vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
[Sunday 28 September 2014 - Saturday 4 October 2014]
[page 2]
Sunday 28 September 2014
Bierce page 194: 'Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through the murder of the divinity against whom they sinned, The doctrine of the redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religion, and whoso believe in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.' Ambrose Bierce
I can maintain my equanimity by balancing the joys of my growing theology against the oncoming weakness (and possibly pain) of old age.
Bierce page 230: 'Trinity, n. In the multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with the power of combination and must [urge] individually their claims to adoration and propitiation. The Trinity is one of the most sublime mysteries of our holy religion, In rejecting it because it is incomprehensible, Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological fundamentals. In religion we believe only what we do not understand, except in the instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an incomprehensible one. In that case we believe the former as part of the latter.' Computable is a subset of possible functions. [The incomputable functions are too complex to be compressed into a finite algorithms.]
[page 32]
James A. Bailey: American Plains Bison, Science 29/8/2014 345:1009: 'Wildness is the most unique and irreplaceable characteristic of wildlife . . . In a world where humans increasingly restrict their own freedom by crowding and monotonizing their environment, wild bison should be retained, at least as a symbol of what we have sacrificed in domesticating and civilizing ourselves. DeWoody
Navigating the ship of state.I feel a bit flaky now and then and suppose I always will until I meet someone who understands me and publishes me, the editor I am looking for.
Monday 29 September 2014
Tuesday 30 September 2014
Tuesday 30 September 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityHi Francis,
This is my twelfth letter to you, without reply, but I hope somebody is reading them and they are beginning to seep into the Vatican consciousness. Its time now to get down to practical politics.
The course is clear. The Roman Catholic Church, if it is to become a responsible global citizen, must reform itself from being an authoritarian monarchy rather like the People’s Republic of China into an evidence based democracy like all the other stable systems in the Universe.
The basic claim of the Church is that it is here to tell us what God wants. As I have pointed out at length, its current version of this is largely ancient and untested fiction. To be trusted, it must become scientific. To be scientific, it must accept that God is not the mysterious other that it imagines, but the Universe of everyday experience.
At its root, the change necessary is simply the replacement of the statement God is not the Universe, with the statement God is the Universe. The principle objection to this change, that God is absolutely simple and the Universe is exceedingly complex, is demolished by the mathematical theory of fixed points. There is no contradiction involved in a pure dynamic system (actus purus) having fixed points, which make things look complex to us.
From a practical point of view an executive’s job is to plan courses of action and put them into practice, dealing with problems as they arise. As is becoming manifest around the world, the Church has suffered a catastrophic moral failure in its extended and expensive cover-up of the child abuse committed by its employees. As the magnitude of this failure becomes more apparent, the case for reform becomes stronger.
How did the Church come to find itself in such a disastrous position, effectively a criminal organization hiding crimes against human rights? At the root of the Church’s problem is the feeling that, because it is in direct contact with God, it stands above all merely human institutions. We can see this attitude reflected in the fact that we do not find the Vatican or the Holy See listed among the states that have ratified or acceded to conventions like the International Bill of Human Rights.
At present the Church relies on its magisterium to maintain its doctrine, often against common sense. Its most unrealistic claim is that we do not really die, and that the Church is in a position to dictate the behaviour necessary to merit an eternal life of bliss. There is not the slightest but of evidence for 'eternal life'.
Magisterial authority is necessary because the Catholic God is an invisible and mysterious fiction created by the Church to justify its own existence. This situation is about as stable as a person holding themselves up in the air by their own bootstraps. The truth, in the eyes of the Church, is what it says it is, without any necessary reference to reality. So we have Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth and other wonders which make absolutely no sense in the real world.
An evidence based theology, like any other science, requires no magisterium. It is guided by the reality that it studies. Given that the world is one and that scientific method leads us to the truth, historically fragmented sciences like physics, chemistry and biology have gradually converged worldwide on a unified understanding of their subject. There are disagreements at the fringes, but the central doctrines are believed to closely reflect the world as it is, and they prove their worth through the technologies that they make possible.
Can the Church adapt to the true God, the way things are? The first step toward rational reform is careful study of the situation to identify the problems that make reform necessary. To be effective, such studies must be free to examine the full breadth of the problem, and not be subject to political constraints like the preservation of ancient dogmas and raisons d'etre. A recent example of the Church's blindness to reality is the document Instrumentum laboris prepared on the basis of a worldwide survey of attitudes to marriage and the family. Despite the evidence that it has collected about the wide variety of human approaches to the practicalities of reproducing ourselves and educating the young ones, this document, prepared no doubt by the celibate potentates of the Church, appears to insist on its historical misunderstandings of human sexuality.
I was very pleased to read in a news report (Davies, Guardian, 6 October 2014) that
In a homily before the bishops in St Peter’s Basilica on Sunday, Francis called on the prelates to avoid intellectual one-upmanship at the synod and instead work creatively to establish how the church can take into consideration the realities of Catholics’ lives.It seems unlikely that the Church can manage such reforms without outside help or pressure. It has painted itself into a corner by declaring itself infallible and then using this infallibility to declare the truth of a number of very unlikely hypotheses. This is fundamentalism in its purest form - the denial of change in an obviously changing world. The Church makes a big thing of eternity. The fact is that some things (like the conservation of energy) are virtually eternal, others (like the human lifetime) are not.
The Church has a long history and has undergone a lot of changes, and it must change again if it is to survive. The true God is its judge, and if it worships a false God for long enough, it it going to come to grief.
If it is to heed this warning, the Church must ultimately restore trust not simply by claiming to know the truth but by demonstrating its claim by showing that it is consistent with reality. How this is to be done in the absence of radical theological reform is for the Church to decide. Since I have had no reply to my request and suggestions, I will now cease this one sided correspondence.
Fortunately, the secular world, the real world, is far ahead of the Catholic Church in all areas of social development from science to human rights. The Australian Government, through the Royal Commission into Institutional responses to Child Sexual abuse, is prepared to spend about five hundred million dollars to investigate and exterminate child sexual abuse and other abuses of human rights to be found within the Roman Catholic Church and similar institutions. Hopefully, this and the other inquiries into the behaviour of the Church around the world will eventually force the Church to give up its fantasies of world domination through a fictitious divinity and become a true friend of humanity on the Earth.
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,
Robert Michens, Editor, Global Pulse.
Wednesday 1 October 2014
How do we fix the world? We need more reality. Science, particularly evidence based technology of health care broadly understood as a judicious mix of prevention and cure has led to the population growth which has driven people to war in search of resources and now we need evidence based peacemaking and keeping based on a realistic view of our place in the world and our relationship to the world: the mystical body of God / Earth etc.
Christians, Jews and Muslims must recognize that they sometimes use techniques presented in Joshua to achieve the genocide of the Caananites. The network idea of curating our hardware applies to human institutions looking after their members.
What is it to be human? We say it is to be a subsystem of God. As the authors of Genesis note, God created humans in his own image, ie as a slightly restricted version of itself.
I am more complex than I can understand, sharing many
[page 33]
processes with my environment like physics and the molecular dynamics of life.
Like Maxwells atoms, software does not wear out, although the physical representation of any piece of software may fail, the formal expression is eternal and invulnerable to use.
God is a lonely person. Is there any sex in the Trinity?
Thursday 2 October 2014
Is my theology true? Nature is a network. The more it fits reality, the truer it feels, and, it feels true to me because as I try to develop the network model [it always seems to be able to suggest and accomodate the next step].
Science is an algorithm that tracks the truth, moving asymptotically toward it in larger or smaller steps.
I am expanding my operations from greenie to theologie.
