Ben Carson's Romanticism; 'Poverty is a State of Mind'

HUD Sect. Ben Carson in an interview recently said that ‘poverty is a state of mind’. Yes the remark had a context in which it appeared such as a given ‘mindset’ inertially exists as a cultural characteristic, however it is a useful comment for illustrating the point of view of certain German romantics of the mid-19^th century.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/24/ben-carson-calls-poverty-a-state-of-mind-during-interview/?utm_term=.3e20a7fcad4a

Those romantics exploiting the concept of irony or subjective detachment from the objective social world-establishment to the point of abnegation and nihilism regarded social conventions as of little worth. There is another way to use the detachment or subjective perspective associated with Socrates and his saying ‘know thyself’ that isn’t nihilistic. Instead it is analytical-critical of society and culture while introspective and moving on to comprehend what is right and wrong, good or bad, true or false about society upon reflection rather than just dismissing it all.

It is somewhat ironic that the conservative Dr. Ben Carson personified the relativism vilified by conservatives who prefer objective facts and established empirical reality over subjectivity and detachment favored by the left. Obviously the truth is somewhere mid-way between the two extremes. The extreme subjectivity reaching unto solipsism favored by Schlegel and somewhat less so by Goethe can dismiss objective reality and say that for the individual everything is just a state of mind-even when it is pouring cold rain it would be nothing more than a state of mind for the romantic being drenched. The coefficient of adversity keeping one in poverty is not just one's own thought; it has reciprocals in the thought of others.

Poverty like slavery is not just a state of mind. When wealth concentrates and plutocracy controls and totalized the econom and when computer quant programs control 70% of Wall Street transactions at least in part, or when a city burns down with incendiary bombs dropping in from the sky it is more than a state of mind experienced or even constructed by an individual.

Saying that poverty is a state of mind reflects the poverty of realism drifting in as a cloud of optimism around the heads of those who have made it good rather easily who have no experience of social resistance to making things better.

An Essay on Socratic Irony (video)

Evolution of Christianity

Evolution can mean many things. Change and complexity increasing in time seems to be the main meaning. Things that don't work die off. That's the paradigm when someone says something like 'our seminary will grow if it's God's will'. In that case though it's a kind of directed evolution determining the winners within a pre-determined physical Universe of possibilities. The irony is that winning means being chosen by God for salvation unto eternity rather than the temporal. Plainly over time Christianity has grown in scale and compexity.

The visible church has evolved extensively-possibly more than any other human social organization establishment the past two millenia plus. To fail to see that would require blindness. Consider just the relation of Church and state, empires and ethics across the entire world from Jesuits in Japan and Brazil to the Orthodox church in Byzantine and Russian history, the tonsure and celibacy policies of various times, dead sea scrolls, illustrated manuscripts and PDF files.

Even so the concept of evolution does not require atheism as part of its meaning. Neither does evolution mean that one must accept Darwinian evolution as its meaning exclusively. Christian theology has evolved as well as the visible church. Arianism mostly died off for example. There are not too many Lollards about these days, and in the second century Jehovas Witnesses and Mormons had yet to see frst light. One could write on the topic for years regarding the historical evolution of the Christian church including that of the history of St. Cyril, Constantine and Irish Celtic Christians.

Chrstianity and the kingdom of God in the church of the Lord has increased like Abraham's children from a small sprout to a great tree rich with complexity and size. From being communicated just in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin the gospel is available now in virtually every spoken language and on every continent. etc.

Cheeto and the Whales; Plundering ANWR

The costs of destroying the purity of ANWR will far outweigh the benefits of tearing up tundra, melting permafrost, laying miles of pipeline, spillling pollutants, wreaking havoc on the Beaufort Sea, killing off marine mammals with noise and increasing global warming. Increasing dependence on what should be an obsolete energy technology, and would be if Alaska didn't have a goal of being a second world energy state, is good mostly for oil CEO bank accounts..

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/whales-dang-big-science-may-finally-answer/

President Trump, who acerbic democrats called Cheeto and the orangutan common ancestor of humanity, should send Johnny Depp in full pirate regalia as Ambassador to ANWR to inform the humans of Arctictown of the benefits of fossil fuels and value of ANWR to Exxon-Mobile, BP or whomever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/22/ape-that-lived-in-europe-7-million-years-ago-could-be-human-ancestor-controversial-study-suggests/

Neither party has a responsible budget paradigm. Democrats are the nag half of Republican husbandry such that it's a one-party system of spendthrifts. U.S. public debt is a litle shy (about 80 billion) of 20 trillion and the federal budget is about 80% tied up with little for discretionary spending. What is needed are new ways with sustainable ecosphere and economic policies, and nations seldom meet new challenges to alter economic infrstructure practices sucessfully. Each party is working for a global plutocratic oliarchy-Obama's tax cuts helped with that. The ANWR gambit is just another plunder everything possible and concentrate wealth for the 1% tack.

Irony and Individuality; Why Nihilism is Relatively Meaningless

I have sometimes wondered what culture people come from such that they ask questions like; 'who am I', without having suffered from amnesia. I haven't really been troubled by a problem of cosmological meaninglessness or personal identity crisis. IMO people that have might be originally from a tightly controlled social environment wherein they really are turned out in cookie cutter fashion. I commiserate with people that have been formed in mass produced circumstances rather than with the freedom of individuality.

Escaping from conformity formerly was something of a European problem perhaps. In the United State from the time of the founders people were doomed to be free individuals on the edge of a frontier. Spiritually the frontier never really closed before the 1970s.

Cosmology is neither a source for anxiety about meaninglessness. People exist everywhere as individuals and it was what they think subjectively that they experience as conscious thought experience. It is their freedom to put together whatever package of knowledge and data they can in the best possible configuration within their own capacity.

I suppose the Universe and mass energy might be compared to a pointillist painting with everything made of strings, branes, quarks and atoms including individuals. As in the novel Utopia that means 'nowhere', nowhere is where anyone exists...one place is in an absolute sense (against a transcending Universal backdrop), as central as any other. Even so people are not just quantum dots clumped together by their own free will. Instead there are forces, patterns and destiny that holds people together in addition to elements, planets, stars, dark matter and energy etc.

Individuals exist apart from any other in a unique space-time position. In theory the force of gravity holding them on Earth could be negated with technology and they might relocate anyplace in the temporal Universe. As individuals meaning would still be relative to themselves and their understanding of all of the waves of communication they perceive, and reason about what they find.

Kripke and Quine had somewhat different approaches to nominalism and pluralism, Platonic realism and nominalism (e.g. 'Naming and Necessity' and 'Ontological Relativism'. Particulars and Universals such as Socrates regarded and Plato wrote of were somewhat ahead of Aristotle's great efforts at classifying human knowledge are tools for existential analysis. Irony or self-objectivity about the external social world with one's subjective capacity of thinking for oneself is what all humans necessarily do to a certain extent since they are not automatons only resembling sentient beings. While everything is relative to one's subjectivity, communication is a socially dialectical phenomenon. Words and ideas; meanings- are more phenomenal things to be perceived and used as one constructs their life-project in-the-world as best as they can.

Jesus Christ was/is the truth that makes one free. He was God-for others and one of the three persons who is God. One is phenomenally free yet existent within various physical force fields. People are as unique as anything that is just as one planet is not another though there are billions, and one number is not the same in an infinite series though there is an infinity of them.

Developing introspective and reasoning skills can be fairly said to have entered intellectual history with Socrates, yet he also was an exponent of classical virtue. I believe he should not have been able to precisely define 'the good' yet he does provide a fine exposition of classical virtue and pursuit of the good and knowledge in the Platonic dialogues. That is lacking from modern nihilism and relativism. Socrates and classic virtue did not vacate morality claiming that relativism made everything absolutely subjective. Just as Jesus said the kingdom is within you and the truth shall make you free, Socrates sought to awaken individuals to an inner reflection on virtue and its meaning finding that it would comprise a dialectic with the natural world. It is a kind of natural law as Cicero wrote of later, yet even more virtuous.

Any age may have a spirit of the times. However the Holy Spirit is the sole guide worth following. It is wisdom as well as natural law. It transforms the individual from bondage to nature and unreflective pursuit of baser desires to contemplation of virtue, the good and the divine. With irony and individual might discern that it is his or her own responsibility to improve their intellectual library of understanding of how the Universe or Multiverse functions, to be aware of one's place in the temporal phenomenon and to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior who is prior to space-time in any possible material Universe. 

Salvation does not mean that one blandly, blindly follows the way of the cultural-economic world show wherein 'one struts and frets an hour upon the stage meaninglessly signifying nothing'. Christians may work, construct, design, solve, journey, forgive, innovate and provide relief so far as their capacity permits. One has an infinite sea of words, ideas and Universes of learning and wisdom to consider in this life awaiting the personal eternal transformation to the realm of God, who is good.

President Trump Joins Eco-Pirates withn ANWR Lust

President Trump wants to plunder the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for its oil to provide global oil corporations more oil than they need already. Trump's analysts have given him ANWRs value as 1.6 billion dollars over a decade, yet the environmental costs are probably greater. And the United States already has more oil than it needs due to fracking, fracking has already started in Alaska and existing fields may be regenerated, and eventually the public will be left holding the bag with the costs of cleaning up after thousands of weather beaten dried up wellheads, pipeline, melted permafrost from global warming, costs of saving endangered species, costs of leaking oil wells into the Arctic ocean and rivers never before polluted by mankind, underground water purity violated with fracking fluids etc.

The President really is unlikely to get a second term if someone other than satan doesn't run against him, as he loses independent yet ecospherically informed voters. The high Arctic needs to be protected, not plundered. He may want to have Johnny Depp in full pirate gear serve as Ambassador to ANWR  persuade people of the value of extracting the oil.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/23/trump-proposes-opening-anwr-to-drilling-selling-strategic-oil-reserves/

Irony and Human Knowledge

The book of Genesis is arguably the most influential work in human history. It has influenced innumerable intellectuals and ordinary people. Yet ironically it has largely been misunderstood.

Especially interesting as an illustration of the double-edged nature of knowled regarding bomb making knowledge yesterday was a suicide bomber detonating him or herself (or indeterminate in the midst of sex confirmation evolution) at an Ariana Grande music concert in England killing more than 22 people. Knowledge is dangerous yet human life is dangerous, as is virtually all animal life. The three stooges with uncertainty on how to use or configure what-they-know.

Ferdinand Christian Baur was the founder of the high form of Biblical criticism at Tubingen and was influenced by 'Kierkegaard's dialectic' (ref. Wikipeda). Preaching or providing one's opinions about the state of worldly affairs and/or religious concerns is of the essence of irony.

And that too is why it is ironic that the largest paradigm for human existence at its traditional genesis is misunderstood. Adam and Eve were cast out of an atemporal existence not subject to space-time entropy and then were cast out into-the-world. Apparently they existed apart from the space-time Universe. Only after the fall did they receive the containment corrections for original sin. Human mortality and the paradigms for animal existence in the Universe were where Adam and Eve as souls were sent. That is, the physical existence of being human and like animals requirement to metabolize is the context for original sin.

Thus what's wisdom to man is foolishness to God, and one may only be saved through faith. One may knock oneself out with the greatest quest for knowledge and still end up as simply human and isolated from God in the material, human condition. 

The state of the Christian church in Europe since the second century has always been an important part of civil society by increasing degrees. The church-state relation concerned empire and counter-empire, reform and counter-reform. Human development occurred within the church in Europe inseparably until recent times, as well as in parallel cultural establishment. Human knowledge and the body of thought that comprise the history of ideas continues as a fire growing from its earliest days possibly in the Balkans circa 7.2 million years b.p. where mankind may have branched off from big apes according to recent scientific reports.

Church establishments like all cultural establishments and organizations tend to seek to expand. Perpetual revolution or creative destruction seems to be the nature of governing and organizational establishment even if within a conservative evolutionary rather than a violent paradigm. Christians probably need to use irony such as Kierkegaard employed to be able to take the gospel of Jesus Christ for itself rather than as given by an established organizational hierarchy with goals virtually indistinguishable from those of any acme organization to sustain the standard of living of its members.

The human quest for knowledge will continue until the age of the gentiles is fulfilled.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/god-cosmology-and-nothingness-theory-and-theology-in-a-scientific-era/ebook/product-22947558.html (free download)