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vol VII: Notes

2014

Notes

[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]

[Sunday 21 September 2014 - Saturday 27 September 2014]

[page 26]

Sunday 21 September 2014

[page 27]

Even though I am a transfinitely complex whole, the conservation laws of the Universe dictate that there is only a countable number of systems like me in the local Universe, and we are all unique and may be labelled in a way that makes us in some was amenable to computation.

Vague ideas seem to be coming clear at a good rate as I try to get down to actually making a comprehensive story out of my vague hopes.

A sound wave is a relatively simple thing which can be almost infinitely modulated to carry linguistic and emotional information.

Monday 22 September 2014

Miles page 93: 'Then as Israel — superfertile thanks to the covenant — threatens to dominate Egypt, the inherent tension in the high god/personal god fusion requires for its alleviation that the Lord become and remain a warrior in addition to whatever else he is. The equation is creator (yahweh/'elohim) + cosmic destroyer (Tiamat) + personal god (god of . . . ) + warrior (Baal) = GOD, the composite protagonist of the Tanakh. Miles: God, a biography

page 95: 'As a common noun in Hebrew and the other languages in the Northwest Semitic Group to which Hebrew belongs ba'al means "owner, master" or "lord" in that sense: the "lord of the manor". As a proper name the same word refers to the deity Baal, who is master of the Universe but who, notably, has acquired his mastery by military force. In mythological terms, he is a young god, a rebel god. Baal - Wikipedia

pantheistic monotheism.

[page 28]

Miles page 117: 'As he announces his plans for the ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the Lod does not, to repeat, seem angry with the Canaanites , but the effect is genocidal, all the same, and there is no escaping it.'

page 141: 'The God of Deuteronomy has remained God for Jews and Christians down to modern times.'

Tuesday 23 September 2014

Equinox, survived another winder cancer and all and holding out high hopes for theology.

Ultimately the divine world must go viral, but we have to build a firm foundation and answer all the questions first, or at least a representative sample, each question being a variable dimension.

Science and advocacy Whitehouse Andrew Whitehouse

Another way to follow the will of God: assume that the Universe is divine and do what the Universe suggests.

Miles page 144: 'The Lord requires ardour. A part of the mind — "the foreskin of your heard" — must be figuratively excised to signify the surrender of the mental autonomy as part f the penis, the foreskin, was circumcized to signify the surrender of reproductive autonomy.'

Just like Genesis: and breed up the tribe to increase the power of the elite.

[page 29]

Miles page 145: 'The curses section in [Deuteronomy] chapter 28 is four times as long as the blessing section and rises to an eloquence in the depiction of horror unmatched until Dante.

page 147: 'In the savagery of its detail, this vision greatly exceeds the flood.'

Wednesday 24 September 2014

Why - [is God seen to be] other [than the Universe?] Eureka

There comes time in each jurisdiction when many patent medicines are wiped out because they are dangerous or ineffective. Society of Toxicology

The fixed points of the Universe are 'separated' by discrete quanta of action.

As the initially mysterious God slowly develops a personality in the Old Testament, the Roman Catholic Church has been gradually defining its doctrines in more detail and with higher authority right up to the pinnacle definition of infallibility. In the Old Testament, the Hebrews and Israelites were in fact simply feeling the impact of their environment like everybody else, but they built a form of morality into these events by believing that their sufferings were the result of disobedience toward God just as Adam and Eve had disbelieved God and been cursed with work, pain and death for their transgression. The whole tone of the Old Testament is obey the boss, your king by divine right, your God. And who says what God wants? The ruling elite, like Moses. Infallibility - First Vatican Council

Everything begins with imagination / fiction and then we test each each image (expressed as a series of operations - computers which may or many not be self sustaining.

[page 30]

Thursday 25 September 2014
Friday 26 September 2014
Saturday 27 September 2014

We should look at all our human difficulties in terms of health and the particular interest of government should be in public health, both physical and mental. We maintain physical health by food, exercise, housing etc, and treatment for the inevitable accidents and disabilities. Mental health is primarily a matter for education, giving people a broad and reliable outlook on the realities of the world we live in. Of course there are casualties and disabilities in mental health as well as in physical health, but preventive measures like healthy food and good education can minimize the adverse outcomes Of particular concern these days are the false ideas loose in the community about the nature of the world, of God, of our human role in maintaining ourselves and our world and so on. It is here that the new theology can help the most. At present the Australian Government and IS, ISIS, ISIL have an almost equal catalogue of false fundamentalist ideas about the human condition.

FUNDAMENTALISM - DENIAL OF EVOLUTION Fundamentalism - Wikipedia

Some things do not change. General relativity has probably been in action since the beginning and it predicts change. It is symmetries that do not change, with respect to space, to time and to spacetime. The arrow of time points toward increasing complexity.

The problems we have with the internet are reflections of the more complex problems we have in social and political networks, such as terrorism, spam.

The internet has given us a window into the Christian

[page 31]

world, a world of schadenfreude, I hate your success, I rejoice at your failure.

Fundamentalism is the antithesis of creation.

Bierce: 'Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. Ambrose Bierce

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Blake, William, and Daniel V Erdman (Commentary), Harold Bloom (Editor) William Golding (Author), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Anchor 1997 Amazon Product Description 'Since its first publication in 1965, this edition  has been widely hailed as the best available text  of Blake's poetry and prose. Now revised, if  includes up-to-date work on variants, chronology of  poems and critical commentary by Harold Bloom.' 
Amazon
  back
Brillouin, Leon, Science and Information Theory, Academic 1962 Introduction: 'A new territory was conquered for the sciences when the theory of information was recently developed. . . . Physics enters the picture when we discover a remarkable likeness between information and entropy. . . . The efficiency of an experiment can be defined as the ratio of information obtained to the associated increase in entropy. This efficiency is always smaller than unity, according to the generalised Carnot principle. . . . ' 
Amazon
  back
Crossan, John Dominic, God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now, HarperCollins: HarperOne 2007 Jacket: 'John Dominic Crossan has achieved the status of a pivotal theological scholar of the rank of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Barth and Tillich. This book is incisive, original and fascinating.' John Shelby Spong 
Amazon
  back
Homer, and Bernard King (introduction) Robert Fagles (translator), The Iliad, Penguin Classic 1998 Amazon From Library Journal 'Why another Iliad? Just as Homer's work existed most fully in its performance, so the Homeric texts call periodically for new translations. With this in mind, Fagles offers a new verse rendering of the Iliad. Maneuvering between the literal and the literary, he tries with varying degrees of success to suggest the vigor and manner of the original while producing readable poetry in English. Thus, he avoids the anachronizing of Robert Fitzgerald's translation, while being more literal than Richard Lattimore's. Fagles's efforts are accompanied by a long and penetrating introduction by Bernard Knox, coupled with detailed glossary and textual notes.' - T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga. 
Amazon
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Miles, Jack, God : A Biography, Vintage Books 1996 Jacket: 'Jack Miles's remarkable work examines the hero of the Old Testament ... from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. ... We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind.' 
Amazon
  back
Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China (Volume 1) Introductory Orientations, Cambridge UP 1954 Jacket: 'This is the exciting first instalment of a comprehensive work . . . The author has set himself to interpret the Chinese mind in Western terms, and he is perhaps unique among living scholars in possessing the necessay combination of qualifications for this formidable undertaking. The practical importance of Dr Needham's work is as great as its intellectual interest. It is a westerm act of 'recognition' on a higher plane than the diplomatic one.' Arnold Toynbee, The Observer, London. 
Amazon
  back
Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China (Volume 1) Introductory Orientations, Cambridge UP 1954 Jacket: 'This is the exciting first instalment of a comprehensive work . . . The author has set himself to interpret the Chinese mind in Western terms, and he is perhaps unique among living scholars in possessing the necessay combination of qualifications for this formidable undertaking. The practical importance of Dr Needham's work is as great as its intellectual interest. It is a westerm act of 'recognition' on a higher plane than the diplomatic one.' Arnold Toynbee, The Observer, London. 
Amazon
  back
Papers
Nature Q&A, , "Data on display", Nature, 455, 7211, 18 September 2008, page 273. 'Risking being scooped and having patents refused, some scientists are posting their data online as they produce them. Organic chemist Jean-Claude Bradley of the Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pensylvania, and biochemist Cameron Neylon of the University of Southhampton, UK, describe this 'open notebook' approach. What is an 'open notebook'? Bradley: The basic philosophy of open-notebook science is to have no insider information. ... '. back
Links
Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devils Dictionary, edited by Donald E.Schiltz and S.T.Joshi, the University of Georgia Press,Athens and London, ISBN 0-8203-2196-6 'Any writer of worth, no matter how large or varied his or her literary corpus, typically has a single work that encapsulates precisely his or her worldview and major themes or concerns. . . . The Devil’s Dictionary is quintessential Bierce. In fact, his life and career can be summarized in a single sentence: Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. . . . Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision’ back
Andrew Whitehouse, Is advocacy a core job requirement for medical scientists?, 'But there still remains an open question about what we expect from science and our scientists. Job descriptions for scientists rarely, if ever, include ‘advocacy’ as a key requirement or performance indicator, yet history tells us that it is often scientists who have been highly effective champions for applying their own data towards policy change.' back
Baal - Wikipedia, Baal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Baal, also rendered Baʿal . . . is a North-West Semitic title and honorific meaning "master" or "lord" that is used for various gods who were patrons of cities in the Levant and Asia Minor, cognate to Akkadian Bēlu. A Baalist or Baalite means a worshipper of Baal.' back
CERN, LHC Homepage, 'The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sits in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. The first collisions at an energy of 3.5 TeV per beam took place on 30th March 2010. The LHC is designed to collide two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. Proton-proton collisions are foreseen at an energy of 7 TeV per beam. The beams move around the LHC ring inside a continuous vacuum guided by magnets. The magnets are superconducting and are cooled by a huge cryogenics system. The cables conduct current without resistance in their superconducting state. The beams will be stored at high energy for hours. During this time collisions take place inside the four main LHC experiments.' back
Fixed point (mathematics) - Wikipedia, Fixed point (mathematics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, a fixed point (sometimes shortened to fixpoint) of a function is a point that is mapped to itself by the function. That is to say, x is a fixed point of the function f if and only if f(x) = x' back
Fundamentalism - Wikipedia, Fundamentalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Fundamentalism is the demand for a strict adherence to orthodox theological doctrines, usually understood as a reaction to Modernist theology. The term was originally coined by its supporters to describe five specific classic theological beliefs of Christianity, and that developed into a Christian fundamentalist movement within the Protestant community of the United States in the early part of the 20th century.' back
IBM, ManyEyes, 'Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.' back
Infallibility - First Vatican Council, The English Text of Definition of Infallibility, 'we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.
So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.'
back
Schadenfreude - Wikipedia, Schadenfreude - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This word is taken from German and literally means 'Harm-Joy.' It is the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune. It is also borrowed by some other languages.' back
Society of Toxicology, Society of Toxicology, 'The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the oldest federal agency dedicated to consumer protection, originating as a single chemist appointed to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1862. FDA in 2006 employed more than 10,000 toxicologists, chemists, pharmacologists, physicians, microbiologists, pharmacists, veterinarians, lawyers, and others. This poster, excerpted from materials produced by the FDA's History Office highlights the fascinating early origins of the regulation of medicines and accompanies several objects generously loaned by the University of Arizona's Museum of Pharmacy.' back

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