vol VII: Notes

1999

Notes

[Notebook DB 52A Mathesis]

[Sunday 12 December 1999 - Saturday 18 December 1999]

Sunday 12 December 1999

Monday 13 December 1999

Tuesday 14 December 1999

Wednesday 15 December 1999

[page 197]

Thursday 16 December 1999

Ford page 720: 'the heath of the discipline of theology'
'many faceted richness and vitality . . . overwhelming to the point of bewilderment.'

Does this come from theology or from the abandonment of theology?

page 721: 'It is no accident that twentieth-century theologians have been especially fascinated by the theme of God as Trinity, which might be sen as the classic expression of the dynamic differentiated relationality of an infinitely rich God.'

'These theologies attest to a three fold abundance: of God, of culture and creation, and of evil. They also invite the rigorous cross-examination required by any testimony on which a great deal depends.'

All criticism is relative, does this subject go with that object via this verb? Aristotle Peri Hermenias. On Interpretation by Aristotle

Leading questions: God: is the Christian hypothesis true?
1. How attest n truth to God and all else in relation to God?

[page 198]

Driving force of theology is contradictions in human experience of life.

Ford page 722: Quote Coleridge va Aquinas on self-love, sociobiology.

Theology's responsibility to academy, church and society.

Friday 17 December 1999

Barbara Thiering: Jesus of the Apocalypse Thiering

Thiering page 6: Indulgence = money for salvation.

Biblical times, interpreted in modern categories become simply a normal piece of history, although, like Elvis, its large number of followers has invited detailed study.

Saturday 18 December 1999

A religion is a corporate parasite that feeds off humanity which may become a symbiote

[page 199]

if it increases the fitness of its prey relative to other human groups. A parasite is sn 'abstraction' (like a virus) of a culture, and a model for the more abstract beast we call a corporation. [a network bound by law]

That the Church still seems to be marketing the 'eternal life for conformers' version of salvation and living off the proceeds seems to me to be a breach of corporate ethics comparable to worst we have seen this century.

All text represents calculation, for the writer it is the output, for the reader it is the input.

Wouldn't the ancients be amazed to see that all their petty political shenanigans, murders and diatribes were still being taken seriously 2000 years later by a crew deluded [by profit?] into feeling that all this was the word of God.

' Thiering page 66: 'The book which was "revealed" to the seers of Ephesus is a perfect product of the secret ascetic movement that began at Qumran and became so westernised that it ended up as the Christian Church.'

[page 200]

All history is sacred, or none of it.

God is effectively the human [universal] network seen from the point of one user.

a) all communication s physically mediated

Most mathematical ideas develop by extending some finite structure to infinity, principally to see if this structure is invariant with respect to size. The process is exemplified by the history of numbers [which as Cantor demonstrated, have no upper limit]

b) the physical world, insofar as it is consistent, must be transfinite.

The basic task of cybernetic soteriology is to find the boundaries of stable human societies, so that we can avoid them and the war and social breakdown that lie outside these boundaries.

All progress in vision begins at the time where one is trying to find an outline in the mist, deciding whether it is there and

[page 201]

slowly getting closer bringing a new structure into focus. It happens all the time on the road.

My confidence feels boundless. Cybernetic soteriology may yet be just a gleam in the eye of a lunatic parent, but it looks like a goer. An Essay on Visible Salvation

What is theology? What is religion? In essence, I think, each religion defines in some way the relationships between members of its community. As the community size n grows the number of relationships grows like n(n-1) since each of n people may have a relationship with each of the other (n-1) people, ie O(n²

O'Murchu : quantum theology
me: cybernetic soteriology. O'Murchu

Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

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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!)

Joyce, James, and (Edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior and with a new preface by Richard Ellmann, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, The Bodley Head 1986 Preface: ',,, For the purposes of interpretation, the most significant of the many small changes in [this] text has to do with the question Stephen puts to his mother at the climax of the brothel scene, itself the climax of the novel. Stephen is appalled by his mother's ghost, but like Ulysses he seeks information from her. His mother says, 'You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.' Stephen responds 'eagerly.' as the stage direction sasy, 'Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.' She fails to provide it. This passage has been much interpreted. ... Professor Gabler has been able to settle this matter by recovering a passage left out of the scene in the National Library. ... the omission of several lines - the longest omissionin the book. These lines read in the manuscript "Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. ... '' page xii back

Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'  Amazon   back

Nielsen, Michael A, and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2000 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002.  Amazon   back

O'Murchu, Diarmuid, Quantum Theology : Spiritual Implications of the New Physics , Crossroad Publishing Company 1997 Jacket: 'For quantum theorists, the fact that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts underpins all reality. "This is not merely a scientific principle of immense significance for our times" writes DO'M, "it is also a theological norm, known to mystics for centuries and now maturing into the supreme wisdom of our age."'  Amazon   back

Thiering, Barbara, Jesus of the Apocalypse: The life of Jesus after the crucifixion, Doubleday 1996 Introduction: 'It is now possible to show that ... the bizarre images of the [Book of Revelation] were deliberately constructed ... to read like fantastic images but to convey through this form actual historical information. ... Above all the Book of Revelation contains evidence, supplied by the early Christians themselves, that Jesus survived the crucifixion and remained active for many years afterwards. ... " vi  Amazon   back

Papers

Gittins, Ross, "More to most of us than just the acquisition of stuff", Sydney Morning Herald, , , 13 December 2010, page . 'The chief speaker at the [economists'] conference was Gary Banks, chairman of the Productivity Commission and a high priest in the economists' Temple of Mammon. With Eslake as altar boy, he preached a fiery sermon about the need for more micro-reform to lift Australia's faltering productivity performance. Factually, he's right, of course. If you're obsessed by economic growth then, as Paul Krugman has famously put it, ''in the long run, productivity is nearly everything''.' Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/more-to-most-of-us-than-just-the-acquisition-of-stuff-20101212-18tzb.html#ixzz2dDHCyOsS. back

Links

De Interpretatione - Wikipedia, De Interpretatione - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'De Interpretatione or On Interpretation (Greek: Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, Peri Hermeneias) is the second text from Aristotle's Organon and is among the earliest surviving philosophical works in the Western tradition to deal with the relationship between language and logic in a comprehensive, explicit, and formal way. The work is usually known by its Latin title.' back

drupal.org, Drupal - Open Source CMS, 'Come for the software, stay for the community Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.' back

On Interpretation by Aristotle, Internet Classics Archive, 'Part 1 First we must define the terms 'noun' and 'verb', then the terms 'denial' and 'affirmation', then 'proposition' and 'sentence.' Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. This matter has, however, been discussed in my treatise about the soul, for it belongs to an investigation distinct from that which lies before us.' back

Ross Gittins, Faithful few attend the economic church, 'If the nation's economists are right in assuming almost all of us share their belief that the pursuit of an eternally rising material standard of living must be a key goal of government, they're left with a puzzle: why then is there so little support for further micro-economic reform?' back