natural theology > VII notes

Notes

[Sunday 6 November 2011 - Saturday 12 November 2011]

[Notebook: DB 71 Israel]

Sunday 6 November 2011

[page 81]

Monday 7 November 2011

Authoritarian organizations like the Communist Parties in the Soviet Union and China and the Roman Catholic Church practice mind control by violence. The two major communist parties and their multitude of smaller brethren have killed millions of people in their efforts to create a certain mental state in the population they rule. The Catholic Church may not have been so bloody (although one would like a figure for the total number of doctrinal murders it has committed in its 2000 year history), but it is definitely inclined to use violent methods (like beating the young) to achieve mental compliance with its dogmas. Natural theology and religion see that people adjust their behaviour to suit their circumstances, and should freely be allowed to do so, since freedom to move is freedom to alleviate pain and increase productivity. If one wants to guide [people] they must be given the data behind the guidance and an understanding of the models being used to guide the population, the idea behind education and democracy. McGregor

Reading Kafka's life reinforces the idea that education began as bureaucracies training new recruits to keep up the maintenance of the administrative model they used to keep the peace in their realm. Pawel

Pawel page 77: 'Sex, the fateful duality between Eros

[page 82]

and Thanatos, was the sinister leitmotif dominating literature, drama, and the arts of the period. And beyond the poetic metaphors loomed the brutal real-life affinity of sex and death - botched abortions, childbed fever, syphilis, suicides, rape, domestic violence, prostitution, slavery . . . '

Churches and Parties are bureaucracies, (systems) usually trying to grow and reproduce themselves, analogous to me, a vast cellular bureaucracy which also wants to grow and reproduce.

Tuesday 8 November 2011

Pawel page 97: 'Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition "writing is a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Prayer: talking to oneself or an imagined friend; defining oneself. Finding one's stationary points.

Most of the old religions are conspiracy theories of one sort or another, proposing the existence of a secret controlling power that guides our destinies despite ourselves rather like the role of Yahweh in the Book of Job. Natural religion, on the other hand, is very much what you see is what you is, although both vision

[page 83]

and integration are rendered difficult by the great complexity of the world and our historically bound presuppositions about how it works and how it is controlled.

Every message is a message from the past to the future, since all messages travel at a finite velocity.

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Correspondence of Sir Michael Quinlan 20 pounds including postage = $A30.96 Quinlan

Thursday 10 November 2011

Collins Woman in White. Our respect for the dead is a respect for our past, for the ancestors who have gone before us and made us what we are, genetically and to some extent socially and financially. Science is the study of the past, the invariant remnants of past life. From a few pots and stones and fossilized bones we attempt to reconstruct the lives of our more remote ancestors and with the means of physics, cosmology, biology and so on we can study our remote past back to some initial point traditionally called God. Theology is the history of what we are. The Bible, for many people, is a story about themselves. In the wider data base of natural theology, the whole of reality is a divine story about us, and our survival depends on getting this story right, of learning our true history so that we can make educated guesses about what to do next. Collins

[page 84]

Natural theology models god as almost infinitely fine grained, every pixel measured by the quantum of action which is exceedingly small. Action (physics) - Wikipedia, Planck's constant - Wikipedia

Designer religion

1. Parmenides, Brouwer, dynamics, statics, logic, consistency, computers

2. Formalism, mathematics and Cantor's theorem.

Friday 11 November 2011

Saturday 12 November 2011

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

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Collins, Wilke, The Woman in White, Penguin Classics 2003 Review 'Novel by Wilkie Collins, published serially in All the Year Round (November 1859-July 1860) and in book form in 1860. Noted for its suspenseful plot and unique characterization, the successful novel brought Collins great fame; he adapted it into a play in 1871. This dramatic tale, inspired by an actual criminal case, is told through multiple narrators. Frederick Fairlie, a wealthy hypochondriac, hires virtuous Walter Hartright to tutor his beautiful niece and heiress, Laura, and her homely, courageous half-sister, Marian Halcombe. Although Hartright and Laura fall in love, she honors her late father's wish that she marry Sir Percival Glyde, a villain who plans to steal her inheritance. Glyde is assisted by sinister Count Fosco, a cultured, corpulent Italian who became the archetype of subsequent villains in crime novels. Their plot is threatened by Anne Catherick, a mysterious fugitive from a mental asylum who dresses in white, resembles Laura, and knows the secret of Glyde's illegitimate birth. Through the perseverance of Hartright and Marian, Glyde and Fosco are defeated and killed, allowing Hartright to marry Laura.' -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
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McGregor, Richard, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, Harper 2010 Amazon editorial review: From Publishers Weekly 'McGregor, a journalist at the Financial Times, begins his revelatory and scrupulously reported book with a provocative comparison between China™s Communist Party and the Vatican for their shared cultures of secrecy, pervasive influence, and impenetrability. The author pulls back the curtain on the Party to consider its influence over the industrial economy, military, and local governments. McGregor describes a system operating on a Leninist blueprint and deeply at odds with Western standards of management and transparency. Corruption and the tension between decentralization and national control are recurring themes--and are highlighted in the Party™s handling of the disturbing Sanlu case, in which thousands of babies were poisoned by contaminated milk powder. McGregor makes a clear and convincing case that the 1989 backlash against the Party, inexorable globalization, and technological innovations in communication have made it incumbent on the Party to evolve, and this smart, authoritative book provides valuable insight into how it has--and has not--met the challenge. ' Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Pawel, Ernst, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, Collins Harvill 1988 'Dr Franz Kafka, a German writer who lived in Prague, died the day before yesterday in the Kierling Sanatorium at Klosterneuberg near Vienna. Few knew him, for he was a loner, a recluse wise in the ways of the world and frightened by it. For years he had been suffering from a lung disease, which he cherished and fostered even while accepting treatment. . . . It endowed him with a delicacy of feeling that bordered on the miraculous, and with a spiritual purity uncompromising to the point of horror. . . . He wrote the most significant works of modern German literature; their stark truth makes them seem naturalistic even where they speak in symbols. They reflect the irony and prophetic vision of a man condemned to see the world with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable and went to his death.' Milena Jesenska, Narodny Listy 5 June 1924 (Pawel page 447)
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Quinlan, Michael, and Tanya Ogilvie-White (editor), On Nuclear Deterrence - The Correspondence of Sir Michael Quinlan, Internsional Institute for Strategic Studies 2011 'This timely book, published in the lead up to the 2012-14 decision on Trident renewal, makes available for the first time the late Sir Michael Quinlan’s private correspondence on nuclear deterrence. It shows why Sir Michael, as Policy Director and then Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence during the last years of the Cold War, became known as the ‘high priest of deterrence’: his unparalleled grasp of nuclear strategy, contribution to nuclear doctrine in the UK and NATO, and deep and genuine concern with defence ethics earned him respect and admiration around the world. . . . '
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Papers

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Raine, Derek, "Book Review: Relative beginners", Nature, 437, 7059, 27 October 2005, page 1237. Review of

Merman, N David, Its About Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity, Princeton University Press 2005 '... Relativity can be summed up in a phrase that Einstein used when reflecting on the origin of the theory: "At last it came to me that time itself was suspect." It is the way that this statement is unpacked that distinguishes the many exposition of the subject. David Merman brings to the task a lifetime of experience in making relativity accessible to the non-specialist student without simplifying more than Einstein's well known dictum will allow.' Derek Raine, Nature 437:1237.
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Links

Action (physics) - Wikipedia Action (physics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In physics, action is an attribute of the dynamics of a physical system. It is a mathematical functional which takes the trajectory, also called path or history, of the system as its argument and has a real number as its result. Action has the dimension of energy × time, and its unit is joule-seconds in the International System of Units (SI). Generally, the action takes different values for different paths. Classical mechanics postulates that the path actually followed by a physical system is that for which the action is minimized, or, more strictly, is stationary. The classical equations of motion of a system can be derived from this principle of least action. The stationary action formulation of classical mechanics extends to quantum mechanics in the Feynman path integral formulation, where a physical system follows simultaneously all possible paths with amplitudes determined by the action.' back

Planck's constant - Wikipedia Planck's constant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Planck constant (denoted h), also called Planck's constant, is a physical constant reflecting the sizes of energy quanta in quantum mechanics. It is named after Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum theory, who discovered it in 1900. Classical statistical mechanics requires the existence of h (but does not define its value).' back