vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
[Sunday 31 August 2014 - Saturday 6 September 2014]
Sunday 31 August 2014
Sunday 31 August 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
This is my eleventh letter to you, without reply.
When I began these letters in was not very clear about what I wished to explain to you, but now I think I see clearly what is motivating me: I want to explain carefully to you the thoughts and feelings that I had on the way to escaping from the mental abuse done to me by the Church when I was a child.
As a first step in this direction, I include here a copy of the submission I have made to the Australian Government Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to child sexual abuse.
This document is available here: Submission to the Australian Government Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, dated Friday 29 August 2014
Now I am out of the woods, and have a clear understanding about how theology and the Church must be reformed. I include here a copy of a draft essay on mathematical theology pointing out the logical consistency of the idea that God and the Universe are identical.
[This document is available here: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics Revisited]
I know this is all heavy reading, but I am sure your staff will point out the salient points to you once they begin to understand what I am saying.
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,
The Editor, Catholic Herald.
Monday 1 September 2014
[page 17]
Tuesday 2 September 2014
Church cover-up of child sexual abuse much worse than US cover-up of torture, eg.
The doctrine of the Catholic Church is a structural flaw in global civilization, The purpose of an intelligent legislatures is to create a body of law (software) that prevents the establishment of structural flaws in society where possible and eliminates them when found. The most powerful instrument for investigating flaws is the Royal Commission which exercises the assumed sovereign right to ask anybody anything and compel them to answer.
The current Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse is concerned with institutions, that is de facto or de iure organizations that operate according to some written or unwritten (but well understood) constitution, Like the Communist Party in China, the Roman Catholic Church has no formal legal existence in many jurisdictions, and so can act as though it is above the law because it cannot be prosecuted. Australian Government: Royal Commission into Institutional Resonses to Child Sexual Abuse
The Commission, like many others around the world, is revealing a systematic cover up within the Church of criminal or at least highly unethical behaviour by employees of the Church. The Church says these are just bad apples, and likes to deny any systemic flaws, but the trouble is there and it is
[page 18]
glaringly obvious. The Catholic Church is not based on the reality of the world but takes its cues from an imagined other world which is both our source and our ultimate destination. In a word, it is unworldly.
This world is embedded in a fantasy world created by the Cathlic Church and this embedding makes no sense because the Church is part of the Universe and not vice versa. To try to embed a big thing in a little think is to lose detail and effectiveness.
An entrepreneurial approach to religion and theology, Crowdfunding the conception and development of a theological hypothesis.
The Catholic Church has been failed by its top management and needs to sack them all and put in a new regime delivered by the laity in a democratic way.
When commentators write about how something should be (like these people should join the war instead of standing watching the fight) they are trying to increase the weight of one course of action rather than another, and this is the aim of all technology, so we can count commentary writing and theology and science writing in general as examples of technology. In the case of science, we are trying to discover where the real weights ('lines') are so that the technologists are guided in the ways of reality.
The Catholic Church is a castle in the air. A magnificent structure with no foundation and so doomed to fail. I am
[page 19]
here to underpin it. This was my day job with real houses before I got cancer. Now it is relegated to hobby and underpinning the Catholic Church [has become the day job]. To do that I must support it wherever I have to remove an old stump to put in a new one. One of the marvels of old houses is that even though one finds that almost every stump has rotted away under the ground in the sixty years since it was put in, the house stays up.
The factions of Islam, having become wealthy, are repeating the history of the factionalization of Christianity, with all the wars in the time of Luther. The European answer to this was to separate Church and State, as the churches are the natural monarchic monopolies and states are collections of free citizens.
Dear Senator Brandis, You have entirely missed the point of the Church you support. It is ruse, designed over tens of thousands of years of human history, to enable some elite to rule the masses and benefit therefrom. Piketty shows how well the elite have succeeded in the economic sphere over the last few centuries. The Church laid down the conditions for their success in the political sphere, that is an executive capable of ruling (unike, apparently, the current Abbott government). Piketty
So, as a commentator, I can rule the world from my desktop, but first have to build the deposit of faith, that is the natural theology website.
The Catholic clergy are trapped in a time warp, a place where time has stood still, at least somewhat, at the root.
[page 20]
Abbott is injecting violence into the system, that is raising the temperature.
The transfinite numbers make the degree of freedom we call entropy measurable.
The purpose of religion is good management. It is the technology of getting diaparate groups of people to live together in relative harmony. At their most abstract, we treat people as units, so we have counts and entropy and work from there to the thermodynamics of peace: equilibrium / non equilibrium
The lives of units are described by statistical mechanics, of which wave mechanics is a branch, as is discrete (logical) mechanics - computer mechanics, noomechanics. What we are saying is that the behaviour of the world can be modelled by a network.
The whole Universe enters into the explanation of every event (?) Feynman diagram. Feynman diagram - Wikipedia
Lost taste: lost desire to eat.
Wednesday 3 September 2014
Thursday4 September 2014
Friday 5 September
effective-maths: ∂ψ / ∂ t = H ψ, where ψ is a vector in a transfinite space.
The dynamic Universe creates itself, from our point of view, by creating and destroying fixed points,
[page 21]
that is observables or particles. By particle we mean units, something countable. Science sets out to work from the observed fixed points to the underlying continuous dynamics The calculus has been an immense help in conceiving the relationship between the fixed points and the dynamics, the continuum. We recognise two types of continuity, analytical and logical. [The Turing machine shows us how to 'differentiate' a logical continuum]
Theology and mathematics both proceed via the via negativa or non constructive proof. We cannot say what God is but we can place bounds on God by saying what God is not. So we deny all internal structure to God, thus making it impossible (from an information theoretical point of view) to understand God. At first glance we see the world as utterly unlike what we imagine God to be because it seems so fragmented, but then we recognise that the details we do see are fixed points in the seamless universal dynamics.
Quantum field theory enables us to compute many features of the creation and annihilation of observables that we see in the world.
Saturday 6 September 2014
effective_maths. The core idea is that both the observables of the Universe and mathematics are the fixed pints in dynamic systems operating at different levels of complexity, ie the physical world and the mathematical community. We connect these levels by a logical continuum constructed using Cantor's transfinite number and Turing machines, so establishing conditions for the existence of a symmetry with respect to to complexity by analogy with Noether's theorem in continuous (Lie) groups. Neuenschwander: Emmy Noether's wonderful theorem
