Elements of Lutheran Reforms

It is interesting to consider how after nearly 500 years the ideas of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the Roman Catholic Church have shaped Christian ideas about the salvation, faith, the Eucharist and sacraments. Protestant reformers of the visible Christian church made their reformed ideas at great personal cost and the thirty years war of liberation from Romanism and it's subject princes tore the European peasantry. The American revolutionaries were of the reformed school-George Washington if Catholic couldn't have revolted from his Prince, although Britain had reduced Romanism already since Henry VIII. Values developed by Martin Luther in the 16th century reformation stimulated political and ecclesiastical changes immediately. As the United States fails to maintain a strong Protestant religious ethic it commensurately develops globalism, concentration of wealth through networking and a variety of forms of ad hoc imperialism with the collateral degradation of nationalism and democracy. Protest against inhuman forces of impersonal hierarchical power in church and state are basic to the revolutionary esprit. In direct relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ mankind finds freedom.

Approximately half of the German princes took up the independence from Roman catholicism movement right from the start. The first democracy in Europe-the Dutch democracy led by the Dewitt brothers in the 16^th century. Severing ties from the Holy Roman Empire at Vienna was essential and just a first step in the rise of the age of democracy.

All was not perfect in the Lutheran style reformation though. Martin Luther was quite conservative and retained some Roman catholic liturgical forms although abolishing the exclusive priestly caste.

When the hierarchy of corrupt Bishops and priests was overthrown Luther advocated and received support for Erastian transition; the German princes themselves became the religious leaders appointing bishops for themselves. Frederick the Elector did follow Luther's instructions for making visitations to German districts to correct the corruptions made during the ineffective prior regime. The people were ready to receive the word of God in a more egalitarian way and German book publishing of the Bible skyrocketed from fewer than 100 books annually in the entire country to thousands and thousands of vernacular editions of the Bible.

Mobs actually burned two of the first catholic priests of Prussia that converted to the reformed relationship to God that Luther set out. Anabaptists were persecuted by new Protestants to for abolishing infant baptism. Questions and controversy about infant baptism, and of how much water needed to be used in any baptism were taken so seriously that many were put to death. That seems remarkable today, so I will toss in my own ideas on the topic of do infants have original sin and does baptism do them any good since they have no ability to intentionally accept the Lord as their personal savior through faith.

It was pointed out that John the Baptist has awareness of God in the womb, even so John was born with original sin. I believe that original sin predominantly refers to the mortal context of being subject to entropy as a biological being. Hence every human has original sin. The entropy condition was a reduction from the perfect environment of Eden and imposed to correct the errors of will of Adam and Eve.

Infants have yet to develop consciousness sufficiently to choose willfully to do evil. They may all have a naturally sort of trust or faith as they are dependent on and reacting to others. Baptizing them may acknowledge that trust socially and can do no harm. Since parents are generally regarded as lawfully accountable for their charges again baptism can do no harm and may confer an element of grace upon the infant. If the infant grows to develop faith as an adult then they may become born in the Spirit as saved souls. Jesus Christ is not bound to the legalisms of liturgical methods or theological positions such as humans entertain. 

Human beings need firewalls in the visible church to defend against interpretive error and union within the invisible church of Jesus Christ.

I tend to believe in the Lutheran concept of salvation through faith yet also have the Calvinist concepts that election and pre-determinism by God are correct. I also would think that the Eucharist is not a transubstantiation of the bread and wine into human blood or body, but rather something more like a commemoration and recognition of the fundamental elements of mass and energy as God's. 
 

The Eucharist would be an acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God in everything, analogous to an assertion of political sovereignty. It's a metaphysical statement on the ultimate building blocks of cosmology. 
 

Visible church outlets in the consumer era may be compared to franchise cheeseburger stores on Main street. It may be true that McDonald's was the first vast franchise empire yet they do not have an exclusive formula to the true cheeseburger. Even the faithful may wander into Burger King or Wendy's now and then. Also, there are home cheeseburger outlets relating directly to the true Platonic Universal form of cheeseburger. 

Particular cheeseburgers are examples of forms of the Universal. Partaking in then cheeseburger acknowledges the organic Earthly origin as grain from the Earth in the Eucharist. The wine is the organic grapes of the Earth. The Lord took the body of the Earth-the organic bread, and human beings broke it on the cross spilling his blood. Yet the salvation of the Lord given to mankind of faith transcends the world and it's consumable produce.

I would guess that the idea of relationship surpassing form is the fundamental reformist paradigm in the gestalt of the church with the Lord. Liturgical forms and concepts about sacraments are a continuum of respect between Creator and created. That relationship continues to be significant even as salvation through faith rather than works or sacraments administered by a sacerdotal set-aside priestly caste has risen to the positive better expression modality for Christians. 
 

The priesthood of believers is a correct form rather than a partitioned dichotomy of priests and laity mirroring that of traditional aristocracy-subjects paradigms. Developing an active priesthood of believers church structure with just three ranks of beginner, intermediate and elder will be a challenge and a renewal of reformation. In the world today the political drift is toward ad hoc neo-imperlialism of class of wealth through global networks.

A Matter of Trans-finite Sets and a Good Algorithm

I wonder if one could write an algorithm using calculus within trans-finite set theory (series) such as Cantor developed for sets to construct shapes logically branching to create new kinds of series? If intervals and point coordinates are nominal ontologically from monism, any structure of coordinates and intervals inclusive of relativistically altered shapes probably can be created for n-topologies with a decent algorithm compounding itself infinitely  constructing dimensions.

If  I had taken calculus in college I would write the algorithm myself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

August 6 100th Anniversary of War of the West on Russia

August 6, 1914 marks the 100th anniversary of the war of the west upon Russia. On that date Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia and a day later Germany invaded. It is notable that a century after the war of the west that took the Ukraine from Russia for a time and that put Lenin and the Bolsheviks into power with the help of the Kaiser, history in some ways is repeating itself.

One wonders if the President's Benghazi news team will report events in the Eastern Ukraine with the same candor?

The First Bastards Cain and Abel Issued From Original SIn

Contemplating the failure of American public education to provide the alternative of private school vouchers I stumbled across a deeper insight into the origin of mankind. Adam and Eve of course perpetrated the original sin having intercourse without being actually married and in so doing producing bastards named Cain and Abel who married the local girls of Y'Earth. Thus humanity was established by bastards creating the bastard line mankind. Mankind needs the intervention of Jesus Christ to be renormalized unto God-and that cost the Lord His mortal life. Jesus Christ was the sole man born of woman who wasn't a bastard since his Father is God.

Schoolchildren today primed by the devil in public schools are mass produced with the mark of the beast about them. That view is perhaps not so rare in people as they age and note the pervasive trend of humanity toward works of evil if not folly. Perhaps it's folly for repeating the same works in line with Solomon's observation that there is nothing new under the sun. Politically speaking humanity seem to be naturally bent toward imperialism as rulers forced to share power in oligarchy reluctantly or be hierarchialy placed followers working for the corporate-government evil empire of choice.

Yet Pope Francis recently said that man and woman are the divine form for marriage. So I guess he is right more or less. God created man and woman in a relationship that is a natural marriage with Eve as close to Adam as a rib during their life together. Humanity can bastardize any institution though so even marriage is endangered by the brave new world.

Martin Luther said (quote from Schaff Vol. 7 History of Christian Church) that

“matrimony (is) a gift of God, wedlock the sweetest, chastest life, above all celibacy, or else a veritable hell.” He had it right. Yet I think the devil attacks virtually anbything that works, and prefers conflict and conquest in human affairs to innovation of better, newer paths.

Well to not leave this post on that note in this poetry month I will quote Schaff about Luther again from Volume 7 of Schaff's history,

“He played the lute, sang melodiously, and composed tunes to his hymns, especially the immortal, Ein feste Burg," which gives classic expression to his heroic faith in God and the triumph of the gospel. He never lost his love for Virgil and Cicero, which he acquired as a student at Erfurt. He was fond of legends, fables, and proverbs. He would have delighted in the stories of old "Mother Goose," and in Grimm’s "Hausmährchen."

He translated some of Esop’s Fables, and wrote a preface to an edition which was published after his death. He enjoyed the beauties of nature, loved trees and flowers, was fond of gardening, watched with wonder the household of the bees, listened with delight to the singing birds, renewed his youth with the return of spring, and adored everywhere the wisdom and goodness of nature’s God.

Looking at a rose, he said, "Could a man make a single rose, we should give him an empire; but these beautiful gifts of God come freely to us, and we think nothing of them. We admire what is worthless, if it be only rare. The most precious of things is nothing if it be common." "The smallest flowers show God’s wisdom and might. Painters cannot rival their color, nor perfumers their sweetness; green and yellow, crimson, blue, and purple, all growing out of the earth. And yet we trample on lilies as if we were so many cows."

He delighted in a refreshing rain. "God rains," he said, "many hundred thousand guilders, wheat, rye, barley, oats, wine, cabbage, grass, milk." Talking of children, he said, "They speak and act from the heart. They believe in God without disputing, and in another life beyond the present. They have small intellect, but they have faith, and are wiser than old fools like us. Abraham must have had a hard time when he was told to kill Isaac. No doubt he kept it from Sarah. If God had given me such all order, I should have disputed the point with Him. But God has given his only begotten Son unto death for us."

Correcting an Implicit Inefficiency of Capitalism

If there is implicit structural inefficiency in contemporary capitalism is it possible to innovate a remedy? Capitalism applications have different forms in differing economic circumstances, levels of sophistication and so forth some being more practical than others. Capitalism presently has an a bias toward expensive means of production limiting the potential number of product producers, and perhaps requiring substantial capital investment. If one could invent a universal hat-making machine easy to make at home it would put hat makers and related hat making supply industries out of business. The market is biased against most-efficient, lowest cost methods of production. The market runs against the present ecological-economic drive toward lowest-entropy economics as a principle of environmental conservation.

Traditionally in classical economics there has been analysis about market efficiency. With high-speed quantitative trading today that works with cold-blooded machine-language analysis of abstract values for instant speed-of-light dark pool exploitation the concept of market efficiency also means eliminating the human element from business and moving toward a version of Adam Smith's capitalism evolving to consolidation of power for the sake of power. Even so, capitalism has an innate bias against inventing the lowest cost way of production such that it would virtually open source.

Capitalism instead favors expensive means of production with rare limited entry producers such as makers of computer chips. Though mass production lowers cost and a corporation produces immense profits social economic development moves toward capital investment in businesses that benefit from investment and become more specialized and rarefied in production moving even beyond few existing rivals. Alternatively technologies that produce goods at very low cost and require little public investment are avoided. Inventors are disincentivized to search for such product inventions with no rewards for producer efficiency. There is an implicit bias toward expensive means of production and products.

When a dichotomy develops between producers and consumers on the basis of corporate hierarchies gathered about an exclusive, costly production industry democracy obviously dwindles. Though planetary masses may be drafted into becoming employees and affiliates of the costly production corporations the efficiency of capitalism suffers. When political power is taken by economic powers of capitalism even the potential for finding or inventing low-cost and efficient open source means of production dwindles. In such a deformed variety of capitalism anthropogenic entropy increases abnormally quickly.

Jesus Christ as the Turning Point in History (audio)

This is an essay I wrote about Jesus Christ as the turning point in history.

Metavnoic Morphs (poem)

Raging against the seafloor
where hopes pinned to nothingness slide
too quickly with seafloor convergence
a mid-Atlantic rise of crowding fumaroles

Because the beginning of time inflated
with a word of pure reason
dimensions caught in strong currents let galaxies fly

Force and energy exclusive to morning shadows
singularities shorn of Universality
particulars required to feel the partitions
these dreams fade like little cat feet.

If No SuperXP Spinoff, Try Linux Mint

Since support for Windows XP bit the dust without a spinoff subdivision to develop the venerable OS for desktop styles as if Microsoft could have two colors of Model T, the realistic choice for p0eople with old computers is to install Ubuntu version 12 because it's easy. Then one can install Linux Mint version 16 and have two operating systems to replace XP.

Ubuntu's Linux and Mint's Linux each are open source operating systems and hence free though they will accept donations. Mint is what XP could be if it upgraded a little. It's simple, streamlined and with thousands of easy to install software apps. There is a lot of free software included with Mint.

 http://www.linuxmint.com/

I suggest installing Ubuntu first because it is easy to duel boot another Linux operating system providing the opportunity to share the drive c memory it whatever ratio you like. Mint perhaps should have 3/4ths of drive c.

 http://www.ubuntu.com/download

It is something of a failure of innovation for Microsoft to allow its popular XP to die as an obsolete species and pursue just one OS development at a time. What business model suggests one can't develop two products at the same time  in different directions?

Odd Light-Possibly Electricity Waste- Seen on Mars

N.A.S.A. has produced photos of what may be electrical waste by unknown life forms on Mars. The light seems something like a very large flashlight arising from the ground. It could also be some sort of vapor backlighted by sunrise, a glow-in-the-dark creature visiting that mostly vacant world or a secret space program element. Earth persons had better get an insulated aluminum log ostrog with a dome for colonialists up there right away before the aliens take all of the good view property. Waterfront props don't go to the slowt.

http://www.chron.com/news/strange-weird/article/NASA-photo-captures-strange-bright-light-on-Mars-5382677.php

N.A.S.A. rover photo of possible electrical waste on Mars

Something About the Universe (with audio link)

Philosophically speaking the configuration of energy in various forms of steady state mass with dimensions, time, motion etc is abstract yet contingent unto the spirit of God.  Strings, quarks and other steady state mass seem to be entangled waveforms arisen from an implicate or implicit field underlying space-time and mass energy.

 http://www.buzzsprout.com/20597/164185-the-implicate-quantum-cosmology

There is entropy and a direction in that field regarding time evidently, yet those are contingent to the actualization of the field-Universe. The scale of the Universe and the capacity for it to recur are I would think be delimited by the intellectual capacity of the human mind. a hypothesized event cycle such as inflation, big bang, or colliding membranes such as Turok described obviously could be posited to recur infinitely though there is no necessity.

 http://www.statecolumn.com/2014/04/boss-uses-140000-quasars-to-make-most-precise-measurement-yet-of-expanding-universe/

The quantum state of a given kind of atom might be hypothesized to recur within given field conditions yet one knows that isn't all of the story to the Universe, and neither is one event-process for the history of this Universe likely to be all.

I believe God created the Universe-in particular Jesus Christ as the Word of God. He may create infinite numbers of Universes though. A Universe created by God may be entirely contingent within the Spirit of God,  with energy and mass being some sort of spiritual element of waves with selectively broken field symmetries or limited access that differentiate as substance and appear to be solid-state mass.

There are lots of ideas to consider in the field.