Notes
[Notebook: DB 58 Bringing god home]
[Sunday 26 February 2006 - Saturday 5 March 2006]
[page 59]
Sunday 26 February 2006
Collingham page 19: regal = energetic. Collingham
[page 60]
The most wonderful feature of our lives is our ability to act and the pleasure it gives us. On the other hand, we associate pain with the inability to act, either through not knowing what to do or through some sort of physical constraint (like imprisonment, torture, poverty, oppression and so on). Action is motivated by the need to move away from pain (unfitness) toward pleasure (fitness)
We associate action with motion, and in a full world) (like those modelled with the mathematics of incompressible fluid flow) every movement at one point must be matched by another move (when I go to the sink, some of the air in the room has to move to here), so creating a circulation or vortex. So we can move away from the fire to lessen the pain and damage (unless we are constrained by a torturer).
The big question for every entity is "how to act?' Among living things actions fall into three categories: avoiding death, growing and reproducing. Growth and reproduction are similar in that multicellular creatures grow by reproducing cells. Action we know is based on form, structure and knowledge. All mean the same thing, here defined by the equation structure = ordered set.
If a church is a political institution, it is liable to end up with an arbitrary set of doctrines chosen for their convenience to the ruling class; in this way religions doctrine is similar to parliamentary (or any other law) which shows strata of change laid down by successive ruling parties. It is hard for new rulers to eliminate all traces of the old, and the modern precautionary approach is to change as little as possible, just enough to deal with emergent threats and opportunities.
The foundation of evolution is the meting between scarcity of resources and the vastness of possibility.
[page 61]
Tawney again: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney
. . .
I cannot deny that the Roman Catholic Church theological edifice is magnificent, if a little inconsistent with reality. My best aim is to correct the flaws, as many have tried to do, and build on 'corrected catholicism' as my foundation.
Its one big error was to get sucked into a Platonic version of God. As ever, this mistake (which may have been the best decision at the time) was motivated by the search for security in a world which appeared to have no invariants.
One cannot design without invariants like the laws of arithmetic, of physics, of the tensile strength of steel and the compressive strength of concrete.
Tawney, Weber: 'the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of the economic spirit of the ethos of an economic system.' page ix.
We hold that all religions are a collective means to power (fitness) with theological (= scientific), social and economic aspects.
The 'fundamental importance of the economic factor' is something that the pampered potentates of the world fail to appreciate because they are protected against economic reality by a capsule of slaves.
Marx opened the debate: page x.
piety is owed to the natural divinity. page x.
page xii; "The truth is that the ascription to different confessions of distinctive economic attitudes was not exceptional in the seventeenth century.'
[page 62]
Tawney: 'how far the Reformation was a response to social needs.'
The basic idea, rely is to ignite a well founded religious revolution.
page 17: Anatole France: "La misericorde de Dieu est infini: elle sauvera meme un riche'.
The foundation of trade is truth. Every error reduces trust and slows things down.
page 18: 'the appeal to the experience of mankind, which is history . . . '
Larger doctrines reach deeper into history for their foundation, and the bifurcation between god and the world seems 3000+ years old.
page 18: 'Things have come to a pretty pass if religion is going to interfere with private life.'
page 19: 'secularization of political theory'. Figgis.
The natural religion project is based on the secularization of religion, that is bringing religion into the present moment rather that placing it in the eternal world of an invisible god.
page 20: The age of religious struggles virtually ends with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
The age of the was of economic nationalism [also religious]
page 20: 'The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.
Economics is the science of fitness.
page 23-24: "trade and tolerance flourished together."
[page 63]
Tawney page 25: 'he quality of civilization depends . . . on the transmission less of physical qualities than if a complex structure of habits, knowledge and beliefs the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race .' [species]
Founding the theology company is something like me committing myself economically to the solution of a puzzle. A good solution will yield fitness and wealth, a bad solution will send me back to rebuilding my capital for another try.
My aim is not so much to open a business as to start a whole new trend of evidence based entrants into the religion business, people operating to a new and much more socially acceptable criterion. The site asks questions that we hope thousands, millions and ultimately billions hope to answer.
page 30: Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.' Piccarda.
page 33: Creationism: genotype cannot fully constrain phenotype.
BANDWIDTH = BRIGHTNESS
Monday 27 February 2006
Some parts of my mental landscape I visit rarely, some not at all. 'Visit' means see, ether in the outside or the inside world, and we presume that the mechanisms are identical, ie communication.
Tuesday 28 February 2006
Cantor gave us a new vision of the geometrical line. Euclid defined the line in his Elements showed (by putting lines into correspondence with numbers), that there were incommensurable lines. This remains probably the most remarkable discovery of mathematics, and has
[page 64]
echoed down through the ages to here (for me) where I apply it to showing that even god (who can only compute with discrete elements) cannot implement intelligent design sensu strictu (? bad Latin ?).
Toward natural religion project is not itself a religion, but rather a theological shell within which an unlimited variety of unique religions may develop, ultimately one for each individual, but all sharing the same fundamental communication protocols.
Wednesday 1 March 2006
Thursday 2 March 2006
The unity of open source work groups is a result of their unity of purpose and of their subject. The foundations of mathematics, computing machinery and software methods are all laid down and and pretty stable, so that once a goal has been agreed on the paths to it are relatively well defined. We wish to establish a similar situation in religion and theology by rooting them in reality, both as to their constraints and their goals.
Friday 3 March 2006
'The nuclear fly' gives us a textual model of the source and sink of love. Communication, para 58. Love makes things bigger, so that things that are evenly distributed throughout space tend to spend more time there. In an error free environment (like mathematics) space grows transfinitely. At the 'noisy end of the scale it may find it difficult to make any progress. he transition from hopeless to hopeful is a phase change, the phase change which religion seeks to bring about and maintain.
The most glaring indication of the failure of ancient religions is in our rapidly growing prison populations in much of the rich and developed world. Why? More people do
[page 65]
do not fit in and must be incarcerated to keep them out of the game. Is this the result of nature or nurture?
Much of the Christian story is ludicrous rubbish that makes James Bond look credible.
'What do human rights have to do with national security? Packer, Assassins, 35. Packer
We must accept that we are built on animal hardware. (The past is the hardware of the future). How it happened cannot be changed, only how it is going to happen. 'Revisionists' would like is to act as though the past happened differently.
By accidents of birth and growth I have become deeply immersed in religious and theological questions. I have changed my religion, and I am hoping that this site will become a forum for others who have done the same.
METANOIA
religioustolerance.org. religioustolerance.org
The 'digital' nature of consciousness is evidence for the network model. As I lie down in bed, my conscious connects to al sorts of different places in my mind, one moment dreaming bizarre dreams, next realizing I need a wee, next thinking about one of my children or my jobs.
Similarly the structure of novels that flash from scene to scene and the saccadic movements of the eye.
