Concerning Governance of the Tongue

In about 1655 Richard Baxter published one of four volumes of Practical Works titled 'Ethics'. Baxter was something of a brilliant reformed theologian. He described time as being the place where we have the opportunity to experience life. A unification of space and time such as they are each dimensions was a common social perception then, surprisingly. His brilliance pertained to practical christian concerns generally, as he was cast out of the church along with other independent minded churchmen by the Cromwell administration and he did not have much of a library to take about the countryside with him. I have made a few comments about chapter none of 'Ethics' as they concern contemporary states of affairs generally.

Concerning Chapter 9: Directions for the Government of the Tongue

Baxter cites psalm 7-4 "our lips are own own, who is lord over us" as an example of those that regard words and thoughts as trivial and of little consideration, who then use language inconsiderably. The raving broadcast media is exemplary in that regard with demotic slurring and morphing of words often to confuse truth with falsehood. If words and thoughts were indeed of such trivial concern it would be a different world than it is.

I think that the basic casualty of slop-talk by the media is the civilian properties of rights and democracy. With mass confusion political power becomes concentrated and is regarded as a lighthouse in the fog. Voters may elect prominent objects that appear through the fog for a time yet never organize or think for themselves. In the collective broadcast news media class creative social destruction enables the concentration of wealth and plutocratic imperialism globally. Media slop-talk runs roughshod over individualism and individual (bright) political ideas such as ecological economic development.

Words and language are in a sense mankind's best attribute; they express intelligent thought and content of the mind. Words can be used to praise the glory of God, and they can also be used to debase the soul and create envy and strife.

The Holy Spirit is a remarkable concept to regard. God as a spirit; the primary spirit is of course known to humanity as three persons, and we are saved through the Son, yet the Father is too spirit, as is the Son who took on flesh...

Spirit that can create or phenomenalize matter and energy in space-time is concerned that humanity (so far as I know) advance to intelligent thought cognizant of spirit. Falling back into creatureliness and a troubled sleep as existential clumps of mass without regard to godliness, rational governance of mind or having a right relationship to the Spirit (Father) through the Son with the help of the Holy Spirit is a prevailing malady for much of society. One can hear in the mass broadcast media archetypes of the social collective ungodliness that is like Platonic language forms from a broadcast media realm of word forms manifested in ordinary imitation as little particular forms by the masses in ordinary intra-social speech. When the government itself corrupts the tongue and works evil, when sin has itself taken over governance of social discourse, it is not good.

The tongue may be used directly for sin, such as with blasphemy, false doctrine (that probably includes pre-tribulationism and dispensationalism), ridiculing godliness, lying, forbidding preaching of the word, boasting, talking about common things too much in a holy setting, tempting to sin, carnal handling of holy things, traducing superiors (this does not include truthful and objective evaluation of and participation in peer proceedings of democracy or of those appointed to serve the public in office who fail to execute their tasks competently and honestly, or to publish opinion about public policy, international relations, environment and of the conduct of those in office, and of those concerned with creating public problems of commensurate scale. In fact for Christians to fail to speak their opinion about public issues in a democracy when they know the facts about an issue accurately, and to allow wrong policy to proceed with maladministration and maladministrators is a kind of sin of omission by the citizen to fail to perform his or her civic or ecclesiastical duty.)

Fish In Ocean 50% Down from 1970

Scientists have found that fish have dropped in quantity by 50% since 1970.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ocean-fish-numbers-cut-in-half-since-1970/

That's bad for fishing prospects with the world population maybe doubled since then.

On the other hand, wages for white males have stagnated since then too, and there are only as many Americans working now as there were in 1977.

http://www.blackstarnews.com/us-politics/budget/toward-the-looming-us-fiscal-crisis.html

On the bright side though, in 11,500 B.C. fishing was good on Alaska rivers and early Americans caught and maybe traded salmon.
 http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0922/Ice-age-Alaskans-dined-on-salmon-say-researchers

As a practical matter the broadcast media psychs the collective so they believe whatever they are told about national prospects to a certain extent making people believe that worse is better and decay is progressive.

If ecological economics could be used to make self-supporting, self-sustaining green living ecospheres with fish and a variety of species on the Moon or Mars, that would be encouraging and dissipate the sense of eco-doom quite a bit. In science fiction at least, anything is possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics

Eschatology part 4 of 4 (video)

Eschatology Part 3 of 4 (video)

Eschatology part 2 of 4 (video)

Eschatology part 1 of 4 (video)

'Directions for the Government of the Senses'

Governing the senses, rather than being governed by the senses, is an implicit human characteristic of reason. Reason is a process of mind sorting through a large body of sense data that is evaluated to comprehend and implement behavior in best self-interest. Chapter eight of Richard Baxter's 'Ethics' concerns governing the senses. It is another brilliant essay in 'Ethics'. I think Baxter's acute philosophical thought would surprise many philosophers. After all, Baxter wrote this book circa 1655-a contemporary of Descartes and prior to Hume and Sartre. Perennial ideas concerning mind, reason, perceptions, sense data and the relation between the temporal world and the atemporal eternal reality from which the Universe condensed or precipitated perhaps phenomenally like a hologram or more substantially as a steady state of quantum entanglement of energy packets are of continuing interest and have beginning for the west with pre-Socratic philosophers besides the obvious Athenians Socrates, Plato and Democritus. Baxter's applied use of the salient philosophical concepts is entirely within a theological paradigm however and might easily slip past the review of overly technical contemporary philosophers and philologists interested in the history of ideas.

To a certain extent encountering sense-data is a forced rather than an optional experience. A mind without sense data input fundamentally would need to be non-existent or without a body and hence non-existent. It may be possible for a human spirit via the grace of God to exist without a body, however the human mind seems to be a concatenation of human physiology existing as a processor of information at a conscious and subconscious level.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his book 'The Fourfold Roots of Reason' a piece examining the relationship of mind to sense data. That is a perennial philosophical line of inquiry. Bishop Berkeley for instance developed ideaism (aka idealism) through the consideration of the mind to sense data relation). Schopenhauer showed that mind can input and reconfigure sense data in such a way as to get more out of sense data than the mere physical input provides. The example he used was that of 3-D vision.

Sense data actually provides flat-screen 2-dimensional visual input and the brain with a little training uses the different angles of input from the eyes being set apart to create a virtual 3-D appearance. That has since been a well-researched field of study that has been broadly applied to horses and creatures that look up from the ground or down from above and so forth regarding the position of their eyes on the skull.

Not to get too far into that particular sense data inquiry, the relationship of mind to sense data and of reason to sense data is of interest for Christians; sanctification according to the measure of God's grace permits reason to develop a spiritual and eternal capacity rather than simply a temporal relation and capacity for reason-and that is a profound difference concerning actual individual and social human behavior.

Contemporary American psychology largely concerns empirical and temporal reason and physiological relations of mind to body and sense data. Because it is fundamentally empirical it has lent itself to an anti-eternal bias. It is like Plato without a realm of forms, or Socratic virtue without eternal reason. As American psychology is a temporal and reductionist study discovering 'mechanical' or innate causality for sense data and cognitive processing it has tended to move toward a fracturization of reason in the temporal and nihilation of reason concerning eternal, non-phenomenal things.

That observation isn't new of course. David Hume was the first of philosophers to formalize the maxim that if a book isn't about sense data input, concrete things one should burn it as sophistry. That point of view seems commensurate with contemporary British imperialism through corporatism and the destruction and degradation of civilian rights, morals and reason in order to default to rule by financial elites without actual democracy being developed.

Baxter has a great page or two (actually most all of them are compared to much writing today) describing the fundamental state of human reason in comparison to that of brutes (or purely materialistic feminists and others seeking pure class ego advancement and advantage without reason of eternal values).

The quote from chapter eight, direction 1; "Reason is dethroned by sin; and the will is left unguided and unguarded to the rapes of sensual violence. Reason must be restored, before sense will be well governed; for what else must be their immediate governor? it is no sin for brutes to live by sense, because they have not reason to rule it; and in man it is ruled more or less, as reason is more or less restored. When reason is only cleared about things temporal (as in men of worldly wisdom,) there sense will be mastered and ruled as to such temporal, as far as they require it. But where is reason is sanctified, there sense is ruled to the ends of sanctification, according to the measure of grace."

I think the development of reason is not so well respected today by select elites though there is more knowledge than ever before. There is perhaps a variegated advance along the social front regarding knowledge, reason and spiritual discernment that does not occur at an equal pace everyplace on Earth in space and time. So if reason falls victim now and then to politics and mass psychology martinets, it probably recovers eventually after some mayhem and destruction, despair and chaos. The U.S.A. presently has a non-reasoning sense-data kind of foreign policy vectors in the Middle-East and Ukraine, and the President has levered through homosexual marriage and a homosexual nominee for Secretary of the Army. Since pre-trib evangelicals also are simplistic and non-reasoning enough concerning their choice of eschatology it seems apropos that so much of U.S. foreign policy and domestic social development is off-balance and non-reasoning about eternal values and principles. Maybe that will again change yet one should never misunderestimate the powers of mass error under the tutelage of the broadcast media. One cannot expect Americans all to be John Rambo disregarding pain as easily as the mythical Buddhist monk for whom all is illusory and when the bell tolls it is silent or no bell at all. It is possible however to develop reason about the senses such that objectivity concerning the senses and sense data builds up. For Christians original sin tolls the bell for all and thee, yet it is not the signal for an, unreasoning temporal spree. Reason with an eye to the eternal world lets the Lord shield one with grace . From sense data that would overcome reason, and resonant bells sounding Satan hellish pace, the Lord Jesus navigates one through temporal, sensory shoals to the eternal place of God.

It is also the case that experience really changes reception of and reaction to sense data and empirical circumstance. Consider how one can prevent blisters from walking in boots through a variety of means, or that infected blisters can cause blood poisoning and death fairly swiftly. The naive walk right into disaster, while the experienced applying the benefit of knowledge with reason act to prevent such development from occurring. Christians too have innumerable sensory traps that might be avoided with reason and experience, and just relying upon the word of God, that are common and recurrent to all that experience life.