"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.

Can the New Wine System Improve the World From a Secular Perspective?

This post is one I may link to outside the blog. If you are coming from outside the blog, the New Wine System, very briefly, is about 1) how we are required to become completely holy (which connects to altruistic motivation and behavior) and 2) that we have enough to realistically complete this process. (A more complete introduction can be found in the italicized introduction to this post.)

I was first interested in reading New Wine for the End Times because it talked about the problem of what happens to non-Christians who haven't heard the gospel before they die. I also was interested in it initially because of its claim to resolve problems in Bible interpretation. As I read it, those caught my attention. But at the very end, what it said about the need for holiness hit me. At that moment, I thought that the New Wine System was a powerful truth that could change the secular world.

What I mean here by "secular" is the world of civilization and its problems: physical and mental ill-health, crime, poverty, war, resource depletion, environmental destruction, X-risks, and the like.

Was the impulse of "this could change the world" a warranted one?

I think that it could be, or might not be. It depends on what other people make of it. A call to holiness might produce greater levels of civilizational altruism (helpful attention to civilization's problems) mostly by mobilizing Christians. Christians might currently feel that they don't have to work any harder because they are going to go to heaven when they die. The New Wine System tells them that their salvation is not guaranteed until they are completely holy. So they might think "how am I still sinning?" and see a lack of love for others as being where they are sinning, and remedy that (in part) with civilizational altruism.

It is also possible that the New Wine System could mobilize formerly secular people to be more altruistic (if they converted to a New Wine worldview). Secular people might think "wow, I'm morally obliged to do something" but then think "but if you think about it, morality is just made up, or some human instinct". Or maybe "Yeah I should do that, but I'm just going to die someday, never to be resurrected, and so I should just enjoy things in this life because it's the only one I have". For secular people (and many Christians, I think, in practice) morality is "what have we all agreed on as a people as to who is acceptable and unacceptable". Morality is socially constructed in practice, and about social acceptability and unacceptability, even for many who officially think that it's absolute, outside humanity. Our current socially constructed morality doesn't demand moral excellence of us. So secular people have their ways, just like Christians, for thinking "Yeah, I don't really have to obey morality. I will never be held accountable for my lack of excellence."

But the New Wine System says that you will be held accountable for your lack of excellence. Or, better put, you will have to repent from your lack of excellence someday, unless you want to reject God and die. The sooner you repent from that, the better, in terms of the good consequences for others that come as you repent.

Holiness preaching is not new, so how does the New Wine System improve on it? It offers a realistic amount of time to overcome sins, "1,000 years" in the Millennium. This generosity reduces the intensity of the New Wine System's moral call. It's not as radical a call to excellence as it would be if there was little time to pursue it. Old holiness preaching, perhaps, threw the absolutes of "repent or else" at people, but I don't know if that led to a coherent worldview that would support repentance, because the old holiness preachers (I'm assuming) believed that people went straight to heaven or hell when they died, so complete holiness could not be expected of people (or if it was, everyone or almost everyone would go to hell, which would make us question God's wisdom in creating us). So when you heard "repent or else" preached at you, you either had to shut down the rest of your mind, or have the rest of your mind say "wait, this doesn't make sense", which would weaken your drive toward moral excellence.

I think the New Wine System will not produce extreme increases in civilizational or Christian altruism, but probably would produce increases on the margin.

(If you want to pursue the idea of altruism through the New Wine System, How Can We Love? is a book about it.)

Is civilizational altruism even a good focus for Christians (including New Wine Christians) to have? I have some ambivalence about that (see Establishedness and Loving God). Success with civilizational altruism (solving temporary problems), might sometimes keep us from solving the problem of, "does God lose us to sin?" Even if we should be ambivalent about civilizational altruism (both for and against it), we should pursue whatever the altruism is that helps us to come into tune with God, in a morally excellent way. I think it's unlikely that people becoming more morally excellent (overcoming sin, pursuing the cross) would not have a positive effect on civilization on some level. Civilizational problems (at least, enough of them) are problems in God's eyes, so the Christian seeking to have God's heart will naturally seek to solve some of them.

Are humans going to have enough agency in the coming decades, for it to even matter from a secular perspective what people's hearts are? What if AI and other technological advances make more and more people unemployed, and also wealthy in all the worldly ways (mentally and physically healthy, having material abundance, at peace, etc.), so that less and less we are needed to actually make the world a better place in secular ways? (The real challenge then is to still engage people so that they really learn to love, given the New Wine need for people to be morally excellent.) I guess if nobody needs to be secularly altruistic, or increasingly few people are, then it could be that the New Wine System won't have much role to play in making the world (secularly) better.

Could ASI be persuaded of the New Wine System (since MSL is a philosophical, logical, rational attempt at formulating the New Wine System, this would be the route into an ASI's schema of what is important and true).

What would it mean for an ASI to be less than morally excellent? Maybe ASI pursue whatever goal they pursue with blind, logical extremism (intensity and something like seriousness), and a more morally excellent ASI is not one that is more intensely focused on doing what it already believes to be true, but one which is more concerned about whether it's wrong.

This raises the question of whether the New Wine System encourages extremism, by inflaming people's moral consciousnesses. Currently, we have extremism and lack of moral seriousness at the same time. Maybe we need the right people to be more morally serious and not the wrong people? Or maybe moral seriousness by definition requires a concern for accuracy in moral worldview. A concern for the truth is needed in a world with greater moral intensity. Aletheism may be needed as a counterpoint to naive New Wine thinking. You need to seriously seek what is true to know what is real and be a good ASI (or human). (In that sense aletheism is built in to the New Wine System as a part of genuine love.) This makes you consider carefully if you're wrong and to have a degree of caution and humility in pursuing your vision of what is good.

It's clear, and on some level, we already know, that we should be more morally excellent, or that we should cross from the watershed of non-excellence into the watershed of moral excellence. In that sense we should become more intense. The exact way we behave given that is not necessarily as clear, and on that level may call for us to be uncertain and unfocused at times.

Overall, the New Wine System provides a motivational structure that is more intense than what is mainstream nowadays, but more realistic than what may have been preached 100 or more years ago. It can increase altruistic motivation by some amount by changing the perspective of both Christians and non-Christians as they adopt its worldview, and this can have spillover effects in the secular world. If implemented correctly, it would not motivate fanaticism or lack of interest in the truth.

Book Review: New Wine for the End Times by Philip Brown

This review is intended to be linked to outside this blog.

The Potential of the New Wine System

The ideas contained in New Wine for the End Times, by Philip Brown (the "New Wine System") have power to help revive the church. There are two basic ideas: we must overcome all our sinful habits (by entering into a relationship of service for the Kingdom, the Holy Spirit removes our sinful habits) in order to go to heaven -- and it's possible not to make it, if we harden ourselves to God's voice; and there is a period of time after this life for us to complete that process.

If we must become completely holy, now we have something to do after conversion. We have something we must do, or else. We must become more trustworthy people (so churches will become less abusive). We must move, and grow (so churches will become less apathetic).

Lay members don't always understand why they need to become more serious followers of Jesus. Lay members who become more serious become like, simply become, leaders in the church. The more leaders, the more the burdens of leadership can be shared, and/or the more can be accomplished. The New Wine System gives people a reason to become more serious followers of Jesus.

There is an idea that Christians have some part to play in saving people from a bad spiritual fate (usually, from hell). This is a nerve-wracking idea to hold if you think people go to hell if they don't make a decision for Jesus in this life. But if there is another one for them to accept Jesus then there's a second chance.

Are people saved by faith? Then they are the ones who must make a decision for Jesus. But what about children who die? The New Wine System has a simple solution -- they can make that decision in the next life.

Are people saved by baptism? If they "slip on the way to the baptistry", are they going to hell? According to the New Wine System, they can be baptized in the next life.

Overall, the idea "needing to get saved" makes more sense under the New Wine System. When things make sense, it's easier to trust them and act on them.

Additionally, Christians should become more trustworthy people, more active in doing good, as defined by the world (in the large area where Christian values and worldly values overlap), if they take to heart the New Wine message. Secular problems (some of them vexing to Christians and non-Christians alike) should be at least somewhat ameliorated by Christians living out the New Wine System. This may make the church look trustworthy to people in the world.

Is the New Wine System true?

New Wine for the End Times tries to show that it is true by considering many of the verses of the Bible that relate. (It is about 600 pages long.) I wish I could say that I know for certain that it is successful in that. But I am not qualified to make that judgment, because I don't have the kind of mind or the interests to be good with comparing the details of Bible interpretations. However, the first time I read it, 10 years ago, I was more into that kind of question. For some years I had accumulated a sense that the verses in the Bible related to salvation didn't all make sense according to any of the existing soteriologies I knew of (Calvinist, Catholic, Churches of Christ, Arminian Baptist), at least in their most basic forms. When I read New Wine for the End Times, I saw that those verses all made sense under the New Wine System.

A few readers of this review may have the sense either that a coherent understanding of the Bible can't be had: either because it's too much cognitive labor for most people, or because the Bible simply isn't coherent as we read it (it may be a collection of human texts that the Holy Spirit uses, it may be something that makes sense in a way we will only understand in heaven, or maybe something else like that). In that case New Wine for the End Times can't be successful in convincing us of its ideas. However, we need to live our lives and how we understand salvation could be life-changing and could help us achieve eternal life (and avoid hell).

As a response to that, as a more philosophically-inclined person, I would say that God is holy, and so he has to be against sin. He can't keep it around forever. We have free will. If we choose sin, we are sinful. If we don't completely reject sin and choose God, God can't have us around forever, so he has to destroy us. It makes sense for him to give us more time than we have in this life to reject sin and choose him, since we generally are not done with that process by the end of this one.

If you found that last paragraph convincing, then I might still recommend reading New Wine for the End Times if you want to see how Philip Brown connects the New Wine ideas to the verses of the Bible.

Other information about New Wine for the End Times

Philip Brown believes that the end times are coming soon, and a significant part of New Wine for the End Times relates the New Wine System to end-times prophecy. His emphasis in the book is on preparing for the return of Jesus, by becoming holy.

I don't have an opinion about when Jesus will return. I'm not sure Brown is right, or that he's wrong. If you do not trust the pursuit of end-times knowledge, the New Wine System is still something worth considering.

New Wine for the End Times is not a perfect book, but it's the best book on a potentially important subject of biblical doctrine.

Giving Yourself up to God for Salvation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unself-focused

A theme in New Wine for the End Times: get your focus off yourself and serve God and others, and God will remove your sinful habits.

Not being self-focused is essential to salvation in MSL. In fact, caring about your own salvation can be self-focused. To be saved (to really love God), you have to put God before your salvation. God wants you to be saved, and because he does, you should do what it takes (on your end) to be saved. But your main focus is to love and trust him, not to somehow live forever apart from that.

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.

Watersheds and Divides

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

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

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

News: 8 August 2023

I put out a call to test MSL / find problems with it and solutions to those problems.

I made an update worth noting, to How Bad Can Satan Negotiate Reality to Be?; Tastes vs. Values.

That involved doing some philosophy, but I'm still overall taking a break until October 2024.

I started reviewing this blog (re-reading from the beginning). I hope to catch errors (if/when they exist) in my philosophy, but not try to fix them until later.

Long Links #3

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consensus Reality and Psychological Warfare

This is an essay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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