vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
[Sunday 27 July 2014 - Saturday 2 August 2014]
[page 2]
Sunday 27 July 2014
An eternity of agony in Hell for Lucifer and his angels — cruel and vindictive punishment (and expensive) or fitting (conveniens) for a benevolent God.
Jesus as a revolutionary leader had a few hard and stupid things to say as we as plenty of traditional good advice. Dud he say these things or were they put into his mouth by the creators of his legend (Smiley's people). We can do better. leCarre
McGreal: How many deaths can we attribute to RCC policy? Chris McGreal
We see the Church as guilty of perverse intellectual subsidy.
Much of the pain in the world is induced by the enforcement of borders [ie immobilization] which maintains the political, religious, cultural and economic disparities. These policies overlook the fact that all efficient networks are scale invariant: each new node in the net is both a source and sink of traffic, economica and cultural.
As a dissatisfied Catholic, I wish to make the Catholic church truly catholic: κατα τον ολον.
[page 3]
One justifies oneself in public conversation according to what one conceives as publicly acceptable norms.
Prediction: how many times do you have to jump on a screw liying flat on the floor before it jumps up and sticks in your foot? It happened to me on the first try last night. A [painful] miracle?
Always hoping that my luck holds and that I can bring this project to fruition, ie find some other people to whom it makes sense.
Turing page 71: King's College Hodges Alan Turing
Communist Manifesto Hodges page 72: 'Buried in the Communist Manifesto was the declaration that the ultimate aim was top make society "an association in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all"'. The peer principle.
The hierarchical order is also an order of coupling strengths between the elements of each layer, that is rates of communication.
General relativity is a property of a physical communication network in which we assume that one quantum of action corresponds to the computation of one computable function. This is why the states of an atom (or anything else) are countable. Countable functions can be represented without error, ie deterministically (in the formal world).
We fear the determinism of Turing machines, but are released from that fear by the incompleteness introduced by networking and layering which introduce effectively random interrupts.
[page 3]
From Hilbert space to network. We start with the two state system |0> and |1> and imagine them permuting between |0> and |1> and |1> and |0> by communicating with one another at a certain rate determined by the energy of the state φ = a|0> + b|1>.
Set = peer group (physically?)
Hodges 91: Hilbert consistent, complete, computable.
Gödel: there is no essential distinction between numbers and operations on numbers. Hodges page 102. [In the purely formal world, where symbols can mean (correspond to) whatever we like]
Hodges page 107: Turing's breakthrough was to imagine computation as an algorithmic [physically (ie discretely) representable] process rather than as a mystery [hidden in the invisible mind] [analogous to calculus, he showed how to 'differentiate' a complex process: each operation makes a difference].
The power of the network is that it is a force toward truth because communication allows comparison and comparison detects error.
Monday 28 July 2014
Importance of state layer of human organization: Mason "metasocialism' - deciding the goals and financing innovation toward these goals. Step 1: Revise theology. Paul Mason
All fixed points in God are autonomous sources, ie God is everywhere hiding in the energy of the local ground state.
We make the identification form = fixed point = message = memory. A work of art is the shaping of a memory in a certain material, paint eg or stone, We can observe form, but we cannot, on some limit contained in the invisibility theorem, observe changing form, ie
[page 5]
dynamics. So the clock in a computer hides the changes wrought by the signal to act until all parts of the system have settled to their new state, which is then revealed and acted upon as the input to the next step in the process. A single computer runs on a single clock with al lits operations having a fixed phase relationship phase locked byt he clock. A network on the other hand embraces many clocks so communication requires memory buffering to adjust for asynchronicity. Phase-locked loop - Wikipedia
Millitants have tiny minds, AP Baghdad
Tuesday 29 July 2014
If the world is digital to the core we can explain the uncertainty principle by the lack of resolution of a digital system.
Networking and peace: networks serve t eliminate inconsistency by comparison and rejection. We can place the similarity of equal length strings on a scale 0 (nothing in common) to 1 (identical). The tolerance of a network is measured on this scale running from say what you like to only utter approved sentences. We may be able t expand the detail in scale by parametrizing differences in terms of layers. On this scale the Catholic Church is exactly wrong s the lowest theological layer where we face the binary comparison God is . is not the Universe.
Francis: August hammering the line that God = Universe and theology = science. The Church;s denial of experience based reality is a fundamental ethical and moral failing, The failure that makes it happy to accomodate child sexual and mental molestation,
Poor childless nuns deprived of sensual pleasure, lik to put me
[page 6]
on their knees at lunchtime because i was a cute little kid (like all kids).
As the letters [to Francis] go on both the identification of the failures of the Church and the proposed corrections gain in resolution and precision.
Secrecy is the enemy of the corrective power of network. One must present one's work to the peer group for checking.
Corrs: 'Heaven knows no frontiers and I've seen heaven in your eyes.' Corrs No Frontiers
The easy option is to go political and ty to be a jesus like personality on the world stage. The valuable option is to try to publish the formal theory in a consistent form.
Corrs, Borrowed Heaven The Corrs Borrowed Heaven
Indeterminism begins with a network. ie as soon as there are two actors communicating.
Wednesday 30 July 2014
Francis July finished
We need make no differentiation between physical and logical networks insofar as information is always being carried by a physical symbol or set of symbols like a photon or a container ship. These packets are addressed and forwarded just like a lostal of any other freight system.
[page 7]
There is very little difference between physical work and data processing, since all information is represented physically. (Landauer). Rolf Landauer: Information iis a physical entity
The root of the Catholic delusion is the denial of this observation, the hope that a purely simple unphysical God can represent an infinite quantity of information in a perfectly deterministic way, but by being unphysical is an invisible mystery to us , so that the Church can assert whatever it likes with nobody in a position to check it.
All art recognizes that all information is represented physically.
Must always be checking to see that it is not lack of courage that is the limiting factor in the process. I like to think that it is just the finite rate at which I can think and write.
The Catholic Church's biggest crime is to miss the beauty of the Universe and concentrate on pain and death, raising pain to a virtue and denying the reality of death.
Hodges page 303: '. . . Lancelot Hogben view of science: the political and economic needs of the day determine new ideas.' Evolutionarily driven, everything depends of resources for life, political economy. [necessity is the mother of invention.]
Fleetwood Mac: Dreams. Cantor and permutation. Fleetwood Mac
There seems little doubt that Tony Abbott, like many politicians will say anything to get a vote and places very little value on old promises that prevent him from following the mood of the voters. He is a true child of the bush era mantra that we make our own reality and in this he is very like the Roman Catholic Church of which he is a
[page 8]
member. The Church cares little for reality, only for its own wealth and power. Death, they say has died. John Donne
Roman Catholic Church and martyrdom: Good old St Lawrence, who asked his torturers to turn him over because he was done on that side. Lawrence of Rome - Wikipedia
Thursday 31 July 2014
Thursday 31 July 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
This is my tenth letter to you, without reply. However, I press on. I know that the squeaky wheel eventually gets the oil if it keeps going long enough. Also I am getting a glimmer of acknowledgement from the other organizations I am giving copies of these letters (see below). As must be clear by now, I am a disgruntled Catholic seeking to transform the Roman Catholic Church from a minority sect to a truly catholic oranization, embracing everybody on their terms, not the Church’s terms (as a scientific and democratic organization must do).
A fundamental question for theology is the problem of evil. I have been personally experiencing this problem lately in the form of a string of cancerous lymph nodes in my neck. These have been surgically removed and a subsequent positron emission tomography has revealed no further cancer. After some evaluation and planning I am now about to begin a course of prophylactic radiation therapy of the area whence the lymph glands were removed.
Cancer is an evil, or, from the more formal point of view which I prefer here, an error. It is now well known that cells become cancerous through a series of genetic changes which remove them from the normal controls on cell reproduction in the body. Cancerous cells grow at the expense of their surroundings. They may migrate from one part of the body to another. They disable and kill by blocking vital physiological functions.
In the case of cancer, the challenges for the health care professions are to identify and control the causes of cancer, and to cure those suffering from cancer. This task has both a scientific and a political aspect. For instance, scientific studies have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that smoking causes cancer. On the other hand, we have governments which allow the companies that profit from smoking to market their deadly wares, especially to the young. These corporations are allowed this freedom for two principal reasons: the ‘libertarian’ view that freedom is a value above all others (like health); and the ceaseless efforts of the the tobacco industry to make certain that the relevant politicians have some debt to it which must be repaid in the form of a continued license to do business.
The conflict between science and politics is widespread, and to be found at all scales. As you are aware, I am particularly interested in the field of theology, and hold quite firmly that your Catholic Church is promoting and worshipping a false God. In a nutshell, the Catholic God is a fictional creation of the Church’s own making which it uses to justify its existence and influence in the world. This is the political force that maintains the false God, a huge business network which has control over the minds of about a billion people, many in the wealthier and more powerful groups on Earth.
The real God is not some mysterious being outside the Universe, but the Universe itself. I have previously criticized the proofs provided by Aquinas and Lonergan that God is other than the Universe. These proofs are based on ancient models of the Universe dating from the time of Aristotle, and bear very little relationship to the Universe as we now know it. I am forever grateful to Lonergan for pointing out to me the error in Catholic proofs that God is other than the Universe and liberating me from the fictitious dogmatic world of old Catholicism
Given the assumption that God and the Universe are one, theology can become a real science. The task of science, as Einstein made very clear, is to find and explain the fixed or invariant points in the Universe. Because these points are fixed, they can be written down in formal texts which transcend time. Pythagoras’ theorem will always be formally true, and we can expect physical copies of the proof of this to last as long as the human species. Not only that, but at human scales Pythagoras theorem is effectively implemented in reality, so that we can use it as part of our engineering calculations.
Newton followed all Christian theologians in his belief that the magnificent invariant features of cosmic dynamics were placed there by the Creator. I take the same view, except that I see the fixed points of the Universe not as something made by God, but as fixed points in the divine dynamics through which we come to know God. All science is science of God, part of theology. In this picture, revelation is not confined to a few ancient texts, but embraces all experience of everything.
The principal objection to my position seems to be the ancient mystical belief that God is a perfect being, the realization of all possibility but nevertheless without structure, absolutely simple, a cloud of unknowing. The world, on the other hand, is extremely complex. I have mentioned previously that I see an answer to this problem in mathematical fixed point theory which tells us that a system that maps onto itself will have under certain conditions, fixed points x that the mapping f maps onto themseles: f(x)=x.Parmenides of Elea proposed that there must be fixed points in the Universe to make certain knowledge possible, but he believed that these fixed points were outside the everyday dynamics of the Universe. Fixed points theory suggests that there is no contradiction between the absolutely simple divine dynamics and the fixed points (like ourselves and the solar system) contained in the dynamics of the real God.
Having overcome this objection, most of the remaining opposition to the idea that the Universe is divine is simply political inertia. Why does power corrupt? Because it enables the powerful to create their own realities which, insofar as they are not consistent with real reality are corrupt, and eventually fail as a result. That is why I can confidently predict the failure of the Roman Catholic Church if it continues on its present trajectory. It is doomed because it considers itself infallible. The Church is locked into the past while the human world around it which it has controlled for so long is breaking free. At the root of this change is the gradually widening realization by the underclasses that the elite have feet of clay (Daniel 2:33).
The Catholic Church professes a form of Christianity. Christianity is based on a series of mysterious and improbable events that it has invented as part of its own history. There is no evidence for these events, and they are officially considered to be mysteries whose truth as asserted by the Church, must be believed. How can we know that Jesus of Nazareth was conceived parthenogenetically?
These propositions are absurdly weak foundation upon which to build a religion which seeks to control every aspect of human life. It has become clear in the last few centuries that the Catholic Church is a significant restraint on the development of humanity. To deny the absolute spiritual equivalence of people of different gender, for instance, is radically wrong, and yet it has been reaffirmed by the Church quite recently (Pope John Paul II: Ordinatio sacerdotalis). John Paul II
The Church must face the fact that God is what is. It must do what Jesus suggested, repent (ie think again, change its mind) and believe in the good news. Things are not as bad as you think. In particular, the Catholic Church is totally wrong about original sin. We are in fact as perfect as can be, divine in fact. We enjoy a dynamic range of responses from the tenderest love to murderous violence, and these responses are elicited by the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
For each of us, God is what is for us, that is the universe of our experience. The Catholic dichotomy between God and the Universe is false. By rebuilding itself on a scientifically plausible theology, the Church has a chance to survive. Unfortunately, by declaring itself infallible, the Church has in effect shot itself in the foot by denying itself the right to change.
The Church has had a difficult time coming to terms with the theory of evolution just as it had with Galileo’s cosmic dynamics. From an evolutionary point of view, we live in a Universe that is creating itself. This idea seems perfectly consistent with the idea that God is the creator. God is creating itself over a period of billions of years, and we are a step along the way. This is opposed to the Catholic view that the whole thing was created in a planned way by a being who exists outside the observable Universe.
The Catholic Church represents the greatest reliance on a perverse business plan ever created within humanity. Because it got God wrong the Catholic Church has criminalized, curiosity, imagination and creation, all essential features of the living God which lie at the root of the evolutionary process.
The scope of imagination is measured by the transfinite numbers which have appeared previously in these letters. We generate new ideas by messing around with old ones. From a mathematical point of view this is equivalent to permuting a set of elements. The number of permutations of a given set of elements is infinite with respect to the initial number of elements. Having discovered all the permutations of a set of elements, we can then begin to permute these permutations to get a new layer of imagination, and this process can continue consistently without end.
Nor, in a divine world, is the human mind the only system capable of imagination. The Universe also exhibits imagination, continually multiplying possibilities as measured by its ever increasing entropy. As with the creatures of imagination, the Universe creates entropy by permuting sets of elements like the fundamental particles, atoms, molecules and so on to explore the realm of possibility. Among those possibilities the world has found many self sustaining forms which act as fixed points in the Universe from which all else is built.
The Catholic universe is kinematic, a series of appearances orchestrated by an invisible, omniscient and omnipotent God. The approach preferred here is dynamic, the Universe is equivalent to the life of God revealed to us in the fixed points of that life. The purpose of science is to find fixed points (divine laws) and develop theories of the relationships between them.
From the Catholic point of view, matter is in some way inferior to God. However, if the Universe is divine, physics (the study of matter) is just as divine as theology or any other science, since all are concerned with understanding God.
The human imagination is the source of fictions like the Catholic History of Salvation, but there is no guarantee that our literary creations are consistent with reality. The only way to know is to check our ideas against reality by collecting evidence for an against these ideas. All the unique events that provide evidence for the Christian picture are lost in history. Proper science can only deal with contemporary recurrent events. A scientific theology must be based on our day to day experience of God, just as quantum mechanics and relativity are based on the daily experiences of physicists and navigators.
Physics is built on quantum mechanics and relativity. These mathematical models describe the behaviour of our Universe at the extremes of scale, from smallest particle to the Universe as a whole. Because it describes God’s body (that is the channels through which God communicates with us), physics is just as much part of theology as any other science.
Quantum mechanics does two principal things: through the eigenvalue equation it provides an algorithm for finding the fixed points of the Universe; and through the Born rule it enables us to compute the frequency of communication between these fixed points.
Quantum mechanics is formulated in the complex vector spaces known as Hilbert spaces. Hilbert spaces come in a variety of sizes with from zero to transfinite dimensions and are not easy to imagine. Processes in a Hilbert space, however, can be easily understood as the operation of a computer network. Since we are natural communicators, such a picture is, for most people, much easier to understand.
From a formal point of view, we can picture ourselves as nodes in a complex communication network of our peers, people we know and people we communicate with anonymously. Each of us stands at the centre of our own network, and our networks overlap in varying degrees running from 0, no communication to 1, continuous communication, that is the communication within ourselves that keeps us alive.
Given the transfinite computer network as a formal model of the fixed points in God, we can ask fundamental theological questions: why does God create? what is creation? We find the answer in fixed point theorems which can be proven non constructively, that is by what the Church and many mystics call the via negativa or more formally reductio ad absurdum. In consistent formal systems we reject the absurd and accept only systems which are formally consistent with themselves.
Here we come to something of a chicken and egg moment. Even non-constructive proof requires formal language, and yet until the theorem is proven, we have no certainty that the dynamic universe also speaks to us in formal language, the language of the fixed points we experience. We have the structure of the Universe and our own experience of life to support this idea of real time connection with God. All possible fixed points exist potentially in God. Here the term potential does not indicate inferiority to actuality, as in the Aristotelian picture, but equivalence to actuality as in the modern physical picture.
The divine Universe judges us by detecting inconsistencies and implementing their consequences. So when I hit a nail wrongly, it will bend, and I have to spend a few seconds straightening it and trying to get it in. If I cannot, I pull it out and start again, life being made easier by the old hole. One pays a similar price if caught by a referee infringing the rules of a game or flying in a defective aeroplane.
This same power will judge the Church if it continues to preach a false politically motivated picture of God and God’s behaviour. The principal interest of the Catholic Church is in maintaining and increasing its own power, like every other organism. We know from the engineering theory of networks that communication errors must be avoided if a system is to be trustworthy. We have, from Claude Shannon a mathematical theory of communication which provides a firm foundation for engineers seeking to reduce the amount of error in their systems.
The Catholic Church is itself very much concerned with eliminating errors, the most pertinent here being that idea that women can be priests. Here I differ from the Church in my belief that regardless of our physical embodiments we are all spiritually equal. Because about half the human population of the world are not male, this attempt to make half the human species second class citizens cannot stand. This question, like many others in a networked systems, will be settled politically. Networks work toward truth by allowing comparison. As new ideas penetrate the network and are compared to Christianity and are found more realistic, they will eventually prevail. If the political settlement is to be effective, it must also be scientifically sound, that is consistent with the real world. The entrenched views of an hierarchical priesthood will eventually succumb to the realization that they are simply not true.
The central selling point of Catholicism is that death is not real. The Church says we live forever, the good in a state of bliss, the bad in a state of torment. Is this true? Is there any evidence for it? If we see ourselves as good people, we might like the idea of eternal bliss, pleasure without labour. In reality the ‘bad’ often seem to prosper at the expense of the good. What can we say to the news that four million women in northern Iraq are now at risk of genital mutilation under the new regime?
Contrary to Catholic opinion is the everyday experience that people do die, just as people are born and that we live in a dynamic system in which many fixed points have limited lives, the proverbial three score and ten now being surpassed by longer lived populations. From a practical point of view, we should proceed as though death is real. If it is not, that is a bonus, but is not something about which we can have any knowledge, since the dead are supposed to be in a mysterious spiritual form inaccessible to our senses (and so to our minds).
The promise of eternal life is a big carrot, but it is also a big stick. One’s fate in the next life will be judged on one’s behaviour in this life, and eternal agony awaits those who disobey God, which is in effect to disobey the Church, God’s Vicar on Earth. Here we come back to original sin. One goes to hell if one disobeys God, but what does God want? In most ancient religions, there is really no way to tell, except to believe the stories told by religious leaders which may or may not be true. Like everything, they need testing before they can be relied upon, and a true test envisages a possibility of failure.
The scientific test of a theory is the degree to which it can explain the data. The political test of a theory, on the other hand, is not how well it can explain the data but how appealing it is to the voters.
Instead of allowing the ruling elites to oppress us, we would do well to follow our senses and cleave to reality, because reality is divine, consistent and proven over many billions of years of evolution. The Roman Catholic Church failed in its duty of care to me by inculcating in me a lively fear of Hell and coupling Hell to sexuality.
I have tried to guide my work by more clearly defining the goal toward which I am working: that all political decisions be based on sound engineering principles, which must in turn be based on reality.
Some may claim that the requirement for engineering to override political choices will restrict political choice but we can turn to Goedel's incompleteness theorem to claim that there is an unlimited choice of outcomes built on an engineered foundation because aleph(0) Turing machines cannot control the aleph(1) permutations of Turing machines (or natural numbers). Tradition tells us that God is love. Many would hesitate to try to define love, but we assume a working definition here, that love is true communication. Since we have formal doctrines of truth and of communication, we are in a position to develop formal expressions for the fixed points of love.
These formalizations can serve the Church as a new suite of doctrinal hypotheses derived from the master hypothesis that God and the Universe are identical. These new hypotheses will bring the mission of the Church into line with reality. This is to say that the dynamics behind the fixed points that we observe is the life of God, nothing less. Since we assume that the divine dynamics is seamless (actus purus, omnino simplex) we expect to find consistent logical connections between the fixed points in the Universe
Once we accept that the Universe is divine, many things fall into place. The most important, perhaps, is that just by looking around us we can see that the true god is a living and creative God.
In my lifetime there has been a widespread revolution in education from ‘learning by rote’ to learning by creative exploration. From the point of view of teaching by creative exploration, teaching by rote can verge on child mental molestation, depending on whether or not the drills being learnt by the children are true or false.
Teachers have a duty of care to teach the truth to their students, and they can best fulfill this duty by teaching subjects in an evidence based way so that students can see for themselves the truth of what they are being taught. This is the scientific way.
I now feel a strong connection between the prevalence of child sexual molestation by your priesthood and the false doctrines about sexuality that are preached by Church. You take naive little children like I once was and fill their heads with fictional tales promoted as truth. This is ethically unsound, as is the Church’s continued attempts to protect its servants from the criminal laws controlling sexual behaviour in civilized countries.
These letters are a conversation between human persons, but each of our corporate environments is also involved. I am also acting in the role of director and chief executive of The Theology Company Proprietary Limited (incorporated in Australia), and you are acting in the role of Pope. This role, according to Canon Law, is that of monarch of the Roman Catholic Church:
Can. 331 The bishop of the Roman Church, in whom continues the office given by the Lord uniquely to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and to be transmitted to his successors, is the head of the college of bishops, the Vicar of Christ, and the pastor of the universal Church on earth. By virtue of his office he possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.
In this corporate space we are equivalent, distinguished only by the size of the organizations we control. I am trying to sell you a product, as the arms trade, for instance, tries to sell its products to the commanders of well funded armies. or the machine tool trade tries to sell to arms manufacturers.
What I am trying to sell is the theological software for a truly catholic religion. Such a religion does not attempt to mould people in some special way, but rather accepts the richness of our evolutionary heritage and deals with everybody on their own terms rather than on terms of coercive power.
From what we understand of the world, it is not possible for the past to completely control the future. Because entropy always increases, the future is always bigger than the past and the cybernetic principle of requisite variety tells that other things being equal, no system can control another system whose complexity is greater than itself. This idea is founded on Goedel's incompleteness theorem. Goedel also produced a completeness freedom, laying down the necessary conditions for a system (modelled by a Turing machine or network of Turing machines) to be deterministic system.
The deterministic (ie invariant) systems found in the Universe are the foundation for engineering, First the natural engineering that created the Universe and all within it, and (special to us) human engineering, which has given us the extensive networks for the production, transmission and consumption of energy and information that form the physical backbone of our civilization.
Newton attributed the implementation of the deterministic features of the Universe to the God he described as 'an intelligent and powerful being'. In this, and the other views expressed in the General Scholium, Newton expressed mainstream Christian views. Nevertheless, the overall effect of his work was to bring the heavens down to Earth, encompassing them in the same law of universal gravitation. Newton's ideas make it difficult to accept the Catholic belief that Mary, Jesus' mother was assumed body and soul into heaven. Where is this physical heaven?
So I am offering you a software product, christianity 2.0, which is equivalent to Judaism 3.0. The idea here is to put Christianity on a new, realistic footing based in modern physics.
From a marketing point of view, the most powerful element of the Church armory is the Holy Family. We can see the power of family reflected in the British Monarchy and the gossip magazines. We make the holy family real, Joseph is Mary's husband and Jesus is his Child. Mary goes through all the usual pains of childbirth, lives the life of a normal mother, dies as people do and is buried. Jesus is murdered for his beliefs, as millions of other people have been before and since. Religious murders continue on a daily basis through sectarian violence, honour killings and so on, We can imagine that more people are being killed for religious reasons these days than ever before, simply because the population of the world is much greater and the means of killing so much more efficient.
Apart from its political motivation, the original Christian misidentification of God was a consequence of the limitations of contemporary logic, mathematics and physics. In detail, the writers of Christianity 1.0 lacked the theorems of Cantor, Goedel, Turing, Shannon and Brouwer and had no knowledge of quantum mechanics and relativity. Because Christianity 2.0 is metamathematical and limited only by consistency, it is a powerful enough formalism to map the bounds on God which appear to us as the symmetries forming the boundaries of formal structure in the Universe. Physics studies the most basic of these symmetries, and the hierarchy of the sciences is related to the hierarchy of symmetries that each studies.
The upgrade from Judaism to Christianity increased the membership of this church from a dozen or so in the time of Jesus of Nazareth to [possibly more than] a billion at this time. The upgrade proposed here, based as it is on metamathematical foundations, is considered to be broad enough to embrace all of us in one spiritual link to our divine habitat.
There are two sources of violence, need and belief. They are closely related, but whereas human needs are relatively fixed, human beliefs and dreams have no limits, and people are brought into conflict where human beliefs are inconsistent. This notion covers vast range of territory from beliefs about the the ultimate nature of reality to beliefs about the ownership of this particular sheep. To keep the peace we need a way to resolve these conflicts, One is trade, the other is flexibility. We settle matters of material value by trade and matters of spiritual value by science, since it is science that brings us into intimate contact with the divine Universe, our guide.
Science is an attempt to understand the world as it really is, and it may often get up the noses of people who live in fairy tale worlds constructed for their own benefit, those whose wealth insulates them from reality by enabling them to go further into fantasy. They are the deviants. Your role of Pope is the most deviant of all, since you must accept that the Universe has formally and infallibly been declared not to be divine.
Dear pope Francis, I have painted you a magnificent picture of the real God, the God which the Catholic Church must embrace if it is to become a force for human spiritual development rather than what it is, a massive weight on the human spirit.
This picture is another in the long line of pictures of God which we can trace into the fog of past history. In our tradition the first clearly defined member of this series was Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews. Yahweh's personality is modelled on the ruling elite of its time, warrior kings and warlords whose principal task was to plunder their neighbours in the search for resources to support their growing populations. This behaviour was characteristic of the pre-agricultural age when the only resources available for human consumption were the natural products of the land collected by hunting and gathering. Yahweh's personality is still reflected in the militaristic approach taken by Israel to its neighbours in an era which recognizes that war is useless compared to diplomacy.
The Christian God reflects the agricultural era, with the cultivation of crops and livestock increasing the productivity of the land from a human point of view and ushering in the notion of peace through local production. The plundering mode did not die out of course, because agricultural resources are richer plunder than unimproved land.
In the two thousand years since its inception the Christian picture has brought large scale industrialization of the human world and made it possible for large numbers of people to live peacefully on relatively small areas by trade with their neighbours, rather than plunder. The notion of survival by plunder (ie colonialism) has been all but excluded from the modern world except where the primitive religions still hold sway.
I am promoting the next step in this succession, where the progress is peace is further developed by expanding our notion of God from the parochial and sectarian ideas of the Hebrews and the Christians to the notion that the whole Universe is divine, that our lives are part of the life of God and that the only constraint on our lives is the necessity for consistency. We can do away with all the artificial constraints imposed by the ruling elites for their own political purposes. Their aim appears to be to capture as much of the worlds resources for themselves as possible. The efficiency of their project is indicated by the fact that the wealth of just 85 people is equal to that of the poorest three billion. (Working for the Few: Political capture and economic inequality, Oxfam). Oxfam Briefing Paper, 178
My new picture of God expressed in these letters is abstract, impressionist, pointilliste, rather poorly expressed, but I think sound. It lays the foundation for a truly scientific and universal theology, which is in turn the foundation for a globally universal religion that rejects sectarianism and lays the foundations for peace on Earth.
I have sent copies to some of the more relevant Vatican congregations and to leading Catholic magazines in the hope that somebody will be motivated to read them carefully and overlook their faults sufficiently to understand the underlying truth of what I am trying to tell you. The Christian faith offers heaven and hell in a fictitious afterlife. Natural theology, on the other hand, sees heaven and hell on Earth, but provides us with sufficient knowledge of the ways of God to clearly identify the strategies necessary for eliminating hell (evil, error) and maximizing the heavenly aspect of life.
History suggests that my position is likely to be understood only by people who have explored the same ideas themselves. By claiming infallibility, the Church forbids itself from exploring this new picture of God.
God is no longer an angry and murderous old monarch who subjected my early life to spiritual torture, but the whole loving Universe. If you are to be a memorable Pope, you must repudiate the doctrine of infallibility and open the Church to a scientific exploration of theology and religion.
I am now off to have a month of prophylactic radiation treatment for cancer now, and will be writing to you again in August, Deo volente. I am thankful that centuries of science have brought us to the point where cancer can be controlled and often cured. The only way the Church can see to this happen is miraculous divine intervention. Modern science is no miracle, but a catalogue of the everyday realities of life.
Yours sincerely,
Copies:
President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Vatican Secretary of State,
The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples,
The Editor, L'Osservatore Romano,
The Editor, National Catholic Reporter,
The Editor, The Tablet.
Friday 1 August 2014
Saturday 2 August 2014
Transfinite recursion, recursive function theory, imagination, Essence and existence (form and action) ate duals,beginning as the ancients trought, with a system in which essence and existence are identical and differentiating as we can see.
The basic ancient error is to believe that information can be represented without marks, as in an 'omnino simplex' deity can know everything past present and future.
