SOTU I: Or, How to Peddle a Second Reality Using First-Reality Language

The Conservative Underground | February 2, 2010 | Jean F. Drew

[betty boop]

Just in case this might be your cup of tea....

[YHAOS]

"Just in case this might be your cup of tea...."

Sip! ( ^: }

[the_conscience]

Thanks for the ping!

Pantheism or Panentheism has many different sources to choose from so I’m not convinced to lay all this at Hegel’s feet.

[hosepipe]

[ How to Peddle a Second Reality Using First-Reality Language ]

Its hard to improve on the metaphors in John ch 10...

Where Jesus stands at the door of the sheep pen and calls them all out(metaphorically).. into the pasture of Ps 23.. Ekkesia(church) lterally means the "called out ones".. History shows, some come out, some do not.. The drama of all this is pregnant...

Especially since Jesus never forbids sheep pens.. let alone vulture, vampire, pig, and goat pens.. The point being second realities as opposed to first reality.. The metaphor only deals with sheep pens.. but my mind can easily conjure up the other pens that humans frequent.. (implied, I believe)..

[betty boop]

Pantheism or Panentheism has many different sources to choose from so I’m not convinced to lay all this at Hegel’s feet.

Very interesting, the_conscience. I'd like to hear more about this, if you have the time and interest.

[betty boop]

Ekkesia(church) lterally means the "called out ones".. History shows, some come out, some do not.. The drama of all this is pregnant

Oh, is that an understatement, dearest brother in Christ!

The Lord created men free — that is, fully capable of generating second realities if they want to. But that does not mean such men are exempted from the one single standard of divine Judgement that ultimately judges all men, whether they be denizens of first or second reality, equally and equitably in the End....

Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest brother in Christ — it's so good to hear from you!

[MHGinTN]

Well done, Jean. Sadly, the vast majority of our fellow Americans need the process elucidated for them. It is not enough to state truthfully what he is doing--his policies are set about to destroy the very values he invoked in his SOTU deceit. To awaken the dumbed down popluace you must detail each and every drop of his poison and the saccharine delivery by his henchghouls.

What Obama spews when he speaks to the people I describe as the disgusting progressive spittlegeist. All will be made equal by destroying any striving for excellence.

Progressivism's target is mediocrity and servitude to the collective power of a very small oligarchy.

[the_conscience]

Betty, isn’t it Kant’s idealism that you ran into on the other thread? We can’t know the noumenon.

[Quix]

Thanks thanks.

Hope to get to it today.

[betty boop]

Progressivism's target is mediocrity and servitude to the collective power of a very small oligarchy.

Extremely well put, dearest brother in Christ! I couldn't agree with you more.

Perhaps you are right that the rabble will take us all down in the end. But it seems to me nothing in the reality I experience ever moves in a "straight line." So as far as I can tell, the jury's still out on this question.

Meanwhile, I pray to God — for spiritual renewal, for another Great American [Re]Awakening! There have been two major ones in the history of America, going back to the colonial period; and each changed the course of the subsequent American future. The first fed the spirit that culminated in the American Revolution; the second fed the spirit that culminated in the abolition of slavery....

Both seemed intended to form "a more perfect union."

Be of good cheer, dearest brother in Christ! For Christ Logos reigns eternally, from the Beginning to the End and all "places" in between.

[betty boop]

... isn’t it Kant’s idealism that you ran into on the other thread? We can’t know the noumenon.

But we have to live as though we do. :^)

That's a little joke I guess.

Kant elaborated the distinction between phenomenon — an existent object of sense perception — and noumenon — the way the object actually is, "in itself;" or in more philosophical terminology, in its substance.

Evidently he was inspired to do this by David Hume, who had the temerity to suggest that the only things that the mind can "possess" are perceptions of reality, but never reality as it is "in itself."

Another way to put it, human sense perception can acquire and register only "images" of reality, never the reality itself. That is, the phenomenon in se. The skepticism of Hume raises the issue of on what ground can humans say that their perceptions actually match up with actual reality — that is, phenomenal reality as we encounter it in experience. Hume notices there is no purely logical connection here. The only connection seems to come from human experience — i.e., from habit and custom.

Anyhoot, Kant evidently noticed that part of reality, which recedes from methods of direct proof. That would be the "thing in itself" of which perception can be no more than an image: The "original" can never be directly captured by the mind, only its "photograph."

But Hume evidently also notices that human beings continue to think and live as if phenomena and noumena coalesce in actual human experience.

So far, that looks like a good bet to me. :^)

[the_conscience]

I suppose I’m trying to get at the difference between Kant’s “transcendental idealism” and Hegel’s “absolute idealism”.

One of the side effects of Kant’s idealism was wrought in the Lutheran theologian Schleiermacher. Reacting to Kant’s idealism he reduces God to Natural Law.

Here’s how Kevin Van Hoozer summarizes Schleiermacher’s position: “Yet few modern theolgoians are happy to construe the God/world relation in terms of divine intervention. Schleiermacher influenced a whole theological tradition when he judged it a mistake to see God as overriding or supplementing natural causes, for to think of God in terms of exercising efficient causality is to think of God in terms appropriate to creatures: ‘It can never be necessary in the interest of religion so to interpret a fact that its dependence on God absolutely excludes its being conditioned by the system of Nature’”.
(Tyndale Bulletin 49.2 (1998))

Thus it seems the reaction to idealism in some theology is that God is reduced to merely Natural Law. Schleiermacher is the father of liberal Protestant pantheistic theology of which Obama drinks.

[Quix]

Isn't that all rather

Platonic?

Plato and his ideal sphere somewhere . . . his ideal perfect chair somewhere etc. etc.

I think it is

unarguable that

1. we all have perceptual bias--inescapable perceptual distortion bias.

2. that from some hypothesized yet also--certainly from the Christian perspective--REALalistic perspective of God . . . God's angelic hosts . . . or even, one might say . . . God's master computer hardware observer drones . . . THERE IS SOME OBJECTIVE REALITY that does not suffer from perceptual distortion and bias.

3. However, the latter, has a bit of a problem with TIME in the equation. What IS or WAS at that moment is MOST PROBABLY altered the next moment or given sufficient moments . . . depending on a list of partially unknown variables.

4. Hume, Hegel, and all the other nihilistic pontificals ad nauseum . . . seem to have been in a hell fostered rush to push God out of the equation. Given that God was/is by definition infinite . . . and largely empirically unknowable in strict RELIGION OF SCIENCE TERMS--it was a nice trick to define reality as only that which is empirically provable.

4.1 However, interestingly, Satre was closer than he might have realized . . . to reality--when he asserted that for the finite to have meaning--it must have a connection to the INFINITE. He just never connected to the INFINITE himself, as far as we know.

5. However, they spoke too soon. They could not anticipate quantum physics and the observer problem. They still had the insane 'luxury' of pretending that there COULD BE a

TRULY OBJECTIVE, TRULY EMPIRICAL PERSPECTIVE in this time/space dimension.

6. I think there's another uppity miscalculation on the part of such hell fostered mentalities and perspectives. They are most rattled by MIRACLES. Certainly hell is familiar with the equation that less faith equal less miracles. So, in a sense, it's a tidy little way to decrease miracles--trash faith.

7. However, God IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN I-AM . . . and is quite delighted to sabotage such presumptions on the part of the finite and particularly on the part of hell. However, He is also usually loathe to drop HIS MIRACLES into a laboratory--particularly on 'scholarly' 'RELIGION OF SCIENCE' COMMAND.

8. Yet, satan's goons do capture a lot of unsuspecting folks into a mentality that trashes their faith. FAITH--the critical currency and critical structure of God's multiverse.

9. Oddly and flabbergastingly, he gets them to put their FAITH into something
--far more finite,
--far more silly,
--far more irrational,
--far more UNEMPIRICAL,
--far more unverifiable,
--far more unfounded . . .

. . . a philosophy that quickly ties itself in a Gordian Knot of self-obliterating descriptions, premises, definitions and foundations.

10. They know to some degree that there's no such thing as an objective observer. Yet, they go merrily on PRETENDING that they with their super narrow, super rigid, super UN-REAListic biases are MORE objective than God. I'm sure He's impressed.

The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.

The fool has said in his heart, there is nothing knowable outside our little fantasies about reality.

When IN REALITY, there's little knowable WITHIN their fantasies about reality.

[betty boop]

They know to some degree that there's no such thing as an objective observer. Yet, they go merrily on PRETENDING that they with their super narrow, super rigid, super UN-REAListic biases are MORE objective than God. I'm sure He's impressed.... The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.... The fool has said in his heart, there is nothing knowable outside our little fantasies about reality.... When IN REALITY, there's little knowable WITHIN their fantasies about reality.

Well and truly said, dearest brother in Christ!

[Quix]

Thanks for your kind reply.

[betty boop]

I suppose I’m trying to get at the difference between Kant’s “transcendental idealism” and Hegel’s “absolute idealism”.

Usually it's Hegel who's classified as a "transcendental idealist," not Kant. Kant is usually classified as a "mere" idealist. At least last time I checked. [I don't like "school philosophies" anyway.]

God cannot be "reduced" to Natural Law, for the simple reason that He is the Author of it. The creation can testify to the Lord, but it cannot fully explain Him. It is derivative from Him; and no derivative possesses the type of knowledge that Schleiermacher seems to want to endue it with. (If the object had this kind of knowledge, it could create itself. And we don't see objects in nature doing this. I mean, an object in nature can perhaps create progeny of its kind; but it does not and cannot create itself.)

Who is Schleiermacher anyway, to "tell" God what He may or may not do? Seems to me God can do whatever He wants, whenever He wants.

But I digress. It seems to me the HUGE difference between Kant and Hegel was that Kant did not shuck Aristotelian logic, while Hegel absolutely had to, in order to make his system-to-end-all-systems "work."

Aristotelian (classical) logic is founded on the law of noncontradiction; that is, it is built up on the core idea of antithesis.

Hegelian dialectics, however, is built up on the premise of synthesis: the parties are thesis and antithesis, finally subsumed under a synthesis, which becomes the next "thesis" in the series, inviting its antithesis, which will in turn be subsumed in a higher synthesis. Which becomes the next thesis, ad in finitum, ad nauseam.

In short, Hegel is described as a transcendental idealist because he has removed all referents to a world exterior to the mind from his analysis/programme.

Kant never did this. (BTW Kant is on record as being "shocked" by Hegel's proposal.) Kant just suggested that there are "uncertainties" that obtain between the world of real objects and the way they are registered in human perception.

Hegel obviates direct perception altogether. He finds it needless to his project.... It's all "inside the head" with Hegel....

[YHAOS]

“Hegelian dialectics, however, is built up on the premise of synthesis: the parties are thesis and antithesis, finally subsumed under a synthesis, which becomes the next "thesis" in the series, inviting its antithesis, which will in turn be subsumed in a higher synthesis. Which becomes the next thesis, ad in finitum, ad nauseam.”

Your description sounds like a depiction of a do-nothing Congress, obsessed with “process,” not rooted in any sort of reality (does this sound familiar?), and drifting off into the mists of some obscure and undefined destination, not further defined, but somehow thought to be that illusive Nirvana (History begins today with nothing coming before and nothing following – what you call your ‘second reality’?).

Thanks for the beep. Hearing from you is always a breath of fresh air

[the_conscience]

I suppose the point is that whether you start with analysis or synthesis, are a pragmatist or an idealist, yet don’t have God as the absolute Absolute, you turn man into god as the sole interpreter of the world. Either way you’re bound for tyranny.

I will say that the Idealist at least starts with an Absolute although a false Absolute.

[hosepipe]

[ The Lord created men free — that is, fully capable of generating second realities if they want to. ]

Little wonder Jesus came to make ALL religion and pseudo religion; Obsolete.. and said.....
"You MUST be born again".. -Jesus
Into a first reality, I think..

For we all can easily get caught up into a 2nd reality..
or move from one 2nd reality to another... and another..
Some 2nds reality's don't have the name of a religion, but serve the same purpose..