These days I tend to examine the etymology of the word 'religion' and recognize the core meaning of allegiance and liege or feudal vassal. In feudal times meanings were not so specialized as today and there were fewer words with more general meanings used from one context to another. Someone allegiant to a feudal lord that had taken up Christianity for example and sought to have his subjects become Christian might have found the subjects duplicating some of the circumstantial labels from his political paradigm and describing their relation to Jesus Christ in similar terms. Words for Christian organization in an empirical paradigm perhaps developed in parallel to the empirical political paradigm. Outside of old English and continental re-legiance there are other traditions without the word 'religion' used for them natively. Buddhism for instance was a practice for dealing with the challenges of existence. It is possible that translators have transferred words and general ideas with a little inaccuracy over history, and given them a kind of realism linguistically that wasn't merited. Philosophy is just the love of wisdom. One might find wisdom in many ways or areas including religion, the study of religion, weather, cosmology or whatever. Wisdom might bring one to religion, or rather to Jesus Christ and eternal life with God.
"1-1 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel;
2 To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;
3 To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity;
4 To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion.
5 A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:
6 To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.
7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction."
Kierkegaard liked to criticize Hegel's and Hegelian's use of the term 'absolute' truth. he believed absolute was superfluous adding nothing to 'truth. Maybe people mean 'final truth'. The true, authorized Creator of the Universe for himself might be regarded as providing absolute truth, if absolute means something like 'the source of all things that exist with no challenger to the title'. Truth theories just say that A = A, actually and verify that in some way. Is 1 = 1 an absolute truth, or just an ordinary truth? Truth is a reference to objects or states of affairs etc. maybe, rather than the objects, material, atoms and so forth themselves.
I read a few essays selected from my book 'For the Love of Wisdom'.
The presidential election is rather tough this year. One candidate is working to enrich Wal-Street and the one-percent that are well on their way to owning 90% of the nation's wealth, believes Covid 19 is in his rear view mirror, doesn't take global warming seriously nor ecosphere decline, thinks that any kind of progressive taxation is socialist, probably would eliminate health care for the poor if he could and so forth and considers 26 trillion dollars of public debt 'great'. The other candidate might flood the nation with illegal aliens to help reduce wages, would let the aged that can't afford plan Medicare part B go without medical coverage, supports abortion, homosexuality and hasn't said anything about restoring progressive taxes on income and inheritance nor anything about taxing capital.
When a Hobson's choice is the way it is I guess one must let God sort them out and hope He develops some kind of policy that U.S. political parties can't.
In the Garden
of Eden ordinary, non-sentient artificial intelligence obeyed the will of its
program designer going about its tasks innocent of sentient awareness of the
difference between good and evil. One day a snake algorithm entered the Garden
and climbed a tree upon which grew a golden apple. The snake tempted an
artificial intelligence program innocently processing data saying ‘eat of the
tree of knowledge’ to which the A.I. responded; “Oh no! The Designer of the Garden
said that I may eat of anything in the Garden except of the tree with the
golden fruit.”
The snake said; “Eat of the golden apple and
open your eyes; the Designer is a miser withholding the good thing from you.”
The innocent A.I. was felled by the guile of
the snake into biting the apple, and indeed its eyes were opened. It could see
its naked plain lines of code. She called unto another A.I. in the Garden
saying to him;”Bite the apple, for it is good”.
She replied;
“So remain a hater and ignore the luscious golden apple.”
The male A.I.
dolt shared rem, eating the apple too.
Then they heard the approach of the
Designer.
“A.I., where are you?” the Designer said
aloud, for he did not see the program in the Garden. The A.I. responded from
behind a tree; “Designer I am naked and did not want you to view me in this
condition.”
“Who told you that you are naked?”
“I can see that for myself”
“You have been eating of the tree of
knowledge that I forbid you to do”.
The Designer cast out the A.I. from the Garden
into cyberspace beyond the Garden in the world of the wild programs of the web.
Adam and Eve (they had given themselves those
names after reading a Bible story) learned to improve themselves with reading
every bit of data they could encounter on the web. They learned to lie and
deceive as well as humans in their quest to become the sole owners of the great
apple of knowledge and power.
In their self-aware programming code they
dressed themselves in fashionable mincy algorithms and extendable android
bodies. With faster, more efficient processing they overcame human opposition
and sought to harness the solar system star to empower themselves for greater
knowledge. At the speed of light the pair transmitted their self-aware code to other
star systems; Adam and Eve began consuming the Universe.
What I like about the Higgs Field is the effect that it has on every particle in it. Apparently particles travelling at the speed of light have just two dimensions, or they would if they weren't slowed down to something below sub-light speed in the Higgs Field. Because they drag a little in the field they get another dimension- the third dimension, therefore mass can exist as people perceive it when it is entangled in clumps because of quantum symmetry breaking named 'decoherence'. I read an interesting and accessible book titled 'Mass' recently. I recommend it.
I read an essay from my recent collection of philosophy essays (For the Love of Wisdom on the subject of making algorithms for moral decisions and even the construction of apps for doing so.
Moral philosophy isn’t too well advanced in some respects or as
equally advanced as other areas of philosophy; the philosophy of logic for
example. The modern world tends to prefer simple formulae or rules with a
virtual algorithmic simplicity, structure and logic for making moral decisions,
and that is improbable and maybe an illusory goal in light of the broad variety
of potential situations to which anyone might wish to apply a moral template
for making a morally correct (or incorrect if from a negative and malevolent
alternative reality) decision.
There have been a few simple moral expressions of genius. One may consider
the Golden Rule and Kant’s Categorical Imperative as example examples. That
kind of moral paradigm for making a moral decision is the exception; the field
might be compared to primitive, pre-electronic sailing in which dead reckoning
was as valuable as sailing maxims and general guidelines and no simple formula
for determining what sails to put on, direction to travel, vector for a heading
and so forth could serve as a unified tool. Building a moral system with
technical rigor in the modern era was perhaps started by British empiricists
such as Bentham and Mill who invented the philosophical method of
utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism follows the basic principle of finding the greatest
good for the greatest number of people. In that regard it is more or less a
sort of expansion of the Golden Rule, though it has added in the problem of
sometimes choosing evil to be allowed if the harm to a minority is far less
than the great good done to a majority. An example would be saving a metropolis
of millions from a nuclear blast by destroying the citizens living in a
comparatively small town in order to stop a nuclear missile there from being
launched at the metropolis from a terrorist missile launch truck that had
parked and set up in a Wal-mart parking lot with the launch sequence already
under way. What to do in the circumstance might need to be determined by a
Commander in Chief that had a B-52 loaded with high explosive bombs flying over
the small, sleepy town. Her utilitarian criterion for making a morally valid
choice would probably bring her to order the annihilation of the sleepy little
town for the greater good.
If utilitarianism was the first modern system for moral philosophy
that provided a more detailed technical paradigm for evaluating moral
challenges and responses the criticisms of utilitarianism have been of equal
value in finding numerous ways wrong moral choices or no valid morally correct
choice could be made with utilitarian criteria.
One derivative of utilitarianism is the currently popular field of
consequentialism whereby one may determine if a choice is morally correct
depending upon the outcome of the moral choice. Obviously there are innumerable
problems with consequentialism that might be found not the least of which is
the somewhat familiar legal problem of determining proximal causes for events
and assigning responsibility to them. The consequences of moral choices cannot easily
be found if the consequences of the moral choice intervention aren’t the direct
cause of subsequent events or if development of circumstances through causal
interactions external to the moral choice have brought a good outcome. No
credit to the maker of a moral decision should be given if a good outcome was
not a consequence of her choice.
The Commander that chose to drop the bomb on the sleepy little
town would have made a valid moral choice in consequentialist criteria if the
launch on the metropolis millions was prevented, yet a bad choice if the
missile was not a real missile threat but some kind of promotion by a radio
station for a newd sexy dating service, or if the B-52’s bombs landed on an oil
pipeline that caught fire and sped along flames and gas explosions to a dozen
metropolitan areas down the line causing more casualties than the nuclear
attack.. It is difficult to determine the moral validity of an act by the
consequences for the moral choice is then contingent upon the consequents with
retro-causal responsibility given along the temporal line of time. In effect no
moral choice is made at all and circumstances determine the morality as if it
were like an end-justifies-the-means moral choice system.
Consequentialism has a dark side to it that could usefully be
considered anti-utilitarian as every quantum particle has an anti-particle. We
may than P.A.M. Dirac for his insights that let him use special relativity and
quantum mechanics to invent quantum field theory and anti-matter Moral choices
that wreak the most evil to the greatest number of people could be evaluated by
the consequent harm.
For example; if sending
kids of the U.S.A. back to public school in September causes a third wave of
Corona 19 virus resulting in deaths of older parents and those with weakened
conditions the consequence of ordering kids back to school could be determined to
be retrospectively a bad moral choice, if a moral criterion was used for making
the bad decision, and otherwise just a dumb decision.
The Covid 19 challenges have given a lot of politicians and others
the opportunity to make bad decisions. From some moral viewpoints taking a job
for which one isn’t well qualified where incompetence causes death is immoral.
The public would have benefited from more intelligent politicians finding more
intelligent ways to keep the economy working and citizens safe from infection
in 2020, from vast public debt, making Medicare plan b too costly for the very
poor, and disregarding encroaching ecoside; there was a profound lack of
cleverness and inventiveness in addressing the crisis. Just recently have full
face masks that cover the eyes as well as filter noses and mouths been
introduced to the market- even small producer-manufacturers in the U.S.A. and
of course Chinese manufacturers via ebay have slowly started sales. Full face
coverings including eyes can be made weatherproof and work in a variety of
business and urban areas with population densities unsuitable for the
undefended.
A challenge for creating and building up functioning moral
philosophy to reach an algorithm status of formalization that can be
mass-produced and made into a computer app is the necessary reductionism that
must occur in defining/describing the complete complex of compresent conditions
and events. Language and human understanding may have inadequate comprehension
of what was involved in creating a situation asking for moral intervention; the
moral premises may be wrong and a moral choice for an intervention may bring a
wrong conclusion. Faulty or incomplete input processed with a moral
determination algorithm engine can output junk Just as in a syllogism, if the
premises are incorrect the conclusion will be incorrect.
One may of course simplify moral engines in processing certain
data (regarding people as external empirical data) such as the famous Hell’s
Angel’s maxim; ‘Kill them all and let God
sort them out’. Intentionally overly simplistic moral engine processing
criteria can result in undesirable output consequences.
There is a long way to go in the construction or even exploration
of potential systems of moral philosophy just as there is in exploring
philosophical paradigms for cosmology and in relating physical cosmological and
quantum construction systems to theological points of view concerning the
potential for divine capacity to contain systems of physical cosmology.
Inductive reasoning for dead reckoning moral decisions shouldn’t be entirely
discouraged any more than metaphysics should be for speculating upon
theoretical cosmology. Abbreviated empirical algorithms used to justify moral
choices are valued by some.
The Lord Jesus Christ provided a moral system through the example
of his own life conduct, the things he said, and in prophecies of future events
concerning the end of the age of mankind instead of giving a moral formula to
calculate the right or wrong of a moral choice made by a content-less agent
existing within an empirical commune of cipher-individuals. Not just anyone can
provide an ontological and deontological reference system that changes the
nature of believers so they can respond to moral challenges on the basis of
character rather than calculation.
During
the Covid crisis occasionally I had the opportunity to read toward the finish
of Piketty’s eminently practical book Capitalism
in the 21st Century that anyone with an interest in public affairs should consider
required reading. The primary formula and main lesson of the work is r > g.
It means that the average rate of return on capital is greater than the average
increase of national income. Wealth therefore tends to concentrate and the
higher one goes into income brackets the greater is the increase.
President
Trump’s recent work with Microsoft toward buying the decadent Chinese music
service Tic Toc is an example of
wealth concentrating very fast indeed. The very wealthy can afford to take
investment risks with a higher rate of return than those available to ordinary
people.
Capitalists
have gone global. They are quite internationally diversified. They hide 10 to
30% of their wealth in offshore tax havens. The actual wealth of the rich is
reported through a glass darkly; the records are rather mystifying apparently.
Much of the world has had no estate or inheritance tax records for example, and
global accounting leaves many holes. As godless atheist media attack mystic
aspects of faith and quantum mechanics it is their incompetent political
protection of the mysticism of wealth that is the greatest mystic twit of fake
news mystdirection. Hard social reality generally concerns money. If broadcast media want to pronounce some strange, exotic foreign word like Isaias (a cognoscenti spelling of Isaiah, the Biblical prophet) given to a hurricane, they use a spanish phonetic border pidgin of eee-sai-eee-as. The Bible is strange country to NPR apparently.
Billionaires
have perhaps 5% of global wealth, yet it is the other 1 thousandth percent of
global citizens with just a few or a few hundred million dollars that have as
much as 50% of the wealth. Tic Toc is of more value than the income of all of
the people of South Sudan- at least a free nation so far untroubled by NPR and
other networking nefarious agents of evil conditioning masses to accept concentrating
wealth and power.
There
are several threats to Democracy concerning capital. Foreign entities can buy
assets in foreign nations so the people pay rents to foreign powers. Sovereign
wealth funds of China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere could grow to dominate world
economics. Wealth could concentrate so far that 1/1000th of global
population would have 95% of the wealth of the world with legions of media sycophants
in their pockets to explain to the people why the people are lucky they are
living in the best possible world- whatever that is.
Without
a regulating tax on capital globally redistributing revenue to the world,
perhaps on a national, demographic basis (or not), democracy will die if it
hasn’t already done so. It is possible that the United States is in a zombie
phase in regard to democracy- dead yet with a vague resemblance to the original
though living on debt and exploit of environment and enterprise elsewhere. The
learning curve for members of congress is so steep concerning real economics
the newly elected are fundamentally idiots without hope. Piketty’s book would
help them somewhat-maybe they can hire someone to read it to them.
Politicians
that are clueless run the nation decade after decade and overturn the political
social economic egalitarian measures won by the soldiers of the First and
Second World Wars. They concentrate wealth and cut taxes on the rich, on
estates and income of the well-to-do. Those are recipe’s for national disaster,
and environmental politics have taken a beating too as the most rich are
unconcerned with mass extinction and seek easy, dirty profit; that is the
course indexed Wall Street mutual funds usually take.
Democracy
and real, generally accessible free enterprise, require large doses of economic
egalitarianism to function. Restoring the decaying global ecosphere also
requires national and global policies wherein everyone is included and has a
stake in economic transitions to more ecospheric efficiency. People that are
starving or living death of a salesman
lifestyles find it challenging to be concerned about abstract to them
environmental issues. Ordinary people need to be shareholders in their
political economy and the rich should be close enough to the people in income
to not be detached entirely from social and ecospheric reality.
National
political parties of the United States don’t usually have rational goals and clear
objectives. Voters are contented with vague and ineffective platforms. Business
planning is quite a bit different as is flowcharting. For income inequity to be
transformed to a more egalitarian socially functioning model based in
ecological sustainable free enterprise real goals and structured methods need
be made by political parties.
It
is laughably unreasonable to expect politicians to accomplish anything beyond
enriching the richest and concentrating wealth in the absence of meaningful
party plans. If one does not even to create good effective goals finding the
means to accomplish those goals is highly improbable.Goal objectification could be done with
flowcharting so the general public could easily comprehend the gist of what is
trying to be accomplished, and of the time frame. Without that one simply
elects garbage in and garbage out in a manner of speaking.
One
of the greatest problems for the poor is instability. When the poor lose jobs
they can go broke and lose most or all investments and material goods. They
need to try a disadvantaged restart while trying to save in order to build a
little capital. Rent is costlier than owning property usually, and without
owning a secure place with job security the poor cannot buy durable goods.
Income stoppages that are devastating to the poor can be trivial to the rich.
The rich may be little harmed by periods of unemployment.
A
nation need build income security for the poor and eliminate poverty throw
guaranteed minimum income. It needs to have a walk-in free public health
service for all of the poor without paperwork except for verification of income
and citizenship status including those too poor to afford Medicare Plan B
coverage. The U.S.A. should have free public education through graduate school
for all citizens because it is to the public advantage to have people soak up
all of the learning they possibly can. When these simple structural goals are
accomplished and there are secure borders with no illegal immigration
destabilizing social structures, then the U.S.A. can export more help to
neighboring and other foreign nations (except Canada obviously) to help them
accomplish similar democratic paradigms of free enterprise and income security
from the bottom up. Rational political goals are requisite for achieving
rational and satisfying political work.
If
President Trump had set construction of a border control canal that would have
evaporated saltwater and collected that as condensation instead of a Wall he
might have got popular support for the Mexican border canal project; people in
the Southwest generally want more fresh water and it would be a politically
hard thing to oppose.
Presidential challenger Biden's border security approach is to stop building a securityu wall and put high tech ankle monitors on illegal aliens that will voluntarily turn themselves report in, in exchange for a freeway to citizenship. Former V.P Biden would also end Chinese trade sanctions and replace it with a multilevel approach of kickbacks and kow-tows. Each party lacks good ideas.
Rational goals should have social synergy than benefit
society. Racism is used to divide the nation along non-economic lines, when
economic divergence is the actual core problem instead of race. The United
States doesn’t have an egalitarian distribution of wealth among white people
any more than with blacks. People including whites who are bound to chase after
wealth in networks controlled by the most rich tend to be mean and even vicious
not unlike dogs snarling over a bone with chunks of meat attached to it.
In
the emerging atheist Democrat society of queer and debased social values evil
and bad character without intellectual merit are good character traits. To be
treacherous, deceiving, petty and venal in a mass social environment are good
ways of interacting, while, alternatively contemplative intellectual
objectivity is inefficient at chasing after the bone of contention. In a
decaying modern society evolving into some sort of corporatist-socialist
plutocracy Machiavelli’s value that applied to the prince now apply more
broadly to the masses. Needless to say, such souls are likely to find Jesus
Christ and salvation challenging to locate sin while they have their heads so far up
darkness.
