Missionary Care for Creatives in Los Angeles; or for others

I wrote a post about cultural altruism hubs. That post, and this one, which is related, discuss a kind of organizational or "scenic" structure or structures that people could build. I don't feel like this is a thing I should pursue, so I'm not looking to try to build those structures myself. But I think the ideas are worth writing up. Maybe someone else will find them useful.

I often write to a secular audience, or to no audience / to myself. But in this case, I write more to a Christian audience.

Creative people are especially susceptible to spiritual attack. Culture war brings out Satan. Some cultural-spiritual warfare is fought by "foot soldiers" (through interpersonal contact). Others through "air support". Airplanes are sophisticated machines. Books, movies, etc. are machines made out of thoughts and images. Culture "flies in the air". So producing cultural artifacts puts new "airplanes" or "drones" in the sky. These artifacts fight each other and fight people on the ground. With good air support, ground troops can have an easier time. So (I think) with good cultural artifacts, interpersonal evangelism and discipleship can go better.

Los Angeles is a center of the movie and music industries, which manufacture cultural artifacts (that part of the "air war"). Those industries are not always kind to the people who try to work in them. Many people have dreams of success in them, but only a few can succeed. There are stories of exploitation in those industries. This can affect everyone who tries to "make it". The overall culture of these industries seems to largely be non-Christian. Christians trying to work in those industries may experience as much exploitation and as many broken dreams of success as non-Christians. They may also experience culture shock and spiritual attack (for instance, being invited to hedonistic parties (something that I would guess happens), or being acculturated to the dominant secular culture to the point of compromising their faith). They may also experience hostility, due to their beliefs.

Are Christian creatives in Los Angeles missionaries? Arguably yes. So they can be supported and cared for like any other kind of missionary. (I recommend reading Serving as Senders Today and The Reentry Team, both by Neal Pirolo, to understand what I have in mind by "support" and "care". Briefly, churches or other sending teams can provide moral support, prayer support, send and receive messages about what's going on in the field, maybe money or logistical support, and help in missionaries transitioning in and out of service.)

Creative missionaries could care for fellow creatives and engage in evangelism and discipleship like any other kind of missionary. But they also "translate the Bible into the native language" of their fellow creatives, by being creative themselves, and/or into the language of the US in general, or even of other parts of the world, where LA culture industries reach.

I feel like if I were a suspicious secular person (perhaps an ex-Christian), an incorporated missionary agency sending financially supported creative missionaries into LA would be disturbing and lead to bad press (if evangelical Christians think that there is an oppressive, militant "other" in the cultural world, so do secular people -- everyone is "David" seeing "Goliath" in each other). Creative people tend to have their own ideas and some might not want to work with a missionary agency themselves. (It's good for creative people to be independent-minded in order to see what other people don't see.) Financially supported missionaries might be harder to relate to by struggling actors, writers, musicians, directors, etc. that they may be trying to reach.

So I think maybe the best way to implement creative missions is to set up structures to care for and support the creative Christians who find themselves in Los Angeles, as though they have sent themselves already, but maybe without enough support.

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Implementation:

I don't know anything about what might already be going on in this area. I can imagine that something like this is already going on.

I think churches in Los Angeles are already doing some of this support and care work. What they might not have is the sense that their creatives are missionaries dealing with spiritual warfare, culture shock, etc., and not know as much as they could of how to be good "senders" and "carers". Perhaps what is needed is to equip those churches.

Also, creatives might not have the sense that they are missionaries on a mission field. They might benefit from additional teaching and encouragement in having a really Christian worldview and practice in their art and life.

Other ideas:
1. Establishing refuge places in Southern California so that people can (affordably) get out of LA to take a break from it.
2. Connecting churches that have creatives to creatives in LA. (Not every church is a good place for a creative person to be.)

Southern California (plus northern Baja California) could be seen as having two areas of strategic significance for cultural people: Tijuana which is a gateway to Latin America and/or to understanding the non-American, non-"developed" world; and the cultural artifact manufacturing center of Los Angeles. In between is San Diego, a quieter place (maybe the military in San Diego is of cultural strategic significance?).

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Caveats:

I have not spent a lot of time in LA. I was involved in a low-budget film production that got actors from LA and have seen the incentives for exploitation and selling yourself in filmmaking. I can sense a certain amount of felt unhappiness and spiritual darkness from Los Angeles filmmaking (Hollywood and I guess "aspiring Hollywood" or indie film productions). I don't have direct experience with the music industry in LA.

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Postscript:

What about film directors? I mentioned them above. They are employers, people in positions of power. But they are at the mercy of their funding sources. Directors have to cobble together funding and employees from various sources, and then work intensely during production, with long pre-production and post-production times. Once finished, they sell their product on the market and hope for critical and financial success, which is uncertain. A lot of money rides on what they do. If they lose too much money, maybe they can't work again. It sounds like a risky, stressful, "disestablished" line of work.

This sounds like perhaps a more intense (or not) version of what entrepreneurs in general go through.

A film director could do the wrong thing because they are under some kind of pressure. Perhaps it is true of any kind of entrepreneur. Or business executive. How much wrongdoing comes from powerful people who are (subjectively or objectively) in insecure positions? Perhaps it would be good to come up with care and support for them.

Maybe if a person doesn't have money, that's their hard limit, and only with additional funding would they be able to do the right thing. (Maybe there could be funding to help them do the right thing?) With better support (prayer, moral, logistic, communication) and the expectation that they can get care if they fail, they might have more courage to do the right thing in marginal cases where they may not really be risking their success, (where perhaps it is some kind of delusion of danger or sin that puts its thumb on the scale of their perception of risk), or even in self-sacrificial cases where they have to sacrifice their success (their business venture/film? / career?) to do the right thing.

(Funding to help do the right thing: a director could develop a relationship with a funding agency that would commit to providing at least a significant part of the director's funding for each of their films, conditional on them doing the right thing and not necessarily on them being commercially successful. In other words, provide grace, or slack, so that directors can fail commercially if they do the right thing on set or in their other operations.)

(Conservative talk radio, to me, sounds like the voice of people who are suspicious and hardworking -- maybe small business owners who could easily go out of business and who have to deal with other insecure people who might cut corners or make untrustworthy deals to survive. Can there be care and support for them?)

Likewise, people in the spiritually dark worlds of the elites. Do Washington, DC churches adequately care for politicians and staffers who fight a culture war of their own? Political theater is part of the "air war" that movies are also involved in. Political decisions and governmental implementations of them have cultural consequences.

(Silicon Valley sounds like a place with its darkness and its own, different culture. What about it?)

People with bad reputations (criminals, prison guards, and police, for instance) may need care and support. It requires discernment how to support someone who has directed their life toward wrongdoing.

Like with creative missionaries in LA, I don't know anything about what might already be going on with care / support for people in these areas.

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The church I grew up in had a sign over the door as you went out, that said "You are now entering the mission field". Probably everyone could see themselves as a missionary, and everyone experiences occupational hazards as they interface with the world. And so everyone could be sent and cared for -- by other people who also could be sent and cared for. Do churches send and care for their own pastors? (Maybe pastors should have some support from outside their own congregations.)

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Everything is powerful, culturally. Everything sends a message. The way you do business as a small business owner affects the overall culture, the sense of how things are and how people act. Similarly with the products a business owner releases on the market. Each one is a movie or book, conditioning people's minds. The caring professions are culturally powerful.

This raises the question: if everyone has cultural power, if each person can say something that has a significant effect on someone (at least on him- or herself), what should you say? Are you the missionary for God and the truth, or for an off-flavor of God and a somewhat misleading truth? You have to seek to know what is true, so that you can correct what is wrong.

This process of self-correction has to go on on a societal level. Society (people within it) must speak against what is believed by society (other people within it). What does it take to oppose a consensus or effective consensus? What if the consensus involves the caring structures that you can find? Who will care for you when you burn out? Will the price of getting care be that you have to stop pointing out what's wrong?

So as much as care and support sound like a good thing, for at least some people, those who would point out what is least popular, it may be good to develop independence from human support and care. A wise society concerned with protecting itself from its own blind spots might try to develop the strength behind that independence in people, and not only promote care and support for people. For a believer in God, deriving strength from God, rather than from people, is a way to be strong enough to say what's unpopular.

It's possible for Christian (church-based) culture to somewhat discourage the individual from seeing things from their own perspective, and instead tries to enmesh them in a social organism. An individual church, and many individual people, will fare better if they are simply in-some-sense-"properly" interrelated socially. But Christianity as a whole suffers if it becomes blind due to its success in orienting individuals toward the points of view of their nearby congregations, which all can potentially be misguided.

Moving Forward

In trying to think about my writing, I wrote a page called Categories of my Writing. I noticed different trends in my writing: "how can we love?", the "exilic/familial", "radically theistic / New Wine" (or, I should say now, "radically theistic / millennial holiness"), "aletheism". How would I now say all these things relate? And how do they relate to outside views?

Overall, I want to move forward. "Moving forward" characterizes "advancing kingdoms" -- the kingdom of God, or civilization, or justice, or something like that. One thing I have had to do is move beyond being more into advancing secular things (civilization, justice, etc.) and into doing good in a really theistic way (advance the kingdom of God, the God who really exists).

Is the project (or projects) of "moving forward" a good thing? I can think of some "dissents": postmodernism (in my mind "there are a diversity of viewpoints none of which can be said are invalid"), and elements of the "exilic/familial" (the sense that nobody wins, and we mourn the death of our enemies). If we mourn our enemies too much, then we risk being on their side, or sinking into inactivity. Being on their side might sound like a good thing if we think that we are on the side of them as persons. But we should not necessarily adopt everyone else's point of view. The truth is what it is -- that our enemies are wrong necessarily connects to the fact that there is something we need to do in the world.

Another dissent is the apocalyptic view (in the sense of, there is only a little bit of time left). I feel that this is working deep, under the surface of our culture, in a way we don't always explicitly state. But it can be an explicit view (climate, AI, the perennial religious end-times thinking). If there is no more time left, then we lost motivation to move forward.

Another dissent is the appeal to human nature, or other kinds of nature, or the body, or health. Human nature certainly isn't the best thing we can conceive of, but it's also not the worst. Health calls for moderation (for not moving forward too much, or not at all in a sense, since we already have the body and its desires).

Those engaged in the project of moving forward might become disillusioned with its failures (they might be on the side of moving forward still, in principle, but might have lost some faith in it because they see the damage it causes, or its inability to bring about what we think it promises). Prophets speak the unvarnished truth which "nobody" wants to hear, for the sake of the truth, even if it seems unhelpful for them to do so.

Part of moving forward involves the truth. How do we know the truth? Can we know the truth? For the postmodernist, the claim is that there is no one truth. For the Reformed (Calvinist) thinker, the claim is that humans can't naturally come to know the truth, and God has to give us that truth (this undermining natural reason). Buddhism and modern science also cast doubt on natural reason.

The Bible itself (I think, this is my reading) contains both moving forward and critique of moving forward. Abraham is called by God to found a new nation to bless the whole world ("moving forward") (Genesis 12:1-3). But he is also commanded by God to sacrifice his son, who is the child through whom that nation is supposed to descend (Genesis 22). David weeps for his son Absalom (who had been killed after trying to take the throne from David), but then David realizes (is told) that he has to live for the ongoing process, for the people who were on his (rightful) side (2 Samuel 19:1-7). Should you trust the voice of God? Overall you should. Should you fight for God's project (as I think the Bible would say David was doing more so than Absalom was)? Yes, but you have to acknowledge the danger in what you're doing and listen to the critique.

I use the term "moving forward" rather than "progress" because while progress is a form of moving forward, there is also the moving forward needed to preserve the things that already exist. Neither the church, civilization, nor justice will maintain their current sizes/fullness (in general) unless individual people move forward. The dissents to moving forward take away energy that can help people move forward -- whether to maintain what is good or to make things better.

"How can we love?" is about "moving forward". "Radical theism" contains both "moving forward" and concern for every person (because every person came from God -- every person has a history of being a child descended from God, even if they choose to reject God permanently) -- thus, mourning and losing (like in the "exilic/familial"). God loses in the end -- but he doesn't have to lose as much. Love mourns what is lost, but has to apply effort to prevent further loss.

I think that evangelicals (at least, the best of them) balance this forward-moving with a concern for every person, a concern which does not demoralize them but causes them to move forward (in a way that does not "outpace" the people they try to help), and I would consider my writing project overall to be evangelical in a certain basic sense.

I think it is wise to consider the dissents to moving forward, as each contain some element of wisdom and can be a check on moving forward in a misguided way.

Postmodernism in a strong-enough form is a way to close the mind against the possibility of there being answers, and this I find hard to like. But in a sufficiently weak form, it says "you have to listen to everyone's point of view in seeking the truth, and when you start the discussion, everyone's view is equally valid". Or it could say as well "You feel like X is true from your own experience and reason, but other people believe not-X. Why do you think you're right and they're wrong?"

Apocalypticism biases us to do good in the short term. Perhaps we have too many incentives to do good in the short term already. But maybe apocalypticism biases us to act intensely in the short term. I don't know if that always is a good thing, but it's worth considering. Apocalypticism may also bias us to rest, a similarly mixed thing to pursue.

Concern for health, the body, human nature, etc. is necessary to keep us from burning out and to do good in an unhealthy way tends to be doing something that has evil mixed in it somewhere. Health-pursuing, like postmodernism, can close the mind, but if it does not make itself a god, it is something worth listening to. Respect for human nature (in the sense of seeing it there, like you see a rattlesnake in your path) and typical human fallibility is wise.

Those who move forward but in the process of moving forward critique specific ways of moving forward, are doing something good to make sure that their efforts are really good instead of bad, as long as they avoid demoralizing themselves (or other people) about the overall process of moving forward.

Reformed, Buddhist, and scientific questioning of human's natural ability to reason each have their uses.

The Reformed perspective says "you are not God". I think people should move forward, try to have the values of God and then do the things that God wants, which are in line with those people's values now that they have adopted God's values. So you should see what you see and do what you want. You want to do what is good, so your appetite is trustworthy when you want that. When you do what you and God want, you are an agent of God. You are becoming like God, on the small scale that you can act in. Everyone who acts out God's will is in a sense God himself, his body. When you behave completely legitimately, you are part of Legitimacy.

However, there is a sense in which you are not God and never will be. God's work is much greater than yours. Your work has a boundary to it and many things happen outside your work. Your work is affected by things you don't understand, but which God does understand.

If you are trustworthy, people will trust you, and some will think you are most-trustworthy on a deeper level -- they will give you the glory and not God, and this is a dangerous mistake. If they make you an idol, you (with all of your trustworthiness) could keep them from loving God.

So it is good to consider the Reformed perspective (in which it can sometimes seem like God does everything). I don't think it's literally true that God does everything and we do nothing, but it's a good perspective.

The Buddhist perspective can be taken as a means to achieve mental health (see above). The scientific perspective can elucidate human nature (see above). Also it teaches us to think carefully and biases us to not trust our intuitions, which is a good thing up to a point.

All of these things are dangerous when they close the mind to the good that we really should be doing, the forward moving that we should really take seriously. Buddhist and Reformed critiques of reason need to see the danger that they are wrong and that reason is saying something valuable (as much as it is important for rationalists to consider that their reasoning is dangerous, as Buddhist or Reformed thinkers allege). I would propose that everyone move forward with their worldview (postmodern, Reformed, Buddhist, evangelical, etc.), but periodically consider that which questions their worldview, take it as a live possibility.

This would be an "aletheistic" thing to do.

So, perhaps I could integrate all of the above into a kind of formula:

Movement: Motivate yourself strongly ("how can we love?") to go into the secular world to some extent ("how can we love?"), but primarily to reach people to prevent them from hardening and dying the second death ("radically theistic / millennial holiness"), seeing them as kin, children of a God who risks losing them if they reject him ("exilic/familial"), not as people to defeat but rather people to mourn ("exilic/familial") but overall still moving forward with the work to make the world more the way God wants it to be ("how can we love?"), anti-tempting ourselves and those around us ("radical theism / millennial holiness").

Dissents: We need to question the movement from time to time ("aletheism"). We can consider "dissents", like Reformed, Buddhist, health-oriented, human nature-oriented, postmodern, and apocalyptic thinking (mentioned above). Or perhaps even the Bible could be considered as a dissent, or both a dissent and a support (call of Abraham and binding of Isaac / David mourning Absalom and moving on). Or there could be other dissents not mentioned. The movement is improved by the dissents, but overall the movement is where you are headed.

Semi-dissents: We need to improve the movement. We might accept it as it is on a "coarse-grained" level, but on a "fine-grained" level still want to improve it. This requires self-criticism. Perhaps this self-criticism can morph into full-on dissent.

A person could try to live this out (or an improved version of it) both somehow integrating all of the above into everything they do in each moment (or getting closer to doing that), or by going through phases.

"Justice", Memory, and Forgiveness

A lot of what I can say about justice and forgiveness is probably well-known. But I think I should still talk about it in the context of MSL.

What is "justice"? It seems like it usually means "paying someone back for something bad they've done" or "making someone do something now to undo their own bad past actions". Basically, that the wrong things people have done in the past matter still and must be dealt with in some way. For the sake of this post, that is what "justice" means.

Is the past real? What would it mean for the past to be real? It would have to exist in the present. How would that work? I've tended to think that the past exists in the present in the form of memories that God continually remembers. We are writing a book, and the past pages exist in the present and are being read by God all the time.

We can access the past as well, through memories or proxies for memories like books.

Why do we hold onto traumatic memories?

1. One reason is to try to teach ourselves to stop trusting people who are untrustworthy. When people traumatize us, we can't believe that they could be so bad, so we hold on to two conflicting images, of them as devil and as angel. People really can be mixes of devil and angel, but they are coherent, finite mixes, not superpositions of all-devil violently alternating with all-angel. The traumatic memories are the voice saying "do not see them as all-angel", and uses lurid imagery to make its point.

2. Another reason is because the other person enslaves us to them by traumatizing us, and the memory is their lingering power over us over the years. People set themselves up as gods over us with an imperious word, or an intimidating tone of voice, or maybe an act of violence or deception. They sometimes do these things deliberately and knowingly, to achieve some kind of purpose. Other times, they act instinctively in the moment, and perhaps forget the idolatry they've set up in someone else's mind, and are surprised to see its fruits. The memory is what was set up, and the memory (empowered by demonic influence) is what enacts their past selves' will, years upon years into the future.

3. A third reason is because we hate people, are looking for an excuse to hate somebody, and the fact that they really did wrong us gives us a good excuse.

4. Another reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to add to the ones above, is the affirmation of memory. Abusive people sometimes want to erase the past, and in the process will try to discredit people's faculties of memory, and the content of those faculties. If you can't trust your memory, you can't trust yourself very much. So you have to either put up a wall to keep out people who attack your memory (part of the process of figuring out if people are trustworthy), or you have to strengthen your own memory and self-trust so that you can push out people trying to lie to you.

(There could be other reasons I haven't thought of.)

The third reason given above is I think the point of the command to forgive (forgive that you may be forgiven). That's where you really do sin by not forgiving. The other three reasons are cases where it feels like you need to forgive (at least, the thoughts you have toward the person who injured or wronged you can be negative), but in your heart you are not unforgiving, the issue more is that you need to learn to not trust people who aren't trustworthy, or you need to get free of (be freed from?) mental slavery.

Is "justice" a useful idea? The desire for justice keeps the past alive. You think about the past traumatic actions and demand that there be justice. Something happened that should not have happened, and so there is a dissonance between what should be and what is. You will hear a voice saying "get over it" as though there is no dissonance between what should be and what is. This spits on the face of morality itself, and to accept that spit is to claim that morality has lost its legitimacy. It's to claim that humans are god, not morality. If we accept debasings of morality, our societies will degrade. So the voice of "get over it" is a temptation to despair, laziness, cynicism, and degradation. If morality is weakened, people will suffer and die young who didn't have to.

5. Maybe this is a fifth reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to defend the honor of right and wrong. I guess this is "justice", the accounting of past deeds for the sake of right and wrong, urging change.

If "justice" keeps the past alive, then it gives power to the people who set themselves up as gods. We may still need to keep the past alive to teach ourselves that people aren't trustworthy. But by keeping the past alive, we give power to the people of the past to keep enslaving us. The unfortunate side effect of us choosing "justice" is that it allows evil people to do more harm to us than they otherwise would have been able to.

Is there a way out of this situation? Can we affirm morality while not allowing past (or dead) people to rule over our minds and torment us with what they've done?

I think one path is like this: first, figure out whom you can trust and how much, establishing who can be in your life and how much. This enables you to resolve your concept of the person who wronged you. Second, let go of "justice" for a minute (if you can), until the past person no longer has power over you. Third, notice that you are in danger of letting go of the value of morality. Now try to find a way to affirm morality.

I've assumed in my writing that in order for God to be legitimate, he must be truthful, and thus remember everything. (There are exceptions, but certainly he must remember everything that was us making ourselves who we are, which includes all our decisions.) So every bad thing you or another person have done is kept stored in the book of the past. It will never be erased.

That book does not have to be unbearable for God to read. (Perhaps because the death of his Son balances out its injustice.) It can't be, or else he could never rest. But there is a sorrow that is bearable. When God remembers our pasts, he does so with a mixture of feelings, including sorrow, and he will do this for all eternity. If we are like God (as we someday must be), then when we look over the parts of the book of the past that have us in them, we will feel a similar mixture, or the same mixture, of feelings about what we have done. With this, we respect everything that we have done in our lives, see the good and bad, and fit it into our reason. We read everything in it without feeling the qualia of unbearability.

I think this goes some way (maybe some would be satisfied that it goes the whole way) toward alleviating concerns that we forget that morality really matters by forgiving / letting go of "justice". After all, wrong never stops being wrong, and right never stops being right. Memory and the truth are affirmed. (But some could object that some of the wrongness has gone away if the contemplation of it is not unbearable.)

Another thought to consider is: what does it take to repent? Some people (maybe all people?) will have to look at the bad things they've done in the past, each in its turn, and reject them. To relive your past accesses certain tendencies that are still in you, and once accessed, you can choose to reject the values you had in the past, and adopt ones which are better. I can see this being a part of the Millennium.

So there is some reason to think there would be a "day of reckoning" in MSL. But does this maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality?

God must rest someday, and God is morality. God must cause to cease to exist that which is unbearable to him. Therefore, morality must not find past injustices unbearable -- can only object to them in some way that they are not unbearable. (This is intended to be the same as what I had in mind above where God reviews our past for all eternity and feels sorrow among the other feelings he has about our past deeds.) The past is loaded in a bitter way, with an edge to it, but morality itself requires that that edge be taken away someday. Therefore, the "day of reckoning" mentioned in the previous paragraph does maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality.

When we think that morality (right and wrong, the moral standard), is impersonal, we can imagine it being infinite, mathematical, mechanistic, tireless, and without responsibility. But when we think that it is personal, we see how it itself pays a cost for maximal "justice", and thus maximal "justice" goes against morality.

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.

--

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.

--

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.

Conscience; Fiducial Conscience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Aletheism" and "Omnism" as alternatives to "Altruism"

This is something I first posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.

--

(I wrote this before the FTX scandal, so it was not intended as part of the following discourse.)

I don't think it makes sense to replace the word "altruism" in the name of the "effective altruism" movement, but I can think of a couple of reframings of "what it is people who call themselves 'altruists' tend to be and be pursuing" which might be interesting or even useful to think about. These reframings can be discussed through the thought experiment of "what other words could be used besides 'altruism'?".

Omnism

"Altruism" could be seen as "an ethical orientation toward beings other than yourself". (Caring about other beings, acting for the sake of other beings, etc.) If we want an alternative to "altruism" but still want our ethical orientation to end up including beings other than ourselves, we can use the term "omnism", for "an ethical orientation toward all, or the whole of, morally significant beings". ("Omnism" from "omni", meaning "all".)

One potentially useful difference between "omnism" and "altruism" is that if you care about all morally significant beings, you care about yourself, because you are a morally significant being. This is something an "other-oriented" altruist might miss.

Another potentially useful difference is that omnists might remember more often to think not of specific small-scale interventions with certain "others", but also of collectives, systems, or the overall collective or system (the whole). I can see why a small-scale mindset is practically useful, but it could be good to bias yourself against that to some extent.

If I adopt the identity of omnism instead of altruism, I feel balanced and interrelated, plus some hard-to-express feeling from how the word "holism" or "holistic" is loaded in our culture or in my personal cultural experience.

Aletheism

Altruism and omnism are both about an orientation toward well-being, and potentially "engineering reality" to produce well-being. (Maybe that could be called "welfarism"? (Maybe not the best term).)

"Aletheism", by contrast, could be seen as "an ethical orientation toward the truth, knowing it and speaking it". ("Aletheism" from "aletheia", meaning "truth"[1].) But, this can include the goals of altruism/omnism if we understand that to really understand moral truths, we must act. For instance, if you really understand that something should not be, you must act against it if you can. That which should not be inherently calls out to be changed into that which should be.

One potentially useful difference between "aletheism" and what I guess could be called "welfarism" is that aletheists are biased against manipulation, misrepresentation, self-delusion and premature epistemic optimization.

When I try on the "aletheist" identity instead of the "altruist", I feel a clarity, honesty, and lack of controllingness, as well as perhaps some hard-to-express feeling from how the word "truth" is loaded in our culture, or in my personal cultural experience. As an aletheist, I follow reality without an agenda, and because moral truth is part of reality, I try to do the right thing. (That may make aletheism sound like a clear winner over "welfarism", but maybe "welfarism" is more "muscular", competitive, and effective, at least in the short-term. My preference/bias is with aletheism, for what it's worth.)

[1] I chose this term ["aletheism"] not with ancient Greek or Heideggerian resonances in mind, but because it's the modern Greek for "truth" according to https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=el&text=truth&op=translate

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.