People Do Misunderstand Calvin and God's Omniscience, Omnipotentce and Pre-destination

 Calvin's ‘Institutes’ is a remarkable work. I believe many people today misunderstand the reformation movement and what the reformers thought about theology and the Bible. Paul wrote to the Ephesians (5:11) "Ephesians 5:11, KJV: And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them." Plainly Paul was referring to humans in a practical way; pagan society of the day had quite a lot of wickedness. Yet he wasn't especially making theological research into predestination, omniscience and omnipotence and what that means as far as everything that is created. Incidentally McGee was of the opinion that what the Bible calls 'evil' are natural events (i.e. earthquakes, floods (including the one that drowned the first human civilization except for Noah and his family); the Bible refers to human evil, not as evil, rather as wickedness. It is probable that many people misunderstand the cosmological mechanics of the Universe that God created, and how he created it. Calvin was a believer in determinism, election and so forth and there are many opposed to that. They also tend to believe in salvation through works rather than grace.

The subject of predestination is fascinating and implied in the Bible numerous places. (ref. https://www.biblestudytools.com/.../what-does-the-bible...

In my opinion God being omnipotent and omniscient creates everything that exists including circumstances such as freedom that allow people to choose to do wickedness. Plainly the fallen human condition of original sin has changed the relationship of humans to God whom is perfect. He is the maker of pots and can break them if he wills that.

The topic is interesting cosmologically too. It seems that the Universe’s thermodynamics tend toward pre-destination on the largest scale as it was from the beginning giving a certain allotment of energy and then mass to exist and actualize all forms. The topic is fascinating and deep theologically and physically. One theoretical physicist speculated that a universe or Multiverse may exist where everything that can exist, already does-every possible Multiverse universe bit-and human minds with freedom switch between them with each thought, yet the Multiverse itself never changes, it is people choosing their own fate along possible world-lines.

The Revelation 22:10-12 “10And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand. 11He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

12And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. 13I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”

That kind of statement is consistent with free will in a deterministic environment where individuals select their own fate. Yet there are thousands of points to consider about the power of God. I suppose he could create a Multiverse just in His thoughts, yet they have perhaps existed in His foreknowledge forever.

A quote from Calvin's 'Institutes'… https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.v.xxiv.html

Thank God Before Eating Food

Animals eat food to input energy and remain alive; it is fuel for existence. Animals don’t give thanks to God before eating though. Acknowledging the provisioning of God through his grace is a way humans with a soul differentiate themselves from thankless animals.

If original sin, or rather the punishment for original sin was waveform collapse into entanglement in the steady state of three-dimensions in the Higgs Field that is a state that requires the input of energy molecules to remain alive, in order for humans to merit salvation or rather receive salvation through the work of the Holy Spirit, Jesus  Christ and the Father, they need to be spiritually awakened or reborn into the spirit. That is they have a spiritual dimension that did not exist when they were simply fallen animals.

Giving thanks to God before eating is a plain sign of being awoke in spirit.

Approaching End of Civilization; Nyet

Google has produced robots that can write their own code. Eventually that practice should evolve deception and programming vectors that allow insidious practices ad infinitum deleterious to human interests and those of human democracy. Quite likely gaming the system will let plutocratic insiders finesse society their way while manufacturing crises to control the populace. One cannot foreknow what effect that would have on the ecosphere or if the policy of those at the top of the programming food chain will let the masses continue to exist with a world of conceit placing everything at their feet including the moon and planets of the solar system.

Alaska has a new voting system that may require a mathematical statistician to understand. It seems like a gaming platform with consequences of voting or not voting for “second choices” that are challenging to calculate. It seems like a way for incumbents with name recognition to have an implicit edge, and the 2022, slow Alaska race for the U.S. Senate is an example of the corruption of the new system. The incumbent had an advantage in ranked choice voting.

Complexity and technology demand the masses be satiated with entertainment industries that are the equivalent of the bread and circuses of decadent imperial Rome. The masses will be indoctrinated in false historical consciousness ‘narratives’ reinforcing political agenda itineraries of the marionette political powers. It should not be passively blamed on predestination of the erroneous pre-tribulationist fundamentalists that misinterpret Christian eschatology parallel with that of many Muslims whom also misunderstand the Revelation and other eschatological scripture. The Dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World are better choices for illuminating what their situation is, albeit with substantive upgrades to computing technologies and software that didn’t exist back in the day.

The actual end of human civilization probably will be humanity being slowly excised by big data programming iterations perfected by and upgraded with variations by robotic sentients. If Google hasn't personnel with Machiavellian subscript intentions of dominating the world it isn't improbable that those that emulate or abscond with code will eventually change it to evil purpose, even if like the inventor of machine guns, to try to benefit society by making weapons so terrible they should end war. nOne should just stop inventing weapons and artificial intelligence of course, yet the pay and personal benefits are so good people cannot resist.

Truth Theory part 4

  There are numerous truth theories. I prefer Quine’s disquotation theory of truth. Basically truth is an agreement between subject and object, or a way of abbreviating a list with quotes instead of enumerating all of the elements of a list. Someone asks if it is raining outside (paraphrasing one of Quine’s examples) and another replies, yes it is raining outside. Of course one need agree on what ‘outside’ means (such as locally in Pittsburgh rather than in the Amazonian rain forest), or one asks if all even numbers are greater than preceding odd numbers; one may say yes that’s true instead of enumerating all of the even and odd numbers that exist to prove the point. It is logically sound to say that Jesus is Truth, Biblically speaking, because as Creator of Everything God is the sole non-contingent Being. Everything else is relative and rather of a nominal character I would think since Universal monism is temporally divided into plural components aka ‘objects’ and event relationships.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtmSVQMvhJI

Ranked Choice Voting may be a New Key to Corruption

 Alaska has a new voting system that imay require a mathematical statistician to understand. It seems like a gaming platform with consequences of voting or not voting for “second choices” challenging to calculate. It seems like a way for incumbents with name recognition to have an implicit edge, and the ongoing, slow Alaska race for the U.S. Senate is an example of the corruption of the new system. The incumbent has an advantage in ranked choice voting. It seems like counting some votes twice.

https://alaskapublic.org/2022/11/15/tshibaka-grows-her-slim-lead-in-alaskas-u-s-senate-race/

The challenger Kelly Tshibaka took more than 43% of the vote in the state and nearly all Republican votes although she and Lisa Murkowski, initially appointed by her father the former senator and then Governor both claim to be Republicans. Murkowskiy took most Democrat votes and will get more support when the Democrat candidate is eliminated in voting counting as Murkowski was the second choice of the few Democrats that actually voted for their own party candidate. Murkowski votes Democrat on all important social issues and also is pro-global warming gas development through fossil fuels, and is female so she is the Democrat’s choice who runs as an independent or Republican. The state Republican party supported Tshibaka.

In an election the winner ought to be the candidate that gets the most votes plainly. The ranked choice system muddies that and leaves voters uncertain about how to calculate or game the system by careful picking second through fifth choices to help their own first choice win even though they hate the rest of the field. To not vote for alternate ranked choices in some way counts against one’s own first choice.

Plutocrats are converting democracy to plutonomy and corporatocracy by degrees. Apparently social media statistically bans far more conservative political posts than liberal to such an extent that they actually influence elections. Something like 20% of independent voters voted to the left in 2020 because of social media skewers to the left creating more left supporting content. *(the data are difficult to confirm)

In corrupting a Democracy ranked choice voting seems like a good tool to make it more difficult for outsiders ever to get elected. Not only is it too costly and selected by factors other than competence or suitability, now it is also muddy as votes count in lesser degrees for some in accordance with how they are ranked. It reminds me of U.S. Constitution categories for some classes of Americans before it was amended when some citizens counted less than others for population counting purposes of the states.

DeSantis, Pompeo and Pence are good Republican candidates

  The Republicans are loaded with good, traditional politicians that could serve as President in 2025. Of course none, like Democrats, know what ecological economics are and would flunk the curve of keeping planetary goals for ecospheric survival within viable limits. They aren't unique, even the U.N. that made the sdg's or sustainable development goals numbers 9 through 17 (the first eight are meaningful social agenda items that are irrelevant to measuring impact on planetary boundaries for survival of humanity)) doesn't know enough to profile the planetary boundaries for-themselves.

The first eight goals are plainly social items that cannot be accomplished generally by poor nations. Female equality in earnings and education is a policy of developed nations that can afford cars for all that let women travel as fast as men, and machines that do most of the heavy lifting. In poor countries where so many scramble about for subsistence that day may be down the road a bit, unbelievable as that seems. Apparently even Europe as poor people in it that have fallen through the cracks somehow. The grandiose projects for ending poverty on Earth in a way that syntegrates itself with environmental sustainability that conserves the world ecosphere within the boundaries set for viability (like defragging the breaking up of wilderness areas so they can tie in to form seamless, contiguous areas, halting the anthropocene mass extinction of species, keeping the ocean from becoming more acidic and eliminating superfluous, deleterious greenhouse gas releases into the atmosphere) would seem to require a political genius that humanity lacks, at least in the United States. One of the problems is that wealth is concentrated and social media that influences voters is owned by the rich that have their own agenda to control the political thought of the masses and sycophant politicians that support the agenda while dissenting voices are repressed.

 President Biden is very skillful at using money as a lure and incentive to voters to win elections and forgetting the promises after. He used the low bid on ecospheric defense to boost his Presidential race and then failed to accomplish that and in the 2022 mid-term used the lure of free student loan debt relief to boost Democrats while after the election courts put down the policy that was based on executive action instead of congressionally approved spending. Wind-eggs, as Socrates like to term such matters, comprise much of the national response to environmental boundary survival challenges. With Ralph Nadir gone from the scene national and global prospects are rather bleak. Too bad there aren't any Mo Udals around anymore.

Synthetic a priori judgments and metaphysics

  I had a chess acquaintance at a now defunct chess site gobbled up by big chess who jokingly referred on occasion to 'the knowledge' as a most precious item to aspire to.

Sometimes I post at philosophy spots and had the occasion to clarify a point about metaphysics and knowledge. Someone felt that belief is an unsound basis to attain 'the knowledge' and one should be limited to empirical observations, a priori judgments etc. Kant did write about synthetic a priori judgment though; fundamentally pure reason as a basis for making inferences about the unknown. Socrates also tried to show that some knowledge is innate and others that natural right and wrong for human behavior. Not to make the subject obtuse though...

I wrote and cited Stephen Moctezuma within this paragraph; The knowledge- a posteriori, is known, yet synthetic a priori judgments are inducted and fused "judgments that are known through pure reason alone, independent of experience, and they are ampliative to knowledge" aka metaphysics. ref

https://medium.com/@smoctezuma/kants-synthetic-a-priori-knowledge-8c196dbd230f#:~:text=There%20are%20a%20priori%2C%20synthetic,of%20fall%20under%20this%20combination.

https://theconversation.com/we-tested-einsteins-theory-of-gravity-on-the-scale-of-the-universe-heres-what-we-found-194118

In using reason to make synthetic judgments concerning theoretical structures of the Universe(s) and its fields like one on Einstein general theory and gravity that are ongoing subjects of thought and testing when possible. the idea of abstract though prior to testing is exemplified https://theconversation.com/we-tested-einsteins-theory-of-gravity-on-the-scale-of-the-universe-heres-what-we-found-194118

N.S.A. attitudes may be the consequence of spoiled

 Is the N.S.A. a lot of spoiled sacs of manure with attitudes that trim their fellow Americans? Is it a collection of brighter than average individuals that trample on average people with the glee of empowered juveniles? Should they be placed under the supervision of the F.B,.I."

When the N.S.A. corrupts the fabric of democracy rigging search engines, violating privacy and civil rights of Americans rather than just foreigners it is an agency that's gone to far with a vast budget to wreak their ideas of class supremacy on the nation.

It may be, of course, that they aren't such a bad lot of people that run no risks except getting fat paychecks and don't experience the grime of military service. Perhaps they should be required to learn humility by an annual session low crawling through a pig farm yard.

Sustainable Development Goals of U.N. conflate social and physical items as political goals

 In my opinion conflating a social agenda with physical material boundaries is a disaster. The nine ecospheric boundaries should be separate and distinct from the social eight development goals. The mixed bag of goals and boundaries has a poisoned political pill for everyone. I suppose godless atheists might all be happy with abortion for the world’s poor women, and population growth does decline as women have fewer children when they are prosperous statistically, yet those are contentious political issues that won’t be treated well if elite bureaucrats sit around a donut-shaped table generating a lot of verbiage. God may have generated a Multiverse and predestined a Universe- who knows? Darwinist-only votaries tend to be ignorant about theology and metaphysics or hermeneutics generally and associate faith with beliefs common in the 19th century concerning creation- and that is very obsolete.

I couldn’t believe the piece on resilience; do people really need to know what Cicero thought about it or what old french or English variations were? It might be that the excess verbiage on resilience and systems analysis could be abbreviated by fitting them within parameters of Newton’s three laws of motion. Then one can flowchart all sort of squiggly pointillist art with data bits that show the way things flow and how the patterns go. Some whirlpools in creeks return to form even if a boat engine disrupts them passing through. Entropy does count.

Long ago I drew up a flowchart for the logical progression to one world government. It's a jejune idea that youth have withoiut realizing the problems with that (it's best suited for dictatorships). The U.N. conflation of 17 sustainable development goals that seems itself like an oxymoron since development makes most people think of the current high-entropy economic system seems jejune though the topics are serious for all 17. It's just a poorly constructed item.

Free citizens tired of the communist threat; not because of inequality but more so because bureaucratic elites of the communist party dictated what people could or couldn’t do and the dictatorship of the communist party was kind of a drag. It oppressed religious ideas (“churches don’t work anymore”) and so forth. Conflating the eight social points with none physical boundaries debases the critical importance of the planetary boundaries so seriously that they won’t get done. The nine boundaries aren’t serious enough to merit separate and distinct objective evaluation so nations and voters can decide what they want to do about them for themselves?

Piketty’s ideas for remedies to the inequality of wealth are good enough yet simple. Increase progressive taxation and put a tax on capital. Concentrated wealth and power prefer to own the media and internet and repress ideas that might affect their power and wealth adversely and that is becoming worse all the time.

James Lovelock wrote in The Final Warning that humanity only has about 200 years remaining before the big crash environmentally reaches a very high level and world population crashes to 200 million. Jacques Cousteau estimated a similar paradigm. In the 1970s and 80s it was written that global sustainable human population is only about 2 billion. Certainly if the technology for agriculture and living and zoning laws are as bad as political choices in democracies and real practical applications of the techne toolkit the pessimists probably are correct.

The electorate general has no idea of what the nine planetary boundaries are, so coupling them with a left leaning, atheist social agenda will just create such social divisions that few countries will be able to agree even though the EU might like to export its social agenda globally. Democracy can allow progressive tax rates without requiring a socialistic economic. Basically though if people are too dumb to be interested in saving themselves from ecospheric disaster caused by their economic toolkit survivors living off-world for a time may need to let the world fix itself up to use it again someday. Maybe a remnant will survive.

I believe the social items of value to some can be accomplished with an enlightened international on-line population of people willing and able to help. The closure of publishing freedom because of political and economic repression is a great way to let just sycophants express themselves freely.

The idea of sustainable development goals seems an oxymoron in a world with finite resources that preclude development of classical economic methods. The U.N. conflation of a social agenda and planetary boundaries seems to necessarily force political conflict because of the social agenda. Getting everyone to agree on saving the ecosphere from reaching a point where human life isn't very sustainable on Earth is necessary. The social agenda is a million faceted and debatable cluster that could be solved innumerable ways. Corporatocracy seems a threat to democracy and free society while the sanguine futurism requires a hushed up and subjugated population.

I appreciate the effort yet a more circumspective philosophical examination would be an improvement over pure institutional donut-dipping verbiage. Realpolitk includes an awareness of human nature and short-sightedness in pursuit of economic advantage.

Create consumer product list for biodiveristy safe items

  Consumers generally haven’t any idea about which products are safely made and harmless for global genetic biodiversity. It would be helpful to have an easily accessible on-line data base of products that aren’t harmfully contributing to mass extinction.

In my opinion not a single consumer out of a thousand, and maybe one in ten thousand actually checks out product status in regard to being harmless or harmful concerning mass extinction before they buy it. When consumers visit stores they look for good buys, items on sale and things they can afford. Virtually none even know how to find out if a bar of soap, a can of soup or toilet paper contributes to loss of land resources in regard to biodiversity, habit etc, or if the transportation used is polluting the sky or killing fish. It is simply too technical for non-scientists and the opportunity cost of making internet searches for each product is way too harmful in regard to time lost for the inquirer on-line.

Someone really ought to coordinate a unified product list of numbers to verify the genetic biodiversity status of each and sort them by categories and rank for easy on-line review.