be on the side of value, and must value everything that is of value for what it is. Morality values persons in that they are persons, this personal valuing being called love. Morality must love in order to be self-consistent and thus valid. It loves that humans are in tune with it so that they can exist permanently. To love a person fully involves understanding the person's being fully, and that full understanding can only come from kinship. So morality is a person (a person who is also kin to animals).]

["Everything is the expression of a will, either that of morality, or of a free-willed being whose will is willed by morality. To be is to will. So impersonal beings are parts of personal beings and don't have independent reality. They are valued as parts of personal beings, and with those beings morality has kinship, not with their parts taken separately.]

["Morality has to be willing to bear the burden of what it imposes on others. If it's worth it for a human to pay a certain cost for morality's sake, it's worth it for morality to pay it as well, if possible. Morality already experiences every burden that is part of our experienced lives, by being conscious of what we are conscious of, but there is a further burden that each of us experiences, which is to experience only our own lives and deaths, without the comfort of knowing the bigger picture. How can morality bear that burden? Morality is composed of multiple persons, one of whom experiences everything, another, who does not and can live a finite life (the first maintains the moral universe through his/her validation of everything during the time the second lives a finite life)."]

[As you might have guessed already, "morality" in the above could be considered "God".]

[If we accept the above (or perhaps a better-argued version of it...), we have a concept of morality that largely supersedes hedonism. It incorporates hedonism and its recommendations, at least insofar as it validates the first-order goodness/badness of pleasure/pain (if pleasure has baked into it the perception that it ought to be, and pain, the perception that it ought not to be), as well as answering why it is that care for hedonic states is transcendentally valid. Further, we are recommended to be willing to give up everything for what is right, and thus to risk ourselves for that when it is called for. And we are to bear the burdens of those we rule over, as much as we can. It might be possible be able to come up with other ways to thicken the very concept of moral legitimacy, so that we know more about what morality must be, and thus what we must do or be in order to be moral. This thickness is a useful guide. And, if we think that this person or persons who are morality exist, they may have acted in history, and we may try to find evidence of where they might have spoken, allowing us to thicken our concept even further, although with less certainty.]

[To defend my earlier statement, I think that it's hard for me to imagine a successful secular / atheistic moral realism, because what I see as the way to ground moral realism involves the existence of God, and the (perhaps unrepresentatively few) secular moral realisms I've seen are not satisfying to me intellectually. Maybe if I want to strengthen what I say further, putting it briefly, I would say that if morality exists, it must love fully, and that kind of love is something that persons do. So then, morality is a person, and the word for a person like that is "God".]

--

22 September 2023:

When I wrote this post I thought that bipolar disorder was my big problem. However, now that I am more over the ways people have traumatized me and programmed me with the ways they wanted me to think, I see that those are a much bigger deal than my bipolar disorder. My bipolar symptoms, without those traumatized and programmed thoughts, are fairly mild.

"There's Nothing Special About Where You Came From"

When I was in my early 20s, there was a young woman visiting from out of town whom I wanted to impress. Around that time I had discovered banh mi, inexpensive and good-tasting sandwiches from a shop nearby. So I took her there, and she bought herself a sandwich.

This was in the neighborhood near where I grew up. I always thought that Vietnamese culture was interesting because when I was a kid, I saw the extra marks on their letters and heard them talking to their parents on the sidewalk after school in a different language. (Banh mi is Vietnamese.)

Vietnamese culture was special because it was part of my neighborhood, and different from me. It was part of where I came from.

For some reason, I had never noticed, or there never was, a banh mi restaurant in my neighborhood until that time in my life in my early 20s. So it was special as well -- I didn't even realize that there could be more than one banh mi restaurant. This banh mi restaurant was in a class of its own.

I don't know what the young woman thought of banh mi. She was better-traveled than me and could easily have had it somewhere else. (Because, in reality, banh mi is a genre of food.) She may not have cared, or had the tact to not care, about the commonness of the banh mi.

I used to think Ethiopian music was special, but someone (a different person than the young woman above) pointed out that it was just partway between West African and Arab music. Nothing special. Imagining that attitude grafted onto the young woman makes me think, "there's nothing special about where you come from". In reality, many major cities in the US have Vietnamese (and Cambodian, Somali, Ethiopian, etc.) populations. If there is a significant population of these cultures, they will have restaurants. San Diego probably does not have the best Vietnamese restaurants. Someone told me that San Jose has a bigger Vietnamese scene. Vietnamese culture is in some ways clearly classier and more real than a typical franchise restaurant, but similarly it's found in multiple cities. Imagine if someone grew up next to a McDonald's and thought it was something special.

I feel a little bit embarrassed to have been so enamored of the banh mi shop. We fall in love with the existing things that happen to be nearby, I guess, but then grow up and see that they are typical, and on a continuum. We only thought they were so special because we didn't know any better. Now that I am older, I think I was a bit of a fool for being so taken with the banh mi shop. But who is the greater fool, the person who in ignorance loves particular things as though they are the best in the world, or the person who in knowledge never loves that deeply?

What else is only special because it's where we come from? The specific moral values we hold? Morality itself? Consciousness? Existence? If I want, I can conceive of each of these things ending without feeling any qualms. So in that moment of calm, am I more cosmopolitan, more broadminded, more objective, and thus more in tune with reality, than the people who fight for existence, consciousness, morality, or particular moral values? Maybe I have a "God's eye view of the world". (But that may be the wrong term -- why should God have a particularly detached view of things?)

So maybe we are two sets of fools, the people who want to hold onto the special feelings of youth despite evidence, and the people who see beyond all special feelings to the point where deep and wholehearted love is impossible, or even to the point that nothing matters. Is there any way to be wise in the way each are wise, and not fools in the ways each are fools? Otherwise we fight each other and will never convince each other, because each side will have an irreplaceable value that the other does not honor, whether it is really loving or it is seeing things as they are.

Perfection, Control, the Small Things

In principle, the goals of perfection and control, that things turn out the best way possible, are of utmost importance (by definition). But perfection and control themselves are spiritually dangerous. Not even God perfects and controls everything, so why should we? Behaving irrationally with respect to what is best is (at least sometimes) better than being rational, if it keeps you from succumbing to perfection and control.

In order to actually do good on any big scale, and to be whole-hearted and to give all your strength, you have to trust ... something (de dicto) ... which is to some extent, or entirely, really you trusting God (de re). Otherwise you'll worry about small risks of your own life, fearful of dying, shame, failure, or others. These will make you be responsible, in a bad way. Your temporal (and, metaphorically, "spatial") horizons will be clamped down on by that responsibility. You won't be able to believe God when he appears to you, telling you to bless the whole.

In order to love, to have deep feelings and deep intentions, you have to trust.

Perhaps there is a tradeoff, between being good at being responsible for the little things, and being good at being responsible for the big things. Whether we can accomplish big things in our lives is largely up to a lot of things beyond our control, but we can approach life as people who are responsible for what is big (deep, real, the heart of the problem), and risk neglecting some of the things that are shallower, less real, less the heart of the problem. The little details that are crucial are part of something bigger.

Reciprocal Relationship with God

When we are young, we need to feel like we are loved. We need attention, fun, and validation as well. If we are young enough, we need people to give these things to us, and it is right to provide such things for those who really have to have them. But, if those are provided in such a way that people are kept from growing up, they do serious harm and are possibly worse in the long run than if the children are not given enough attention, fun, and validation.

As we grow up, perhaps we need to be loved, or perhaps we do not. But all of us must learn to love, and that is the most important part of maturing. If we put "to love" first, we must be willing to give up "being loved".

Adult children have a kind of equality in their relationships with their parents. There is a kind of reciprocalness to the relationships. The children relate to their parents similarly to how the parents relate to them.

God is our father and he is not bound to us because we love him. He is bound to us because he loves us. So, if we are to have a reciprocal relationship with him, we should be bound to him not because he loves us, but because we love him. We someday have to love in a mature way, in order to love as God loves and have the heart that God has.

If God does not love, then he loses his legitimacy and ceases to exist. For God, to love is life or death. But he can survive not being loved.

Is Full Maturity Required by Love?

Is full maturity required by love?

Is salvation to love, or to be loved? Arguably, a loving parent would love their children by teaching them to love. It might then be odd for a parent to be content with their adult children who do not love as fully as the parent does, or at least seem likely on their way to love as much as the parent does when the child is the parent's age.

Is there an MSL reason to think that we need to love like God someday? We need to come into tune with God in order to be saved. Part of this involves our hearts being like his.

If we have an unforgiving attitude toward someone, then that prevents us from being saved. We can't perceive or relate to all people, like God can, but we can become the kind of people who would relate to each person the way God would. Then, we will love like he does. Our values will be aligned with his.

God loves the truth, particularly the moral truth, which is rooted in legitimacy, which is he himself. God loves the good, and so we must love the good. God is unilaterally inclined to forgive everyone. But we all still need to come to love the good ourselves, and if we do not, at some point he can't accept us and we can't exist anymore.

So is it the case that fully mature love is needed in order to enter God's rest? If our hearts are the same as God's, what else can we do? I'm not sure exactly what goes into the word "mature", but maybe "mature" can mean "having a heart that is inclined correctly" (perhaps inclined toward responsibility / burden-bearing). Another dimension to "mature" being "exhibiting some sort of full-grown skill, strength, security, wisdom, etc."

What's important is who we are, and thus if there's any aspect of loving as God loves that we are incapable of, then that's only a problem with what we are which God can remedy in the end if it makes sense to do so. What is up to us is to be inclined, in who we are, to love to the full extent of our abilities. This is God's love, how he loves to the full extent of his abilities. In our lives on earth, or in the Millennium, we may have to develop our abilities to act to their full extent in order to love to the full extent of our ability to love. Sometimes in order to really love, you must become more mature, and it is a good thing to seek to become more mature, as mature as you can be insofar as love requires it.

Obligation vs. Desert Love

Love often requires going through the desert, in which you do not feel like loving. Obligation also makes you do what you do not feel like doing. Love is good and obligation is bad (those words used in this paragraph). When we love in the desert, we still love, with who we are, although with what we are, we do not want to love. But when we do things out of obligation, we feel like not doing what we do out of who we are. Why do we act out of obligation? Perhaps out of fear for ourselves or out of our own hungers, or maybe other reasons. A test for whether you are doing good out of desert love, or out of obligation: do you resent what you do? Generally, love does not resent the difficulties and sacrifices that go with it.

It is better to choose desert love over obligation, and, I guess, counterintuitive though that sounds, it is entirely up to our free choice as to which we choose. "Who we are" is somehow entirely within our power to shape, although it doesn't feel like it. Perhaps there is a certain level of service that "what we are" can sustain, and given that, it is entirely up to us whether we pursue it out of love (including desert love), or out or obligation.

(When you love someone or something for long enough, you will enter periods of the desert, where it doesn't feel good or you don't feel like remaining committed. If it is only "what you are" that doesn't feel like it, then that's fine (although subjectively it's hard and can be hard practically as well). But if "who you are" doesn't feel like doing good, that is not such a good thing. Perhaps if you intend to love someone or something, you may at first obligate yourself fakely. But that is not so bad, since really you ("who you are") want to love.)

Benefits of Temptation; Risks of Anti-temptation

Anti-temptations sound like unambiguously good things. They draw people toward God. How could anyone resist the appeal of God? But, they are risky.

Temptations are obviously bad, but can have a non-obvious benefit. When we are tempted, we can decide, out of our own personal will, to reject the temptation. Maybe we reject it in the moment by not acting on it. Or, after we give in, we reject it retrospectively by regretting giving in and turning back to God. The stronger the temptation, sometimes, the stronger the rejection of it. That rejection can harden our hearts against sin and drive us into loyalty to God. So actually temptation can enable willful people to get closer to God than they might without it. With their willfulness they reject the temptation to turn against God, and in so doing turn toward God more firmly, truly, and permanently.

If a willful person is exposed to anti-temptation, they might reject God, out of willfulness, as the opposite of what happens when exposed to temptation.

Someone exposed to anti-temptation might become "inoculated" to God, enjoying the pleasantness of the anti-temptation without connecting to the real person of God underneath. They also might only be able to love an appealing God, or appealingness itself in its divine mode.

When we feel good about God, we may be feeling good about a false image of God. So do we really love God? A true anti-temptation tries to connect us with the real God, but we may willfully misunderstand what the anti-temptation is talking about. It offers something real, but we missee it and thus refer, de re, to something else.

Also, when we are feeling good about God, we may make motions of dedication to him, and may offer a generous portion, perhaps 95% of our hearts to him. But for us to be saved, we need to give 100%. Having drawn so close to God with the 95% that we have given, perhaps we start to harden in that state, ignoring the 5% we keep away from dedication to him, and the 5%'s size and undedicated status can harden. A hardened 5% of sin is worse than a rough and obvious 50% or more of sin that we know is sin and is still uncommitted enough for us to change.

For these reasons (I think maybe in contradiction to what I might have said or implied earlier), "throwing anti-temptation at the problem" (like "throwing money at the problem") is imperfect and potentially dangerous. Anti-temptation is a valuable part of people's experiential diets, but temptation is also needed for many people. Maybe it's worth stressing that "anti-temptation can't replace your decision to come into tune with God."

Who do you love? / Who do you fear?

Sometimes I ask of myself "Who do you love?" when I am drawn toward something or someone other than God. Who am I putting first in my intentions and emotions? Who am I most committed to?

Sometimes I ask of myself "Who do you fear?" when I am afraid of some reality other than God. A reality might limit me, but I choose if the idea of a reality limits me, more than the reality itself does. What I fear is what I consider real. What I fear most is what I consider most real. So, who do I fear?

Alien View of Two Cities

Cities tend to be alike insofar as they are places to meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at a job, grow old, get born. Your whole life story can play out in a city, and there is a way in which your human life can sort of be lived the same no matter what city you live in. In Delhi or Lima (each under a cloud of smog), people meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at jobs, grow old, and get born. I went to Lima for a few days, when I was 17, and was impressed by the smog. But if I had stayed five years, while that would have been bad for my respiratory health, I might have gotten more involved in friends or perhaps a girlfriend, or a church, or something like that. The smog would have been a background condition, one which I noticed here and there, maybe every day, maybe not. But I would have been living my life, the important, (near?-)universally human parts of life, of developing as a person, caring about things which were emotionally weighty to me (God, art, science, etc.) and participating in other people's lives. I would have shifted back and forth from theism to atheism to agnosticism in my fiducial depths, and experienced whatever other essential features of the human condition. But the smog wouldn't have been worth mentioning.

The alien view of a city is to see the smog and not the people raising their families (and going to school, growing old, etc.), which is the familiar view of a city. Both the alien view and the familiar view are right, and both are wrong.

Except for time I spent in Davis, CA, going to college, I have lived my whole life in San Diego. I'm not particularly interested in travel, and tend to feel the monk's feeling of wanting to stay in my cell. When I'm feeling very local, I see nearby me only a few places, which comprise my whole world that I can see. It's as though San Diego is my house, and I'm looking out the window. My whole world is Southern California, plus a view into Mexico. The Imperial Valley to the east is a desert farming community, and Tijuana to the south is in another country, reputed to be dangerous. I don't go to those places very often. To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which is a watery desert. To the north is Los Angeles, which of all these neighboring places I have the strongest impression.

As an outsider, my view of Los Angeles is that it is a place of spiritual darkness. There is greater stress and hostility there than in San Diego. Los Angeles seems to have been shaped by the movie industry, which sells beauty, but it's an ugly place. The Hollywood neighborhood is not a vision of beauty. But the sun shines "all year long" (not literally true, but something like it). A constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit may sound idyllic (it's the temperature you set your thermostat to), but that 72 degree sun gnawing at your skin, day after day, becomes a horror. You find yourself irritable under its gaze. (We have spells of this in San Diego as well.) That irritating pleasantness can even have an obscene component, the obscenity of people being fed things engineered to please them. Hollywood actresses are selected for for appearing beautiful to American men, but I have come to feel like I'm looking at a Doritos chip, a snack chip for the eyes rather than for the mouth, which has a dark energy to it, something to make me high, addictive and bedazzling. Films themselves are like Doritos chips, though they are all superficially beautiful. There is an obscenity to their beauty, which I see as an alien to them. Los Angeles is a place of desperation (aspiring actors and musicians), of broken dreams, of exploitation. While not all of LA is in the movie or music industries, I would guess that this spills over into the city at large.

When I go to LA, I often come in on the train. As it approaches Union Station, where I get off, I see the same thing every time, a kind of industrial landscape, with the Los Angeles River running through it, channelized with nothing natural about it, graffitied, sometimes with trash and the belongings of homeless people. In San Diego, there's nothing exactly like it. The Skid Row equivalent in San Diego as I've experienced it is smaller, and I have felt uncomfortable but comfortable enough walking through it, but an Angeleno friend had me canceling my Greyhound tickets so I wouldn't have to go to Los Angeles' Skid Row, where the LA Greyhound station is located. There is a hostility in Los Angeles, and an aggressiveness, both in the way people drive, and in the things people say. My Angeleno friend once said "Welcome to LA" after a homeless person went off in a train station in a way I don't think I've ever heard in San Diego. Being homeless is stressful, but perhaps more stressful in Los Angeles.

I visited a therapist in San Diego one time at a particularly dark time of my life. He said good things about Portland, but his opinion was that Los Angeles was a spiritually dark place. I don't want to be unfair to spiritualities which are not Christian, but I will note that goth and occult spiritualities and aesthetics are relatively strong in Los Angeles, and while they could be defended by some as not being really bad for you, their imagery tends to be dark and often weird, a participation in horror. David Bowie went through his worst years in Los Angeles crawling deeper into cocaine and occultism, enabled by false friends and money.

Hollywood (and Los Angeles, to the extent that Los Angeles is a support organ for it) sells America, and the world, fake beauty, so no wonder Los Angeles itself has arguably the pleasantest weather in America (shared with San Diego), but is actually an ugly, dark place. But to be fair to Los Angeles, though I am familiar with San Diego in ways that I am not with Los Angeles, I can see San Diego, as well, as an alien. San Diego, often enough, is a place of genuine beauty, not fake beauty. San Diego is the good life, a genuinely nice experience. It shares some of Los Angeles' dark side (we have that gnawingly pleasant weather, and some of the traffic) and San Diego had (and has?) a relatively strong goth scene. But San Diego is a sleepy place, a kind of "last man" place. San Diego is more spiritually dangerous than Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles, you know something is wrong. But in San Diego, you feel like everything is right. The word "hedonism" sounds to some like cocaine and strippers on Sunset Strip -- a Los Angeles phenomenon -- but to me it sounds like a beautiful sunset at La Jolla Shores, or Coronado, or whatever other San Diego beach, that feeling of the "pacific" ocean calming you, quieting away the deeply personal side of you, drugging you with genuine psychological health. How can you really learn to love in San Diego, when it is at its "finest"? You have a better chance in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is known for the film and music industries, and its container ports. San Diego is known for the military, and for craft beer and burritos and going to the beach. The World Famous San Diego Zoo is here as well.

The vulgar hedonism of Hollywood rock stars in the 1980s is probably too easily grown past. Also, the version of hedonism envisioned by transhumanists (for instance, discussed somewhat in X-Risk), while exciting and motivating to them, may seem sort of ridiculous and unnecessary to the average person. But San Diego, instead of radical hedonism represented by rock stars or transhumanists, represents normal hedonism, for normal people. If you want really good, human compatible experience, come to San Diego. Watch a sunset. Eat food from a taco shop. Drink a craft beer. Go surfing. Maybe stay home and watch a movie. Go check out a farmer's market on the weekend. Forget God. Lose your passion. Let go. Turn off the part of you that cares about anything outside of your lifestyle of normal humanity.

San Diego is the hedonism that normal people would choose, and already do choose, long before any advanced technology makes an Experience Machine possible. It may be the exact experience that people choose once they've tried all the "adventure programs of youth" that you can run on the Experience Machine. At the end -- our vision of heaven, I guess, will be San Diego, or culturally varied versions of it.

One San Diegan I knew lived in Germany for school, but came back to visit his parents in a neighborhood close to mine. He said that when he visited San Diego, he felt sadness. That was his alien view. I can connect with that -- the sadness of a beautiful sunset, all the people beautifully bedding down for one last night, as the dark settles in and they cease to exist.

San Diego says "look at things from the familiar view". Los Angeles says "look at things from the alien view". I feel like I would have a much easier time discussing the content of this post in Los Angeles-as-Los Angeles. I feel it very difficult to talk about it in San Diego-as-San Diego. In Los Angeles, we can have the possibility of really being aware of weird things, like that if we give $5,000 to a charity, it could save someone's life, a totally meaningless and abstract behavior from the point of view of an ordinary human's life. But that weird sacrifice, from our perspective, is like a gift from heaven for the person who benefits, who gets to live 35 more years (up to life expectancy, at least). In Los Angeles, we can be aware that the familiar view, normality, human nature, themselves are horrors, which prevent people from giving to anyone outside their own familiar lives. In Los Angeles we may long for something other than "this", and perhaps even occasionally cry out to God. But San Diego is self-sufficient. I don't want to be too kind to Los Angeles -- I don't know that Los Angeles leads people to love God. But at least in a sense it is unstable. San Diego is more hedonically stable, is a lower-energy point of cultural development. You can become aware of God if you can see outside the totality of the experience-as-experience. You can become aware of persons as persons, as more than just experiences, if there is some outside to the hedonic moment. A perfect San Diego could exclude you from loving God as a person, as a real being, and you would have no way to motivate yourself to leave that perspective. It would be a perfect sunset at the end of a 10/10 day.

The truth is found in totality. So while I have presented the alien views of the two cities, to be accurate, one should remember their familiar views. Every person is an alien to us and family to us, and every collection of people is alien and familiar. Most aliens have some element of horror to them, and so do most people, though there are some aliens who are like cities of God.