News: 26 January 2022

Over the last month, I wanted to get work done on the Bible project and MSLN book. But some things came up and I found it hard to get into a good workflow for those projects. I did do some good work for the MSLN book one day.

I did get some thinking done about the Bible project. I realized there was a significant "bug" in my process so far (which I had left off at the beginning of Exodus). I missed a couple of important dimensions to the question of how to ask who God is, the question I've been pursuing in the first pass of the Bible project. So now I realize I need to think of some way to make sure I have a good set of sensitivities before going forward. I don't want to get to the end of Revelation and realize "I should have been looking for X the whole time." It might happen but I want to do what I can to prevent it.

I thought about trying to come up with a philosophical account of what goes into who a person is. That's not an easy task, at least it doesn't seem so at first. Another approach is to go through Genesis and try really hard to think of different dimensions to who God is as I go through it. Then take a break. Then go back and do it again. Until I'm not getting anything new. Perhaps I will pursue a mixture of the two approaches.

Unrelatedly, I also thought of a way to improve my overall project (a better plan of action for the Bible project).

It's tricky managing this project because I don't think there's a formula for how to work. Should I push ahead? If I were really good at that, I might miss some of these improvements in "how" I do things. (I might get so far in I can't change to accommodate them.) I might excel at "that" I do them but have a worse final product. But if I don't ever push ahead and get things done, no final product will result.

Some of the time this last month I was working on computer maintenance. It's an interesting perspective to compare ideas to computer programs. Also, thinking about analogies between computer security and "mental security" (an analog of "mental health" or "mental strength"). I was struck by how when I looked in my virtual private server's logs, there were a lot of login attempts by bots that were just trying to see what would work (guessing passwords randomly). (This is typical for VPSes.) By analogy, things try to gain access to your mind and control you, like advertisements or attacks from the spiritual world. They are low-level and pervasive like the bots. And there's something cheap and dumb about them, like bots guessing passwords randomly -- "seeing whatever works".

Is God Lonely?; Could God be Mentally Ill?

Epistemic status: In the back of my head I think I may see things differently somewhat as I work on my Bible commentary. But I think this is my default perspective from natural theology.

Is God lonely, or is he socially fulfilled? MSL (as I currently understand it) requires that there be at least two persons who make up Legitimacy, and the Bible (in the orthodox view) says that God consists of three persons.

Someone I knew made a claim somewhat like this: God the Father enjoys community with the other two members of the Trinity.

I am not sure that person even believed in the Trinity and if not perhaps was trying to make me think of God in such a way that I would live a more conventionally healthy life. It's interesting that our concepts of God affect our concepts of what kinds of life are acceptable and vice versa. Maybe the person I knew believed that there's nothing to really know about God, so we should pragmatically shape our concept of him to serve our purposes, to deal with the obvious and undeniable problems caused by pain.

But if there's a fact of the matter about God, what is it? It makes sense that the Father, Son, and Spirit enjoy a strong bond with each other, and other than times like Gethsemane, which I would assume are rare, we don't see any temptation to discord between them. They have a complete kinship (on the level of who they are) by their faithfulness to being Legitimacy, and other than during Jesus' life on earth, they may have had no experience of parting or lack of communication.

But they are probably not emotionally satisfied on a social level, because of the billions of people who misunderstand them or even reject them. If you think of God as power, wisdom, and permanence, then God is plenitude. But God's power is thwarted by a single feeble human who chooses not to trust him. If you think of God as love, he is poor, because love impoverishes itself. God is disestablished by us and will only be established (really himself) when the beings who exist are fully in tune with him. By being our father (and not some professional deity) while we are strangers to him, he values us personally in a way that we do not reciprocate. And to love someone who does not love you in kind is a lonely thing to do.

One way to think of God is that he (or they) are vast, greater than all the stars we think are in the universe. But another way is to think that God is miniscule, only three beings in a vast sea of living people (and other spirits), and who knows how many dead people waiting to be resurrected.

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Does this mean that God suffers from poor mental health, in some sense? It sounds like it. But maybe that is what is required of love.

God has to manage to do his work anyway. We tend to think that we have to shut off our emotional understanding of reality so that we can get the work done that will make things better. This grown-up way of doing things makes it so that we no longer see the world as vividly, neither the rightness nor the wrongness of it.

If we take this to its logical conclusion, nothing matters, and then getting work done (the thing that was our reason for shutting off emotions) is pointless. We might think that God is a professional and sets his feelings aside to get the job done of serving us. But if he is too professional, maybe he will feel like there is no point to anything and blink us out of existence. We might not mind that, if we too have shut off our emotions to the point that we feel like our own existence doesn't matter. But we might not like it if he gradually lost a sense of meaning, and withdrew from the world on the personal level long before he stopped making the psychological and physical underpinnings of it work. A world that gradually gets more and more neglected by God is one that will get more and more messed up, more and more a hell. So we would want it to be the case that God is bound to an emotional truth, some set of emotional responses following from the meaning of things. God's feelings would enable him to keep us out of hell.

This truth, or these truths, may be inconvenient. They are part of Legitimacy, which is God and who he is. Legitimacy, that things should be and the way that they should be, determines how a person should respond to whatever the state of reality is. God has to respond to the truth even if it's not pragmatic. Instead, he has to feel the feelings that are true and still function. God's job is a hard job, harder than yours or mine.

(Also as a consequence of everything being experience and thus all metaphysical contact being that of consciousness experiencing another consciousness, God feels our pain exactly as we do and thus can't rest if we can't rest.)

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Is loneliness really mental illness? Even intense loneliness? What exactly is "mental illness"? Thinking it over a bit, I wasn't sure I could easily draw the line between mental illness and what is not mental illness. But I thought "Why do we care about mental illness?" Generally we care about mental illness if it's something that makes it so that we are not in touch with reality, or so that we harm ourselves or others. Is loneliness self-harm? There is harm in negative feelings (subjective). Sometimes, but not necessarily to the point that we die, harm others, or fail to perform whatever good that we ought to for them (more objective). (The difference between subjective and objective harm.)

Being lonely might make us more in touch with reality. Both in the sense that when we are alone, we realize that we are alone most truly by being lonely, and because when we seek to be really in touch with reality, it might make us be alone. As a consequence of really being excellent at minimizing harm in the world overall, it may make you different from most other personal beings and thus alone on that level. So if we are trying to minimize "harm-and-being-out-of-touch-with-reality" (H + !R), we might need to sometimes become more lonely. Minimizing mental illness in a conventional sense might cause us to have more (H + !R), because "mental illness" as culturally defined may not consider the bigger picture of what reality could be. (Sometimes, of course, reducing (as opposed to minimizing) mental illness in a conventional sense reduces (H + !R).)

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We want it to be the case that God's (H + !R) does not get so high that he is untrustworthy, unable to fulfill the role of "good God" for all of us. Clearly, God is untrustworthy at least locally by allowing evil to happen (hence the problem of evil). However, this is bearable if we believe that there was a time before evil and a time after it is gone forever. We would like it to be the case that God is unshakeably good-willed and ultimately competent.

In the MSLN theodicy, it is assumed that God permits evil as a consequence of his holiness. It is because he is unable to will evil that he needs evil beings to will it for him in order for us to be tempted (a necessary part of us having a choice whether to love him or not), and then those evil beings have leverage to make the world worse than it needs to be. God is powerful enough to end any reality (any evil), but it turns out that for the best good outcome to happen (for us to really love him), he must permit the world to have evil in it (to end evil would mean he would have to end us). From that angle, God is behaving in a maximally trustworthy manner, because he is doing the best that can be done for our spiritual well-being. (But it is understandable if not all people can see that all the time, given what happens to them.) Still, what is most trustworthy is some day when evil is gone. God is not on the side of evil and can't stand it forever, so it will be gone, and hopefully each reader of this post will be on God's side when that day comes, rather than identifying with evil in any way.

MSLN theodicy (if it's true) gives us a reason to be certain that God's character is completely trustworthy and that evil exists for an ultimately good reason, and that in terms of "raw power" (what omnipotence may be talking about, I think) God is powerful enough to get his will done, and thus that untrustworthiness is only temporary. But another solution to the problem of evil could conceivably be that God is mentally ill, and inconsistently opposes and supports evil, for reasons that may always be inscrutable to us.

So now I would want to rule out the possibility that God could be mentally ill in a way that threatens his ultimate trustworthiness. I will attempt to do so using (H + !R) as a measure of trustworthiness.

(H + !R) = "harms self or others, is not in touch with reality". If God wills harm for others, it might be because it's the least harmful thing to do in the end ("teaching a lesson"), but if he's not into harm-minimization, he's not legitimate and not God. There are two ways to show this, the "abstract" way, and the "personal" way. The "abstract" way is that harm is a class of damaging something (by definition) which is a diminution of that thing's value on some level -- something which keeps it from its most-valuable state. Legitimacy (value itself) would have to be in favor of whatever was valuable, and thus for each thing to be its most valuable (and thus least-harmed), whenever possible.

The "personal" way is to look at "axizeiology" and consider how we as personal beings think of legitimacy, and especially maximal legitimacy (that which can't be argued against). It is as though we have instilled in us an instinct for recognizing legitimacy, which is helpful in identifying what legitimacy ought to be. We know in this personal way that beings that are maximally legitimate love, and choose the maximally competent course of action. To whatever extent that legitimacy is mentally ill, it still chooses maximally competent courses of action.

What looks like mental illness can be to be two or more wills in one body (or for a body to be possessed by a bad will), or to have a bad will which sometimes masquerades as a good will. In order for legitimacy to love, all of its wills must love (legitimacy can comprise multiple persons). There is a harmony in legitimacy. So what ought to be legitimate is a person (or a set of persons) who are not inclined to harm, and who choose the maximally competent path to avoid harm. Whatever could be called mentally ill in them must be something that doesn't impinge on that. Loneliness or other pains may be psychologically costly (subjectively harm), but they do not prevent God from choosing the maximally competent course of action. He (they, given that God is both a community and its chief member) always does the right thing given the constraints he works with. And to really love sometimes requires suffering, even intense suffering.

Is God in touch with reality? Legitimacy must metaphysically connect with all things it legitimates and thus has all data that exists at its disposal (it is conscious of what it connects to). Legitimacy connects to everything that exists. Does it sufficiently generate enough thoughts to understand reality in depth? (Like generating enough theories to understand given data.) In order to validate something, you have to know how it relates to everything else. Axizeiologically, Legitimacy must understand how everything relates to everything else as part of being competent. So God, as Legitimacy, must be completely in touch with reality, both by possessing knowledge of all that is and by coming to as deep an understanding of it as possible.

In that case, we have reason to think that God passes the (H + !R) test for trustworthiness, and so to whatever extent God is mentally ill, it does not render him untrustworthy. His mental illness is not a form which renders him incoherent internally, so he is of one unified will which loves.

Subjective vs. Objective Harm

Epistemic status: provisional.

See also Who You Are vs. What You Are.

Subjective harm is experiential and damages the state you are in, and is inherently temporary, while objective harm damages who or what you are, and is inherently permanent unless remedied.

What defines a person? In a weak sense, we are all that we experience. Everything that you experience is part of your experience body. In the strongest sense, we are who we are. We have preferences, and we choose to change them. But there may be a grey area in between, between "who" and "experience body". "What" you are (perhaps your physical strengths, or social roles, or something like that) is not exactly just the state you are in, nor your character.

Was Jesus harmed on the cross? Yes, his experience body was harmed. No, his character was unharmed. Was he harmed in the sense of "what" in any way? His physical body was harmed. A body can be made out of experience, but there may be another dimension. Was it harmed permanently? If experience is inherently temporary, then what is permanent about a person is how God sees them. He's the one who recreates our experience bodies whenever we exit unconsciousness. So in his eyes, was there any change in what Jesus was? No. "What" Jesus was was stored in God's mind and will and could be trivially restored into an experience body of Jesus' own (and was, when Jesus was resurrected). Jesus was only harmed subjectively, but not objectively.

But when Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, his body had wounds. So maybe "what" he was was damaged in God's eyes by the resurrection? I could ask, which would Legitimacy prefer, the Jesus who had been faithful and died (confirming the validity of Legitimacy by Jesus, a member of Legitimacy, being willing to bear the burden of human death), or the Jesus who hadn't done that? Real harm is destruction of true value, and God is the judge of that.

Maybe the body that is more "true" (if not more "beautiful") is Jesus' wounded body and Legitimacy prefers truth over beauty (or what we conventionally think of as beauty). In the vision of Revelation, Jesus is both perfect- and powerful-looking (arguably) with (Rev. 1:14-15) "His head and his hair were white as white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace. His voice was like the voice of many waters." It doesn't say there either way whether he had wounds. The vision later (5:6) shows a lamb who appeared to be slain, which from the text I would assume is Jesus. I imagine a lamb with blood on its neck. My interpretation is that at the end of time Jesus will be both in some sense perfect (or impressive in the conventional sense, which we call "perfection" and which we apply to beauty and power) and in some sense wounded.

Whatever a person is supposed to be according to Legitimacy, they will be, unless through their decisions ("who" they are), they limit God (Legitimacy). Even the damage done to "what" you are, done by other people, can be restored, because God can separate any two people so that they don't interact with each other, and then he can restore the damaged one. But the damage done to "who" you are, can only be remedied by you, and sometimes damaged relationships and thus social roles won't come back, if one or both of the people involved are no longer "who" they used to be.

Who You Are vs. What You Are

Epistemic status: provisional.

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

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

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

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

2021 to 2022

Review of 2021:

In the first half of 2021, I finished the X-Risk and the The Feeling of Value book reviews and EA population ethics reading list that I mentioned at the beginning of last year. I also wrote a review of Warranted Christian Belief.

I wrote other blog posts through June. Toward the end of June, I became more active on Twitter. I found the "Christian humanist" online scene (people into high church conservatism concerned with the relationship between Christianity and politics, and also human nature). I responded to a vocal member of the scene with Establishedness and Loving God, in September. Then in October and November, I transitioned toward non-blog writing projects. I had begun writing a book on "the cross" in the summer, and in the fall added two other projects: a more organized and developed explanation of MSLN and a Bible commentary. I worked on them in December.

Comparison of expectations with reality

My predictions last year were conservative, and came true. (I finished the reviews, did start reading and reviewing Principles of Human Knowledge by Berkeley, and started one more EA reading list.) I did develop MSLN more.

In terms of things that are retrospectively surprising, the most notable is finding the Christian humanists and finding myself writing a book-length blog post in response to them. I have had thoughts relating to politics in the past, but didn't see it as a core part of what I would write about. At this point, I realize that beyond Establishedness and Loving God, I may not be qualified to say much more in that space, so that might be the high-water mark of my writing on politics. However, part of me thinks that the subject is important, and that explaining how MSLN relates to policymaking and governance is actually very important in the long run. If AGI doesn't kill us all, politics may remain or grow more important in the future, because human decision-making could constrain how the AGI behaves (it having been trained to be our servant, or it respecting our values so much that it respects our value of us having agency as decision-makers). However, as important as I think social and political theory from an MSLN perspective is, I may or may not be the person to do that writing.

Preview of 2022:

The most obvious thing to predict, which I see ahead, is that I will continue to work on my writing projects (the cross book, MSLN book, and Bible commentary). I find myself writing less for the blog in the last few months and expect that will continue, although I may still write some posts, if it seems necessary to put a particular idea out there.

I don't feel as interested in the Christian humanists and don't see myself interacting with them much (unless perhaps I get a reply to Establishedness and Loving God). In December I made some contact with an EACH member (Christian effective altruism group) and think that I might try to interact with them some in 2022.

The Bible commentary is a long project which I think will be no more than 25% done by this time next year (at a most optimistic realistically possible estimate). I might have the MSLN book done by this time next year. (Or as done as I can make it without feedback. Given the kind of writing it is, it might need a lot of work once I get feedback.) I may not work on the cross book too much this coming year (mainly gathering sources).

News: 26 December 2021

Recently I haven't been posting as many blog posts. Part of that is because I've gotten more involved in my other writing projects.

The Bible project was going slowly for a while. I had to figure out how I was going to approach it. Over the past week I finally was able to go at the pace it will take to finish in what I consider a reasonable amount of time. The earlier chapters sometimes settle questions or prove points so that later chapters don't have to comment on them, which is an encouraging phenomenon (with respect to finishing on time). But as I go I find new writing styles and areas of discussion. So Exodus (where I am now) presents new challenges.

The MSLN project is doing okay. I'm currently writing up notes. I think I have enough to try to draft the Metaphysical Organism and Speaker parts (at least, a first draft), but I think I need to do more thinking about the Legitimacy part.

Sin is False Morality

Sin is often a moral act, it's just that the morality is a bad one. For instance, lust as a necessary thing for people to engage in in order to pursue mating partners so that their genes get passed on. It's extremely important that genes get passed on, so much so that men have to stare at every attractive woman who walks by, just in case it's an opportunity to pass on the gift of life.

Anger is necessary so that we can defend what is ours. It's extremely important that we not die -- we are the precious gift of life that is our responsibility to not lose -- so much so that if someone even gets close to being close to threatening a resource that might somewhat prevent our deaths, we must become angry -- just in case that's the critical thing that is the cause of us living an extra day or week or even month.

(Any other sin that can be linked to self-interest works similarly.)

When we make idols out of people or things, then we are being moral -- the morality of worshiping false gods.

Satan tempts us to be falsely moral, using responsibility.

There are theistic worldviews and atheistic worldviews. According to atheistic worldviews, there is no God to help you, no God to trust in. You have to take care of yourself. If you do wrong, you have to take responsibility for what you did, because there is no God to make everything right in the end. So your mistakes will never be covered over, and you need to always get things right the first time. Being very responsible in an atheistic way takes us away from trusting in God, because we must be in control of our own (or others') well-being, not letting God be in control. But in order to be responsible to God (to "fear" him, perhaps), we need to trust him. His reality calls for us to trust, so we need to respond in trust. Trusting God can be a deliberate, ethical act.

Being responsible to the wrong morality is potentially worse than to be irresponsible, although that also can be bad.

A Reason Why Fiducialism May Be Necessary

In Fiducialism, I discuss the attitude of fiducialism, of seeking to trust. It can also mean an ethical orientation of trust-maximization.

Is it necessary to maximize trust? Here's a reason why:

We trust with something like a body. I would use the metaphor of "body" for the part of us that trusts, although it's not identical to the physical body. This body is opened up, or not. If we refuse to open all the parts of us, we can't fully trust God.

Trusting is valuing with your body. Your body says "this thing will enhance me" and that which enhances you is valuable to you (in this case to the part of you that trusts, your "trust body"). So if we can't fully trust God, we can't love him with all of our beings. Therefore we should seek to open up the different parts of our trust body, so that we can receive anything at all in those parts. We might prefer to not trust, but if we learn to trust now, we will be prepared for when we meet God.

Disestablishedness vs. Anti-temptation

Epistemic status: provisional. May be incompatible with something I've said about disestablishedness or establishedness.

In MSLN Reasons to Oppose X-Risks, I said that it might be the case that rebuilding civilization after a near-extinction of humanity, or an extinction (God restarting humanity), could be painful for God, involve many generations with less-than-ideal moral environments (in need of progressing morally to the level we've reached now), and, if our civilization is bad spiritually in terms of potentially leading to hardening (which it sometimes seems to be), ours might still be better than average -- if God wants to end our civilization, he should make that call (to "roll the dice" and see what the next civilization would bring). He could end our civilization unilaterally whenever he wanted, and since he hasn't, we might assume that it's our job to keep things going, to not let civilization end.

However, in Establishedness and Loving God (in the section on abortion), I said that civilizational disestablishedness can be uniquely good for developing people spiritually. This is why this life is better than heaven or the Millennium so that, from one point of view, it's not worth aborting babies so that they are not messed up spiritually by living in this life (instead of a nicer afterlife), or from another point of view, it makes sense that God has us live through this "vale of tears" rather than sending us straight to heaven -- being in a nice environment like heaven may not be conducive to us getting the really essential good, for us to become people in tune with God, who love him with all our beings.

It occurred to me that if the disestablishedness of this life is good, or has good effects, maybe a case could be made that if God had to restart civilization after human extinction, things could be better spiritually in the new, less-developed civilization than they are in our civilization as it is now. So then it wouldn't be as clear that we should continue our current civilization (or the human species) -- maybe we should let it (or them) end.

The way I try to resolve this is to say that there are two dynamics in civilization: (dis)establishedness and (anti-)temptation. Establishedness says "you are as you should be, you are the way you are". Anti-temptation causes you to see God as desirable, seekable, trustworthy, or whatever else helps you to bond with him. If you are established in such a way that you do not seek the deepest connection with God, then for your own good, it's good for there to be disestablishedness in your life, to break your bad establishedness. But, in a world without anti-temptations, disestablishedness may not do any good. It's possible to break a bad establishedness without a good one re-forming in its place.

So over time, civilization works to reduce disestablishedness but it is the job of those who love God to anti-tempt, to make up for the loss of disestablishedness. Arguably our civilization has built up a lot of establishedness and anti-temptation. Compared to the Millennium, it is less established and has less anti-temptation. The ideal world, for spiritual development, is one that permits some establishedness but also has a lot of disestablishedness, as well as a lot of anti-temptation and not too much temptation. We have significant amounts of disestablishedness and anti-temptation nowadays, which likely makes our time more ideal for spiritual development than under the Millennium (on average, given that the disestablishedness and anti-temptation are currently unevenly distributed among the human population). Also because we do have anti-temptation to lose, it isn't clear that the spiritual regime that would result from restarting civilization would necessarily be as favorable for spiritual development, because it might not have as high a level of anti-temptation.

(Could Jesus (an example of an anti-temptation) be preached in a new (restarted) civilization after an extinction of humans? Certainly, but for some reason he didn't come (so couldn't have been preached) until 2,000 years ago. Maybe that reason would apply to telling about him in a new civilization, starting off from a low level of development.)

So it still looks like it is the case that disestablishedness can have good effects, and also the case that civilization is worth preserving.

News: 26 November 2021

Recently I've started work on a couple of long-term projects, in addition to the book on the cross. One of them is a more organized version of MSLN than is on this blog, and of whatever other doctrines I feel should go with it. (Strictly speaking MSLN isn't about epistemology, or is somewhat indirectly about it if it is, but I might put epistemology in there.)

The other is a commentary on the Bible, which I expect to take a long time. The book is about the range of possible ways to understand God and what he prefers, and which ways we should prefer, act, and trust, given that range, for ethical purposes. Also, since I will be reading the Bible, I will see how well the philosophical part of MSLN (MSL, one might say) interfaces with it. (Basically, trying to apply the epistemology of love / altruism to the Bible, given the degree of epistemic and maybe therefore normative uncertainty involved.)

The two purposes of this text are: first, to provide information to any secular people who might have come through MSL to the point of trusting the Bible for ethical purposes (to see specifically how to come into tune with God). Second, to demonstrate the method of uncertainty filtered through ethics ("uncertain obedience") to recommend it to Christians to provide a way to settle doctrinal positions while still acknowledging what we don't know -- maybe this would help to some extent with significant church divisions like that between more conservative and more liberal / progressive Christians.

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Currently, with the first, philosophy project, I've read some of Copleston's A History of Medieval Philosophy. Also I've ordered the books in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series on Plato and Aristotle. I found that after reading their book on Berkeley, and thinking about Berkeleianism for a while, when I got to Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, there wasn't a lot new I needed to understand. The titles in the series are written by different authors and are probably hit or miss, and Berkeley may be a particularly easy philosopher to summarize, but I'm still somewhat optimistic that I can get low-hanging fruit out of them without (as) much reading. Also I checked out a book on metaphysics from the library.

I tend to do better by learning the basics of other philosophers' views and then re-deriving whatever follows (that I feel the need to think of), and then maybe looking at the details of what they say. I'm not really interested in being able to, say, accurately explain some other philosopher's work, but I do want to let them influence my own. I also find it useful to keep my mind in the area of philosophy by reading even about philosophers whose views don't interest me.

I don't intend to directly cite very much of this reading in my own book on my own philosophy, which is why I'm okay reading library books.

With the second, Bible reading, project, I have done some planning and drafted some introductory sections and have read about halfway through Genesis in the first pass of reading through the Bible (out of maybe four or five passes total).

Is Complete Trust in God Necessary for Salvation?

Is complete trust in God necessary for salvation, according to MSLN?

I'm not sure I can come up with a categorical "yes", but I think I can get close to a "yes".

As I study the Bible, I may come up with a stronger case, but I can at least say that to the extent that a person believes in the Bible through MSLN, we can see Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount teaching that a person should not be anxious and should ask God for what they need (whether they objectively or only psychologically need it, I guess). Not being anxious is a form of trust, and asking for what you need is a form of trust. Jesus ends the Sermon on the Mount with these words (Matthew 7:)

21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will tell me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in your name, in your name cast out demons, and in your name do many mighty works?' 23 Then I will tell them, 'I never knew you. Depart from me, you who work iniquity.'

24 "Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. 25 The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn't fall, for it was founded on the rock. 26 Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn't do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell -- and its fall was great."

I'm not sure all of the Sermon on the Mount's commands can be seen as absolute moral commands, or if some of them can be seen as practical advice that is upstream of obeying moral commands. However, some of the commands, like not being angry, and forgiving, do have language that suggests they are moral commands, related to whether you will be saved, and so it is with anxiety (Matthew 6:)

24 "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can't serve both God and Mammon. 25 Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 See the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you of much more value than they?

27 "Which of you by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28 Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin, 29 yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won't he much more clothe you, you of little faith?

31 "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?', 'What will we drink?' or, 'With what will we be clothed?' 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first God's Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore don't be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own evil is sufficient.

Vss. 24 - 25 suggest that to be anxious is to serve Mammon -- maybe not an airtight inference, but I think strong enough to make us concerned that if we never stop being anxious, we will be kept out of heaven. We would be trusting uncertain things (being anxious) rather than trusting the certain person.

That may be enough to convince some people (it would be enough for me), but there may be other Bible passages that strengthen the case.

Also, for those who do not trust in the Bible as much, but only in the natural theological part of MSLN, what can be said philosophically?

It does seem odd to think of someone who refuses to cease being anxious entering God's rest. It may be "physically" (psychologically?) impossible for a personal being to be in communion with rest if they are anxious. It sounds true by definition. It is as though we condemn ourselves to something like hell if we do not cease to be anxious. Not being anxious is a big part of trusting.

Can God rest if we don't rest? According to the metaphysical organism argument, God experiences exactly what we experience, so, no. That's a fairly airtight reason to think that anxiety must cease, and that if our will is what keeps it going, it must change or we must be destroyed.

Is it possible to sustainably exist in an environment forever if you don't fully trust it? I can think of multiple cases where I was in a social environment that wasn't feeding me (or wasn't feeding me "good food"), and I sort of died inside and had to escape. I needed my "food" from somewhere, and had to flee the sterility or the sickness to find it. I didn't trust my environment, because it wasn't offering me what I needed, or what I hungered for. A person in God's presence who did not fully trust him, was not fully and on all levels receptive to him, perhaps hungry for him enough to keep up with his richness, might find him to be "bad food", or might want to "eat" something outside of God (some kind of sin). Then that person would become desperate and start acting out, but would have nowhere to escape to without disturbing God's rest.

You can resolve to be friends with God forever with your will (with you, the real you), but if your "body" (or whatever part of your psychology is really where the "organ of trust" is located) can't stomach God, you will be tempted over and over by your indigestion of him to turn against him. If you model temptation (as I think maybe I would, although I haven't thought about this as much as I might) as "roll an N-sided die and if you roll a 1 you give in", then to be tempted by any finite-sided "temptation die" over the course of everlasting time, at some point you will roll a 1 and turn against God. You might be able to turn back to God after giving in (or maybe not), but in any case it would disturb God's rest. Therefore it is best for us to learn to trust God fully before we enter his rest.

(Supposing that your conscious love for God is unshakeable, so that you can roll the die and never roll a 1, every time you're tempted by your "body" to reject God, you will experience conscious stress, which will disturb God's rest.)

Another dimension of trust connects to loyalty. If you follow someone, you trust them on some level (true even on social media). To put full and unwavering allegiance in someone is to trust them, to trust that they satisfy whatever criteria obtain for them to be the thing in which you should put full and unwavering allegiance. The phrase "give your heart" to someone sounds like we are putting something valuable in the care of someone else, which is a form of trust.

This may not be a complete list of reasons why we must come to fully trust God, but it's probably sufficient for now.

When I started this post, I felt like I couldn't say for sure ("categorically") that complete trust of God was necessary for salvation. But I think it's necessary for salvation, for reasons given above.

(I don't always stop to acknowledge my intellectual sources, mainly for having so few of them, not wanting to repeat the same names over and over, but I will say that a lot of my concept of trust comes from Joseph Godfrey's Trust of People, Words, and God.)

Sarkar; Sarkar and Truth

In Hinduism, sarkar is (something like) how your pattern of behavior, vibe, feeling, "energy", and spirit are all one thing. If you make a physical movement, it affects the rest of your sarkar. Your feelings will affect your movements. Your feelings are movements, in a way. You are like a motor with interconnected parts moving in a rhythm. You have an inner rhythm which is interconnected with and between your consciousness and your body. (Again, this is approximately what Hinduism says. I may have bent it somewhat to my own purposes.)

It's hard to believe things that you can't work into your sarkar. It could be that we don't live according to our real beliefs, what we really see to be true according to our best seeing. That best seeing may be buried under a pile of how everyone around us patterns us, physically, with shared vibes, and so on. The human body, the brain, the physical mechanisms of the mind, can seemingly only be patterned in certain ways. Intellectual knowledge, the "seeing-that-a-belief-is-justified" (perhaps the ought-belief), might be unbelievable, "un-hold-able", untrustable, if it is not in line with the body in some way.

However, if we want to believe, in a more bodily way, something we see to be true (perhaps is-believe it), then we may have to retrain our sarkars so that they fit what we really believe to be true. We may have to do this against the headwind of how other people pattern us.

Another perspective (than saying what is intellectually true should pattern our sarkars) would be to say that the sarkar is what is right. The right sarkar is what is right, and intellectual beliefs must be chosen as to whether they fit the right sarkar.

How would you know which approach to take? Sarkar-truth or intellect-truth? Either one could be true, one might think. I can't be sure that this is the only meta-truth approach, but the one I tend to favor (the one I currently think best), is that of the epistemology of love / altruism, where we consider all the possibilities, and when there is uncertainty, try to trust and act according to the course of action or trusting which avoids the greatest harm. So if intellect-truth says that there is a threat, it should be taken seriously, and if sarkar-truth says (or "feels") that there is a threat, it should be taken seriously as well. Whatever threat matters most should be prioritized, but the threat that is of secondary importance should be taken into consideration as well.

Doing the Biblical Thing

There are times in life where we have to weigh which path to take; other times where we are preparing ourselves to be a certain way, so that we make the right split-second decision when it arises and there's no time to think (more, or less, aware that that's what we are doing). If we can be deliberate, we might think "What's the wise thing to do? The prudent? The morally correct one?" (The prudent person eats stew, but Esau sold his birthright for stew -- an unwise choice.) We might also think "How can I love God through what I do? How can I trust him? How can I be loyal to him?"

We can certainly make mistakes, and sometimes we can't know the right thing to do in advance. If we feel that we are risking doing the wrong thing, we may try to be risk-averse (choose the safest option). But we can also say "Even if I'm doing the wrong thing, at least I'm doing the biblical thing". (We can find some precedent in the Bible for some behavior, though that behavior might not measure up to worldly standards of good decision-making. Care should be taken that use of the Bible is well-implemented.) Not "doing the wrong thing" in a sinful way, but in an unwise way. Some people choose wisdom (worldly wisdom), while other people choose to be true to God (spiritual wisdom), through the Bible or whatever other valid source of information about what God wants.

Worldly wisdom may employ reason, and we can know things about God using reason, but according to one form of reason, we seek to do what is socially defensible and in line with human instincts, while according to the other we acknowledge God as he really is, as one who connects to all of life.