American issues of Christianity, cosmology, politics, ecosphere, philosophy, contemporary history etc
11/16/24
College Education: Training to Keep People Stupid So They Can't Figure out How to Revolt?
Ca the US Medical System be Improved?
It tends toward being too expensive. Billing is also normally f'd up by agencies external to the medical side. The entire world is not provided basic health care as might be possible if advantaged thoughtful leaders found a way. Walk in treatment for poor homeless Americans without enough sedentary time in state rootedness to qualify for Medicaid should be a minor existing exclusion easy to fix. Biden-Harris had no interest in that
College education provides tools for thinking. Some of the practical get valuable training that pays well after graduation or even before. Anything medical, engineering or science pays well...it isn't philosophy. One may learn vast quantities of stuff that doesn't count for practical training at all. It's worth learning yet not any kind of training that has compensatory prospects.
Reply to an Anti-Christian Blaming Christians for the World's Troubled History
The State executed or imprisoned captives for The Inquisition in accordance with local laws. The Catholic Church examined them to determine if they were Catholics or had foreign allegiance as some kind of heretic. US social median comprised predominantly of Democrats, atheists and wokistry purged conservatives and Christians from social media as best they could as heretics to Democrat Party political goals with less violent means since the Obama administration.The Inquisition was probably a motivation for the separation of church and state centuries later in the US Constitution by Protestant founders.
People need to learn from history and improve upon it. Protestants were also purged in the era. You might read Foxxe’s Book of Martyrs to learn of The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and other events. The Habsburgs were trying to retain control of Europe and the Church was resisting reform from Protestants even as Mongol and Muslim invasions were being repulsed from attacks on Europe and Christiandom.
Illiterate peasants and opportunistic leaders often couldn’t discern the differences between theological points in Latin edition books they had never read and the sword points of foreign invaders; that is the peasants being killed by invaders with different religious beliefs were killed by swords rather than ideas. Spanish conquistadors had 500 years of war in their own country for practice getting rid of Muslim invaders as the inquisition commenced. Intolerance of foreign allegiance was realistic politics of that time.
People have original sin and only slowly discern the way of Jesus as far as numbers go... if they are blessed. Humanity is somewhat crude regarding environmental economics and Christian ethics including many of those affiliated with religion. Society in history is a work in progress.
11/15/24
The Origin of Religions
Strength of a State
One might want to define strength for this context and decide if it is in comparison to other states. Law is just one element of a state. Type and effectiveness of government, economic system, environmental management, education, military, non-governmental organization quality and quantity and relationships with other states are a few of the many elements determining the strength of a state.
Law is not a two-dimensional governor and ruler. Law is an arbiter and enforcer of social boundaries necessary to let individuals be self-determining. It can also be used to stop individual self-determination as in totalitarian states.
Logic is a discipline and tool for reasoning. Classical and symbolic logic are useful. Star Trek's Spock logic brought a lot of people to a warped notion of what it is. Emotion is non-rational though not necessarily bad. Children excel at emotion before reason. I think what is useful for mitigating the environment crisis is education and intelligence in the masses to get understanding for political support.
The mass extinction of the Anthropocene era eliminates most life eventually. It is an event of global habitat decline for life including humans. Chemicals and micro plastics in water, global heating, oceanic acidification... there are so many growing environmental challenges most leadership disregards that some people like Jacque Cousteau and James Lovelock said some years ago that humanity has just about 200 years left before civilization collapses and after that perhaps all human life.
Economic competition demands evaluation of others. Comparing abilities of others is as basic as private property in a capitalist economic system. Christian ethics are less judgemental, yet even sports requires evaluating competition. In a job app for example, people present the best appearance they can. Then a personnel manager compares resumes and hires the most suitable person. A more inclusive economic system could be made with less rigorous comparisons perhaps if broader social goals were common and any body could fill the role.
11/14/24
A Few Points on Cosmology
God is eternal and Earth is temporal. Two-dimensional waves embedded in the Higgs field get an apparent 3rd dimension. Matter is made of fermions and force carrying particles like photons are bosons. Space-time itself may be the source of gravity. Temporality and thermodynamics… Nothing that is matter is eternal. All of the dispersion of the original unified field in it’s sundry forms changes. Information may be eternal though, in some way…Shannon entropy or otherwise with God.
God is eternal and Earth is temporal. Two-dimensional waves embedded in the Higgs field get an apparent 3rd dimension. Matter is made of fermions and force carrying particles like photons are bosons. Space-time itself may be the source of gravity. Temporality and thermodynamics… Nothing that is matter is eternal. All of the dispersion of the original unified field in it’s sundry forms changes. Information may be eternal though, in some way…Shannon entropy or otherwise with God.
Why suffering exists? The coefficient of adversity is natural being alive. It varies in quality and quantity. Adam and Eve had zero adversity before the devil led them woke.
I lean toward Augustine's belief that human nature is totally depraved.God is perfect. Fallen mankind in a thermodynamic world/universe has an opportunity to be saved and that's what matters. If man lived forever without Christ they would create hell for others. Death limits the ability of mankind to do evil into others. There are acts of kindness sometimes. Those are phenomenal. The Universe physically presents a coefficient of adversity. People working together sometimes can overcome challenges so perhaps humanity learns something about caring for other before they go to hell or heaven as the case may be.
Bishop Berkeley's Idealism does not postulate that individuals create their own reality, just that the experience of reality could be like an illusion, or a holographic appearance created by God. For Berkeley, the individual views the world as did Sartre in Being and Nothingness.
11/13/24
The Energy of Space-time?
People are part of space-time. They do not possess it. Humans are privileged or, alternatively penalized to experience time.
Energy may be a measure, yet it can refer to mass changing form; E = m c2 as in radiation from uranium for example. Semantics for non- scientific lexicons can make practical discussions difficult. People sometimes call electrons flowing in a wire ‘energy’.
Fields exist, and the Higgs field exist with two dimension particle-waves slowing and entangled in it seeming to have a third dimension, so energy measurements are contingent selections of the relationships of apparent yet not actual energy?
I don’t know if the total quantity of energy in the Higgs Field ever changes due to the conservation of energy. Gravity may be a space-time curvature attribute or a residual of the unified field, while the strong force, electroweak and Higgs field are in some way joint progenitors of the quark era? One might wonder if quarks are energy, or strings and if there isn’t some kind of solipsistic barrier physically at some level of reduction to fundamental substance-matter-energy.
Mass is the amount of matter of an object. Energy is the amount of work it can do. Quarks are classified as fermions with half not zero spin. In some ways they seem like circular descriptions for noumena at the core of matter. It's hard to regard a field of massless particless as matter- like photons carrying force in an eng field
Quarks are fermions. Mass, like energy, is also a measurement. Photons have zero mass and are classed as bosons because they carry force. Apparently matter is the only 'substance'. Gluons and quarks are classed as fermions because they build matter. Fields existed prior to gluons and quarks. Those fermions put on mass in the Higgs field. I believe the interaction of two-dimensional particle-waves in the Higgs field including photons with their 'timelessness' is interesting to consider.
I believe some would like to regard space-time to be the source of everything in-itself that in various phases emits or allows divisions of packets of virtual energy to become temporally existent independently leading to universes with ‘mass’. I cannot say where all that space-time in-itself evolved to…probably nowhere I think of a soul as information. God backs up that data perhaps…ssds haven’t enough storage capacity
About Christ in Collossians 1- "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
18 And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. 19 For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell."
God always existed, yet the universe has time and had a beginning.
Shanghai had Troubles Prior to the Revolution
Etymologically instinct means an impulse toward something. People tend toward acceptance of select word paradigms as nouns and facts in-themselves a bit too readily. Such descriptions are nominal.
Learned behaviors are sometimes described as instinct or second nature. An SAS operator may shoot a thousand head shots a day on the range (maybe) at proper targets until the right response to stimuli is instinctive, yet self-defense is itself somewhat ‘instinctive’ in a more natural example of the common understanding.
On compassion vs degradation in social history. Is there a cause for optimism philosophically?
Hobbes’ main idea in The Leviathan was the absolute power of the king. He was the brain and the people the body of the state. Life was nasty, brutish and short in his day. Camus’ The Plague has a lot of nastiness in it. The Stranger has the protagonist vomiting on a beach. Camus died in a car accident at a fairly young age. Frankl’s logo therapy was a response to the complete degradation and loss of humanity experienced by inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The only mass philosophy that easily comes to mind that killed millions is communism. Capitalism is more an economic system than philosophy, though basic greed and the will for political power plus minions are the main causes of war.
People can invent their own opponents in politics these days, ignore existential challenges and destroy social well being in the blundered quest for power. Philosophical works sometimes should be understood in their historical context. Would one for instance use The Prince as a role model for poly sci students today?
Communism worked as a revolutionary philosophy because millions of poor people were oppressed by royalty with most of the wealth. China today is better off than they would be if the Imperials had persisted.
If Democrat Presidents hadn’t taken all of Ukraine from Russia and expanded NATO Eastward Russia would be an ally and China more democratic in the political philosophy sense. The poor suffer more than the rich and around the world haven’t got free universal health care That’s a political rather than a philosophical problem
Instincts and Nominalism
Etymologically instinct means an impulse toward something. People tend toward acceptance of select word paradigms as nouns and facts in-themselves a bit too readily. Such descriptions are nominal.
Learned behaviors are sometimes described as instinct or second nature. An SAS operator may shoot a thousand head shots a day on the range (maybe) at proper targets until the right response to stimuli is instinctive, yet self-defense is itself somewhat ‘instinctive’ in a more natural example of the common understanding.
On compassion vs degradation in social history. Is there a cause for optimism philosophically?
Hobbes’ main idea in The Leviathan was the absolute power of the king. He was the brain and the people the body of the state. Life was nasty, brutish and short in his day. Camus’ The Plague has a lot of nastiness in it. The Stranger has the protagonist vomiting on a beach. Camus died in a car accident at a fairly young age. Frankl’s logo therapy was a response to the complete degradation and loss of humanity experienced by inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The only mass philosophy that easily comes to mind that killed millions is communism. Capitalism is more an economic system than philosophy, though basic greed and the will for political power plus minions are the main causes of war.
People can invent their own opponents in politics these days, ignore existential challenges and destroy social well being in the blundered quest for power. Philosophical works sometimes should be understood in their historical context. Would one for instance use The Prince as a role model for poly sci students today?
Communism worked as a revolutionary philosophy because millions of poor people were oppressed by royalty with most of the wealth. China today is better off than they would be if the Imperials had persisted.
If Democrat Presidents hadn’t taken all of Ukraine from Russia and expanded NATO Eastward Russia would be an ally and China more democratic in the political philosophy sense. The poor suffer more than the rich and around the world haven’t got free universal health care That’s a political rather than a philosophical problem
I suppose NDE means near death experiences. I wondered if sometimes God edits reality a little to keep some people alive where they would have died, and they aren't much aware of the edit though they may be thankful for remaining alive.
Don't know about theoretical sentient beings. They may have different views on death.
Conditioning like learning languages is a social context...filtering that out would leave one imbecilic I would think. Behavior is partly learned from experience and that too conditions. Filter out that placing your hand on a hot stove burns.
Evidence and Beliefs
One may believe facts and/or things evident. Power is however a relationship to things other than itself. One perceives relationships about things, not about noumenon. That need be an inference.
Then of course one may want to consult Socrates’ ideas in The Meno.
Is God in and without the Universe?He is non- contingent Being. Consider the relationship of a programmer to a program running. The programmer is outside the program because it is his ossified praxis, so his thought values are in it. If programs were live and written by thought interfaced with code the relation would be more challenging to delineate. Maybe a creative AI will model that paradigm eventually, if not presently.
Exist etymologically means to come into being, such as a Universe or Multiverse Alternatively God is eternal and always is.
Exist etymologically means to come into being. Alternatively God is eternal and always is.
11/10/24
Democracy, Corporatocracy and Republics
Corporatocracy does develop hybrid forms in different circumstances. There is also plutocracy
There are real issues that voters care about Mass illegal immigration was one this time. Voters cast ballots for candidates agreeing with their will. Of course one might like better candidates however the people might get what they deserve. The rare, smart, well balanced candidate with great ideas never makes it through the filters of common averageness that dominate American style democracy.
I should mention the R word (republic). The demos is represented by elected individuals. Direct, live voting on all political issues of a nation doesn't exist anywhere. Some few people would be needed to make issues for people to vote on and they would probably need to be elected. Pure democracy might work in small groups, yet for nations it would need to be reactionary rather than creative, because advancing in new directions would not arise spontaneously as referenda on election ballots.
About Logic
A silly, grossly invalid syllogism. premise 1 All men are mortal premise 2 Janey Socrates is not a man Conclusion- Janey Socrates is immo...
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Alaskan officials have cut down or banned King Salmon fishing in much of Alaska because so few of the large fish are returning. The Ancho...
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Here and there pointillist continua build rowing the skiff clambering over the road staying in shadows until spring insouciant compact snow ...
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Why do F-22 pilots lose consciousness and let their planes crash and burn? The air superiority fighters are designed to survive oppositio...