natural theology > VII notes

Notes

[Sunday 5 June 2011 - Saturday 11 June 2011]

[Notebook: DB 71 Israel]

Sunday 5 June 2011

Monday 6 June 2011

Tuesday 7 June 2011

[page 12]

Wednesday 8 June 2011

The people are not wrong. 'Science' works at the edge of resolution at low bandwidth, whereas the people work at the human concrete level, but need to be educated about the consequences of moving along the conflict-cooperation spectrum.

CONCRETE = MAXIMUM BANDWIDTH (ENTROPY or dS/dt)

Bandwidth = dS / dt. S = integral dE / T

The world is a lot more complex than we think, as programmers discover when they try to model the world.

An automatic teller machine contains a model of its world so that it can respond to all possible (legal) inputs.

We are in denial about the future because we do not understand how to fix our apparent predicament because we do not understand our environment at the root (theological) level. Thomas Friedman. Friedman

Thursday 9 June 2011

Friday 10 June 2011

Traditionally religion has concentrated on the miraculous and the extraordinary, extreme personalities, an invisible God beyond all knowledge, mysterious forces that guide our lives and so on. Natural religion, on the other hand, is concerned with normal life and has only a

[page 13]

passing interest in outliers like Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Our god is absolutely normal, the everyday world which we inhabit. By taking this view, we claim that divine is not just divine, but ubiquitous, ordinary and something we can easily understand and readily act upon.

Dare to be poor.

My contribution to the theology company is mainly motivation and ideas. I am not well skilled in attracting funding for these ideas.

The root of the problem is that the ancient religions, like the ancient astronomies are in various ways inconsistent with the world. I was fortunate to be brought up in the most inconsistent of all, the Roman Catholic Church, whose institutionalized inconsistencies with reality are the source of a painfully large amount of cognitive dissonance and neurosis [and, it is becoming clear, crimes against children The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse].

Jung: Psychology and Religion in Bollingen II page 12, para. 18: 'Although the mind cannot apprehend its own form of existence, owing to the lack of an Archimedian point outside, it nevertheless exists. Not only does the psyche exist, it is existence itself.' Jung

I am a network within a network, my private system and my environment. I stabilize myself by coupling to my environment.

We must look god in the face and like what we see if we are to be happy.

[page 14] Beware the false numen.

Although religious purport to be able to change reality by non-physical means, they know in their hearts that they cannot. Prayer is for prayers, not for God, except insofar as go embraces the people praying.

The divine world requires only minimal change and reconception of Catholic dogma, putting it in a new wrapper or a higher viewpoint.

After years of shilly-shallying, the time has come to fully develop The Theology Company and start using it to raise funds.

Jung page 35: 'The true history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living psychic organism of every individual.'

Saturday 11 June 2011

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

You June copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Damasio, Antonio R, The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , Harcourt Brace 1999 Jacket: 'In a radical departure from current views on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for the making of consciousness must explain how the sense of self comes to mind. Damasio suggests that the sense of self doe snot depend on memory or on reasoning or even less on language. [it] depends, he argues, on the brain's ability to protray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed an ensuring survival.'
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Friedman, Thomas L, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Anchor 2000 Amazon.com Review 'One day in 1992, Thomas Friedman toured a Lexus factory in Japan and marveled at the robots that put the luxury cars together. That evening, as he ate sushi on a Japanese bullet train, he read a story about yet another Middle East squabble between Palestinians and Israelis. And it hit him: Half the world was lusting after those Lexuses, or at least the brilliant technology that made them possible, and the other half was fighting over who owned which olive tree. Friedman, the well-traveled New York Times foreign-affairs columnist, peppers The Lexus and the Olive Tree with stories that illustrate his central theme: that globalization--the Lexus--is the central organizing principle of the post-cold war world, even though many individuals and nations resist by holding onto what has traditionally mattered to them--the olive tree. Problem is, few of us understand what exactly globalization means. As Friedman sees it, the concept, at first glance, is all about American hegemony, about Disneyfication of all corners of the earth. But the reality, thank goodness, is far more complex than that, involving international relations, global markets, and the rise of the power of individuals (Bill Gates, Osama Bin Laden) relative to the power of nations. No one knows how all this will shake out, but The Lexus and the Olive Tree is as good an overview of this sometimes brave, sometimes fearful new world as you'll find' --Lou Schuler
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Jung, Carl G, Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C G Jung, Volume II), Princeton University Press 1975 'Nowhere else than in this study of the interplay of East and West is the point so forcefully made that man's cultural past somehow molds his feelings and thinking as well as his highly contrasting attitudes toward reality.' -- The New York Times Book Review
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Tomonaga, Sin-itiro, The Story of Spin, University of Chicago Press 1997 Jacket: 'The Story of Spin, as told by Sin-itiro Tomonaga and lovingly translated by Takeshi Oka, is a brilliant and witty account of the development of modern quantum theory, which takes electron spin as a pivotal concept. Reading these twelve lectures on the fundamental aspects of physics is a joyful experience that is rare indeed.' Laurie Brown, Northwestern University.
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Links

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse The Commission to Inquire into Child AbuseFinal Report: Executive Summary 'The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was established in 2000 with functions including the investigation of abuse of children in institutions in the State. It was dependent on people giving evidence which they did in large numbers. The Commission expresses its gratitude to all those who participated and contributed with their testimony and documents. The witnesses who came to the Confidential and the Investigation Committees ensured that the Inquiry had sufficient information to investigate the difficult issues that it was mandated to explore. The Commission was impressed by the dignity, courage and fortitude of witnesses who endeavoured to recall events that had happened many years ago.' back