Notes
[Sunday 3 July 2011 - Saturday 9 July 2011]
[Notebook: DB 71 Israel]
[page 32]
Sunday 3 July 2011
In general we do not hesitate to destroy things if we can see immediate value for ourselves. Thus we go to war in hope of plunder regardless of the loss we impose on the plundered, and so with forests, peoples, and our environment in general. Clearly we have to widen our vision to the common good.
To work for the common good we must be able to see clearly how it is good for us.
Natural religion is an extrapolation of the line Yahweh (invisible and violent) through Jesus (visible and a
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peacemaker, but unique) to all of us, visible elements of a visible god, the Universe. Christians traditionally help the poor by giving them alms. The poor help themselves by learning to work for their own good rather than being slaves and recipients of charity.
Maybe time is the fundamental invariant. How much action occurs in a given time depends upon the amount of energy present.
You are your own capital and if you dissipate yourself by unholy practices you will exhaust your capital early : it is to some degree a wise choice to lead a healthy lifestyle, although you may not achieve as much or have as much fun.*
Yahweh propagates himself by violence rather than by education. By his destruction you shall know him. Ezekiel 5:5 sqq Ezekiel
Monday 4 July 2011
EVOLUTION == ADAPTATION to an environment == EDUCATION
To explain the Nazi error and all those like it we need to understand the world and the layered model gives us a clue insofar as the lower layers are more violent than the layers above them (ie more energetic) and can destroy the higher layers of they are not controlled by the higher layers. [the key to survival is to maintain everything upon which one is dependent]
*So did Freud sacrifice himself to nicotine to gain the insight
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it brings, ie the speeding up of insight by operating the system in a life shortening 'red zone' a la F1.
Natural religion must be propagated on the strength of its practical benefits rather than by violence. This suggests that we must develop an input to politics which at the moment only works if we reject the old religions because they are [have been] inherently anti-democratic.
Life is so busy that we never get around to anything, really.
Israel's principal problem seems to be its arrogant and violent God, who is modelled on the arrogant and violent petty kings of the era when the model of Yahweh developed. The Christian God developed in the context of the Roman Empire which was much more broad minded than Israel, simply because its imperial violence and efficient administration took a more abstract and general view of religion and the human condition since it embraced so many religions, philosophies and conditions of life, tempered by Greek reasonableness and scientific spirit. The next step, natural religion, must take a global view, identifying god with the Universe and embracing all peoples and states of life and the whole natural environment that underpins human reality.
The basic problem with the monarchical religions is that they create an envelope for humanity which is too small to hold the full range of independent human behaviour, often under the guise of curbing socially destructive behaviour, and then declare those who step outside the envelope sinners, dissidents, criminals etc even though their behaviour
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is marked by fair trade and no harm. This sort of management encourages a sort of pathetic deference to the ruler in all those who just want a quiet life, Like Daniel 9. Daniel In the Old Testament the prophets are the voices of the establishment, tantamount to Yahweh. Is the New Testament any different? Jesus remains a god / man / king but much of the vengeance has gone out of his spiel and although still rather apocalyptic, he manifests a softer side. He still did not make anything of the softest life of all, a democracy in which we are all free to adjust ourselves to a great extent, to increase our comfort and decrease our pain. The problem has now arisen that our pursuit of comfort is laying a heavy stress on our environment due to the large volumes of matter and energy currently needed to ensure our comfort. To travel, I must move around in 1.5 tonnes of steel, glass, etc, using about 4MJ per kilometre, 40 times as much as walking 100 kJ / km. Similarly my house weights about 100 tonnes and consumes about 20 KWh per day, many times my metabolic consumption of about 10 MJ (3 kWh) per day.
What we are looking for is a natural religious way of ife, which I think I lead. I make mistakes, but I do not think I commit sins, ie deliberate breaches of fairness or doing harm to myself or others. So virtuous that I can devise universal ethical standards based on the network model and the maximization of peace and creativity, . . . !
The world is filled with natural religion. The task is to see it and show it.
The Jews were hostile to the Roman Empire. The Christians embraced it and it embraced them.
In China, the Party, In Israel, the 'religious right'. the ? [Haredim Haredi Judaism - Wikipedia]
Yahweh was continually in conflict with the gods of the people surrounding his people who his people often found more attractive that Yahweh, being on the whole much sexier and down to earth. Most of the intemperate language of the prophets (Ezekiel) was directed at people who preferred other gods to Yahweh and the prophets blamed all the quite normal (for the time) tribulations of Israel on these acts of apostasy by elements of the Chosen people.
Christians think of sin as an offence against God which can be forgiven by God and effectively written off due to God killing his Son and so satisfying himself for everything humans do to disobey him. Natural religion thinks of sin as error and seeks to understand the root of the error and correct it, and if possible repair its consequences, a far more complex and useful task than mere forgiveness.
Tuesday 5 July 2011
The actualization of a potential requires [the] discovery of a feasible path, and we may see the half lives of various decays as indicative of the difficulty of finding the path, ie a function of improbability and search rate, eg code cracking, decay of nucleus, invention of the wheel. Quantum mechanics shows us how to parametrize insight.
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So I want to make the world conscious of natural religion. First find the path (seems well on the way) and then recruit the energy to pursue it by attracting speculative investment on the strength of its promise.
Internet advertising: hand washing sequence finishing with caption 'natural religion cleans dirty hands with real soap and real water. www.physicaltheology.com'.
Superposition : poetry : 'In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately pleasure dome decree. Where Alph the sacred river ran. Through caverns measureless to man. Down to a sunless sea. Kubla Khan - Wikipedi
All these words have orthogonal dimensions of meaning. We put them nto a poem and so construct a Hilbert space with one dimension corresponding to each word and points on this dimension corresponding to different meanings of the same word. A poem may then be seen as a region in Hilbert space in which all the words hav e plausible meanings in the context of one another and in the whole of the relevant poetic literature and culture in which the meanings of these words have evolved.
Wednesday 6 July 2011
Thursday 7 July 2011
Ultra-orthodox = Haredim
Gush Emummin Gush Emunim - Wikipedia
All paths are paths through time, ie parametrized by
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time, the fundamental count (number) ordered by before and after -- 'Numerus motus secundum prius et posterius'. Aristotle. Physics 219b2. Only photons (and perhaps gravitons) exist 'outside' time, ie do not see it, experience it. Aristotle
Humour, headroom and the E=Theorem: Humour falls into the improbable group of sentences that must be transmitted whole because they are too improbable to be encoded. Khinchin
To love one is to always have time for them.
Jung's archetype of wholeness embodies in an individual overlooks the fact that an individual may be composed of a number of individuals (as in the Trinity) so we do not need a special Jesus, we can all be Jesus and work together as parts of the Universe.
The Theology Company is like Agenix, trying to make a living out of an intellectual property developed in a University laboratory. I would say natural religion [is] at least as valuable a property as the average mainstream / line drug.
Time passes and thought flow through my mind. , each in some way a loose consequence of the one before it until I am interrupted by the phone, the cooking or any other of the subroutines of life, eg get a drink, turn off the pump.. all
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elements of the divine process.
We conceive the Universe as a (flow of something abstract) constrained by a set of static 'pipes'. Although the pipes are static and discrete, the flow is seamless.
In a democracy, the dynamics determine the statics. In a monarchy the statics determine the dynamics In the real world it work both ways, genotype shaping phenotype and vice versa. Here we diverge from the theory that the gene is everything to the softer position that the gene is an historical product that guides but does not control its possessor.
We are not exclusive, we are superpositional. Superposition is the formal representation of dynamics, insofar as the actual state is an element of the superposition of all possible states.
From this outsider's point of view, the central problem is the exceedingly parochial based of the 'Jewish' state. Israel, and many other countries, have yet to join the global trend toward natural religion whose creed may be
I believe in human rights
and in the rights of other species and elements of the world
I believe that the Universe is divine . . .
High emotion accompanies large changes in potential.
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NETWORK EMOTION
Portrait of an abstract man: I Haven't got the stomach for fighting.
Rowan Williams by David Hare Guardian: Williams: 'Jesus is the human event that reverses the flow of human self absorption'. Love your neighbour = communicate with and respond to (a Mossopism ? ["its deja vu all over again"]) David Hare
'A bishop is a person who has to make each side of the debate audible to the other', ie develop a unifying protocol, a communication channel between both sides.
What are the conditions for connection: a common code, ie agreed methods of encoding and decoding.
Insight Williams: 'Is it Eliot or Yeats who talks about a poem coming together with an audible click? You think yes, the world makes sense when looked at like that.'
Then the error: God doesn't need us. We are part of god. Need is irrelevant.
" 'We must come to grips with the idea that we don't contribute anything to God, that God would be the same God if we had never been created. God is simply and eternally happy to be God. . . . My reason for saying this is to push back on what I see as a kind of sentimentality in theology. Our
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relationship with God is in many ways like an intimate human relationship, but it is also unlike. In no sense do I exist to solve God's problems or to make God feel better.' In other words, I say, you hate the psychotherapist / patient therapy model that so many people adopt when thinking of God? 'Exactly. I know it is counterintuitive, but its what the classical understanding of God is about. God's act in making the world is gratuitous, so everything comes to me as a gift God simply wills that there shall be joy for something other than himself. That is the lifeblood of what I believe.' "
The other God. An answer to Rowan Williams.
The Roman Empire gave Jesus his change to develop a 'super' theology that embraced all the theologies that had been herded together by the Roman Army and the Roman roads. The resulting mix favoured the development of a universal Catholic religion, but their Catholicism, although it embraced the Roman Empire, is much too narrow to embrace the human world that has been connected together by European Christian imperialism, the Pax Christiana, served by ships and planes, bringing missionaries to the natives and natives to the metropolis.
Friday 8 July 2011
Saturday 9 July 2011
The writer of the Book of Job destroyed Yahweh as a credible God. When he killed Job's family, he went too far. Satan knew it, and Yahweh's boasts about the fidelity of his servant revealed him for the self important fraud he is. He does not love his people, he loves himself, like many an arrogant potentate and the author of Job made this point so strongly that a vacuum appeared in Yahweh's place, to be filled by Jesus.
