The Problem of Gnosticism in the Early Christian Era (incld. video)

The epistle to the Galatians is perhaps the most remarkable of Paul’s existing letters that have made it down to us through time inasmuch as the Apostle seems at times wroth with the Galatians or Gauls of a Roman district that may or may not have been Celts. If these church goers were actual Gauls it mike be a good idea to change the word Galaxy to something else, such as Nuraghe in order that we do not seem to encourage a bad end along with the Universe in some sort of Apocalypse.3:1-” O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?” That may well have been the Gnostic mistake. It does happen that what is wisdom for man is foolishness to God.

Philo of Alexandria presented most of the Gnostic metaphysical paradigm before the crucifixion of the Lord in 30 A.D. The Apostle John may well have encountered those ideas in followers in Ephesus. It is possible that the Gnostic heretical field of scholarship wasn’t terribly well received in Jerusalem either. Thus exporting the pursuit of the Gnostic topic to Antioch, Ephesus and elsewhere that religion had a lively public interest and was received with a modicum of tolerance might have been a logical course. Gnosticism in the first century may have camouflaged itself within the garb of traditional Judaism better even than Christianity for a time socially speaking.

Gnostics were people thought of as regarding themselves as having deeper metaphysical knowledge of reality than ordinary people. Some claimed that Jesus was actually a Gnostic traveler-a sort of astral projector perhaps to other planes of existence around this Universe. It is still a tempting yet silly doctrine popular on late-night radio shows and perhaps with dope smokers of the U.S.A. along with Bigfoot and extra-terrestrials manipulating the Obama administration’s homosexual policies.

Christian disputes with Gnostics occurred because Gnostics tended usurp Christian doctrine and insinuate their own. They might believe in dualism such that the material world is evil and was made by an evil demi-urge. While some might regard original sin in a fallen Universe of thermodynamics instead of eternal spiritual perfection as another way of saying that, the practical consequence of false belief are substantial.

Gnostics tended to deny Jehovah as the true God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to overcome sin for those of faith. The emanationist (simplified for Christian practical purposes to’ let their be light’) theories of Gnostics are though coincident with some aspects of logical insight into the nature of the material Universe such as the big bang, inflaton or even a cyclical Universe expanding and flowing through a thermodynamic process.

Paradoxically those that believe the Universe had no real beginning-just proximal ones such as time=0 located at a temporal hourglass very small singularity before an oppositely sequenced pre-Universe shrinking down in scale, share the idea with Christians that all things that exist are ultimately based in the eternal with temporality being expression of phases within eternity. At this point physical cosmology research hasn’t evolved terribly deeply into physical reality and temporality of a hypothetical multiverse within an eternal context replete with conservation of energy and ordination by God.

Paul as a student of Gamaliel might have been somewhat learned himself in Jewish mysticism. The contemporary of Jesus Christ, Philo of Alexandria, was marginally mainstream and perhaps not unknown to Jewish theology training centers. By the time of the third century Plotinus-a famous student of Ammonius Saccus developed a beautiful, logically satisfying, mystic, theologically simplified cosmology that is similar in many respect to contemporary cosmological paradigms including origin from a singularity or One (En Sof-the ineffable infinite) with universal and broken form theories acceptable to Plato and quantum mechanics.

It is a bit of a paradox that the mysterious, spiritual Kabbalah shares with Mohammadanism the term for spirit –Ka that the Egyptians used as well as ba or shelter. Hence one gets the spirit house or Ka-ba such as at Mecca and the Kabballah going even further in honor of a transcending spirit. The spirit house of Mecca existed long before Mohammad’s syncretistic enterprise.

The danger of simply becoming intellectually lost as an individual self-standing within the created material world is a danger that Lucifer succumbed to. Since everything exists and one may reason within the given steady-state field or any existing alternate spiritual field, there is a temptation for the ego to alienate itself from the transcendent God and the opportunity to renormalize from sin in the contingent field of being and try to exist forever as a contingent being or even a nearly omnipotent contingent being without God imbued with a false consciousness denying His existence. That effort is in disregard to the actual facts of being-that God is all-in-all and the Son is the sole way to renormalize the estranged-by-sin relationship.

A generic emantionist paradigm for cosmological origin of quanta of any type from a state of being ‘void and without form’ requires some emanation of virtual quanta or proto-particles/strings/membranes etc from an existing field containing or heteronymous with the void. Math isn’t theoretically of much help in describing the non-dimensional infinite, indivisible field that emanates with quantum uncertainty perhaps on occasion into a void. 

Mathematics represents some form of coordinate system-even a theoretical one with scalable dimensions. Without coordinates or quanta it would be challenging to use math references for describing one infinite field with no extension and all possible dimensions unactualized prior to emanation from super-positions decohered into forms in a virgin formless void. Theological contemplation might be easier, although it’s better and simpler to recognize Jesus Christ as the only way to understand God containing/promulgating the one field engendering any potential or actual Universe.

Ultimately Plotinus’ paradigm is mostly a horse-shoe toss description of the theosophical state of the cosmos without either modern technical terms. Plotinus did not provide Christian information about how to be saved from the fallen realm of materially imperfect forms and original sin that is implicit in the temporal world. Living a couple centuries after the Lord he may have felt that wasn’t his role. The age was philosophically confused enough and just the canonized Bible such as the Muratorian fragment provided was a plain and accurate guide to eternity.

Rationing Mass per Citizen for Human Fabrication in the Distant Future?

Human society without achieving a critical level of creative, adaptive thought may evolve toward maximum exploitation of available mass converting it to a high entropy format depleting environmental sustainability or even the existence of a given planetary body clumped together under the influence of gravity. Thus one may anticipate distant future political efforts to counteract the noted characteristic of purely egoistic use of mass without consideration of the concatenating social effects.

Human society evolving like bacteria in a Petri dish consume all available food or mass available to process it adding entropy in order to provide comfort, prestige and so forth. Yet unlike uncreative bacteria human society and numerous individuals have bursts of creative, inventive thought, thus they are capable of consuming and adding entropy to mass at a far higher rate than that of bacteria. Not simply consuming food and reproducing more of their own kind to deplete resources human beings convert orderly environmental mass into vast tonnage per person of luxurious dwelling, automobile and so forth accelerating the irreversible conversion of mass with low entropy into mass with high entropy.

One might consider that human beings in an unregulated social environment might eventually be conformed by external forces in the processed environment into a maximum density format such as crystal structures determined by a coefficient of technological capacity, minimal spacing and remaining resources. The alternative to that might be species depletion by elites to provide liberal time for existence of the remnant former minority with quantitative easing of the resource tension via controversial means (if they were debated) such as holocausts. In times of resource tension extreme measures historically arise.

A future society with substantial remaining unprocessed mass and a viable environment might limit the tonnage per individual for fabrication including housing, transport and so forth demanding the most extreme inventive thought materially from its citizens if they are to get the most out of the mass quota. I would guess that a vast, thin polymer geodesic sphere computer absorbing sunlight and floating in zero gravity might be an efficient direction if it were capable of sustaining human life inside. It’s hard to say. Yet it is interesting to thinking about what sort of physical social environment would develop if forethought and intelligence were required of builders rather than mass-producing housing tracts with low, low creative thought involved as if they were farming for-themselves adding so much non-ecospherically sustainable structure at unreasonable rates of interest.

A Universal Widget - In the Realm of Forms - video excerpt Usgov

I read from my science fiction novel on a planet's history of social eco-engineering maximizing efficiency in the use of available mass by citizens within an entropy-reduction context.

Relocation of High-tech Aliens to Run U.S. Business a New Trend?

Immigration/relocation to America is sometimes held up as an ideal. When Microsoft named a dual-passport holding (he may have a U.S. passport too) Indian engineer to be its new C.E.O. the idea of bringing 50,000 more high tech aliens to Detroit was exemplified. Standing before a full size video screen a C.E.O. of a large corporation can talk face to face with his minions around the globe. The nation where he is located makes little difference except as the tax policy favors his machinations and power. The workers are outsourced abroad at any rate whenever possible. Corporate profits are sent at the speed of light through a myriad of dark pools to tax havens and can be reinvested in physical plants of the second and third world without environmental or labor laws of hindrance.

The Peace Corp ads that ask the question 'would you travel 5000 miles to... should be better said 'would you fly coach with only Skype and a drink in a can for a few hours? Some ideas never change about travel. Perhaps 50,000 more Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists of various skills could run America’s corporations better than Americans whom are increasingly so inept as to need low-tech Mexicans to do yard work and other menial jobs for them too. Is it right though to call high-tech aliens immigrants as if they spent months at sea in cold leaky sailing ships to reach the U.S.A. instead of a few hours coach class with Skype ever present to consult face-to-face with home? Wouldn’t the term relocated better describe the high tech alien peregrinations around the globe landing in the U.S.A?

The mayor of Detroit failed to realize that high tech aliens don’t need to relocate to Detroit to perform menial jobs that can’t be outsourced. High-tech jobs can be outsourced via Skype from Detroit, all one needs is capital to afford to hire Indian or Chinese engineers who will perform the work for the capitalist in Detroit or Gstaad at a fraction of the wage as in America. If aliens with high-tech savy relocate to Detroit from abroad all they need to do is study U.S. markets to better coordinate sales from the homeland to the new land of hapless proto-globalists run by a congress and executive that believes one needs to pass legislation to find out what’s in it. The prime directive of competent legislation in a democracy is that which is transparent, well founded and with a high likelihood of working a priori. Obamacare failed that standard miserably.

If America is to be less like the British run era of opium intoxication of China recolonized by aliens relocating simply to annex U.S. political policy to that of Satan in a Babylon the Great paradigm and somewhat more like the American ideal of George Washington it ought to secure its borders, halt the relocation of aliens to the U.S.A. and downsize the corporate agenda while raising taxes on the rich, eliminating the public debt and finding ways through zoning and private incentives to hire people to restore the environment in the way that F.D.R. put Americans to work planting trees around the U.S.A. Even making a wetland out of a parking lot can be labor intensive.

Post Game Analysis; Square Payton Manning Loses Doper Bowl

I will stipulate that I didn't see the Super Doper Bowl between Seattle and Denver last Sunday, the entertainment industry's W.W.A. cavalcade of winners isn't to interesting especially when the sewing economic disorder broadcast media reports the event. Washington State and Colorado are the two states that legalized dope sales so how could they not be the favorites to win in the second term of the Obama administration. Washington State legalized homosexual marriage besides so that state had to beat the legal dope only with a square old-style quarterback that reminds some of Johny Unitas-another notorious square that didn't find playing with the dopey San Diego Chargers keen.

News reports of the other championship bowl games of Iraq and Afghanistan report that they are becoming losses through the reverse causality of the administration though they did have help with their foundations. New ways of producing another Vietnam are being delivered yet the financial costs of entering dubiously necessary contests without a syllogistically sound exit strategy will keep on compiling especially with Obamacare, post-traumatic stress injured vets for the next several decades along with their stressed families.

Bread and circuses were too popular with the plebians of Rome while the Empire developed its royal classes without a clear line of succession. It's lucky that Brit's royals have so many princes so they can become kings of the political economy for the next hundred years as the United States dissipates its notions of national independence. 

Seventeen trillion dollars is a lot of public debt, the broadcast media is a force of moral and economic disorder and Microsoft has named someone named Satya (n?) as it's full disclosure CEO at last and St. Ignatius was fed to wild beast in the Coloseum by the order of Emperor Trajan in 107 A.D. At least the fans of  doper bowls are satisfied with the way things are.

Utilitarian Argument Favors Political Interests of the 99% vs. the 1%

If 2500 billionaires on the planet-a small number equal to the population of a very small town such as I once lived in at Wrangell Alaska, can control 33 trillion of the world’s 250 trillion dollars of capital assets and if the 30,000 Ultra-High Net Worth individuals on the planet control perhaps 150 trillion together what are the prospects for egalitarianism in democracy for the United States? Isn’t it most likely that the 1% will manipulate the politics of the 99% and that the bought and paid for media will support the interests of the 1% prevalently?

I was thinking about the odd situation comparable to if the politics of the United States revolved around the city of Wrangell and if political theory and economics existed to support the right of the billionaires to have low low taxes and through Wall Street networking own much of everything in the nation and plenty of stuff abroad. That would be rather silly I think, and if the citizens of the United States had any of the stuff of the revolutionary founders of the nation they wouldn’t lay down for that.

I ought to say that the people of Wrangell are ordinary people except for a few perhaps and there aren’t any billionaires. In fact some Alaskans have built remote huts without electricity, running water and so forth without even power tools or a road to get building materials out to it. Instead they packed everything in themselves. Even so, the rights of those poor Alaskans are supposed to be equal politically to those of the billionaires of the nation (that total is less than the 2500 maximum in the world though, yet to be equitable, not all the people of Wrangell are registered voters).

In order to reform capital practice and advance preferred socially beneficial methods of political economy the electorate needs to actually have the power of self-determination. That term, self-determination is seldom used in political discourse these days. Formerly in cold war times against the evil empire self-determination was a prime rational for liberating the people of the Eastern bloc from communist government authoritarianism. The East bloc states of the Democrat Party (e.g. Massachusetts, New York, Vermont etc) seem to favor authoritarianism and concentrating wealth simultaneously-not especially political progress.

To reform political economy a polity of citizens needs to be sovereign and not ruled by expensive bought and paid for UHNW representatives, senators and Presidents. It is not enough to select non UHNW politicians, they must actually have an idea about how to reform the economy so competition is restored, sovereignty of the people and their borders are secured and the environmental disasters ahead over-ruled. It is possible to locate such individuals yet the prospects for electing any are nil today. Ralph Nadir was the last candidate with as much as 30% of the qualification for such a task.

I should say something about the straw man argument of socialism as the alternative to oligarchic irresponsible dialectical evolution of capitalism as is developing today in the class networked mode; its only one of an infinite number of possible reforms to capitalism. Examples of reform formats are limiting the size of corporations to 3000 employees, capping the number of corporations an individual may invest in directly or through mutual funds at three and indexing minimum wage to mean salaries of the top 25% of at something like a limit of 50:1. There is more motivation for the poor to invent and become rich than for the rich to invent or allow others to invent-instead they have a trait of networking, repressing inventors, repressing rival free enterprise and co-opting politics to their advantage.

The 99% cannot just redistribute income from the 1% as if everyone got it existentially from a practico-inert fairy cheese of the Universe with a finite size and everything will be hunkie dory. One must reform capitalism along real functioning principles such that it would produce full employment, satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the 99% (a good utilitarian argument exists for preferring the interests of the 99% over the 1%) including the freedom to allow worship of God without coercion from any sort of authority.

There may be an approaching economic disaster stalking the world like a vast tidal wave over the horizon in an era before electronic communication and when sailing ships were the fastest boats on the sea. Unlike that period when it took months to cross 5000 miles today that distance is just a few hours away and for an economic tsunami much closer; it could occur at the speed of light through electronic trading and financial collapse or biological designer weapons could be unleashed from the increasing arsenal of Pandora’s vast bio-research box. Global warming could transition the world into a proto-Venus through a cascade of doom as CO2 levels steadily rise with sulphurous tar sands and perpetual reliance on automobiles and roads to kill off bio-diversity threatening the rich tapestry of life on Earth that is interwoven and inter-dependent for its evolution.

It is believed that the 2008 Wall Street meltdown was just a vague outline of the economic collapse lurking inn the shadows for Americans and even the world economy. Innumerable writers and economists have described several of its parameters as the blind men once described the elephant. It is time to consider restoring national economic independence and the well being of the 1% even as the nation helps with good Christian neighborliness our friends in the world.

Ideas for Next Generation Nook/Ebook Readers

Nooks with audio reading accompanied by appropriate bouncing-ball along highlighted text would be an invaluable tool for teaching literacy and increasing vocabulary and comprehension. The audio reading could be built it yet with capacity for downloaded upgrades yet some books could be designed for audio e-book reading by pros with a phrase of highlighted text moving simultaneously. Mathematics instruction e-books could have highlighted formulae and geometric elements. What else besides solar recharging ability, more storage space and lower cost would be good for instructing the third world with super-cheap units and access to a U.N. free e-book library?