John Locke – Quantifying Reality

The modern division between the words “objective,” and “subjective” can be traced back to certain thoughts of John Locke, and Galileo before him, at the start of the scientific revolution. “Objective” has become a synonym for truth and reality. Just as it sounds, being “objective” means treating things as objects and quantifying them. “Objectively true” thus means “we measured it and the measurements were correct.” “Subjective,” anything not measurable, is then regarded as not true and not real. Applying this objective/subjective distinction then means that anything debatable and not provable using measurement is then supposed to be a kind of nonsense. Morality, beauty, purpose, value, meaning, emotion, consciousness and mind, and all interior phenomena, not being quantifiable, would then be “subjective,” and thus regarded as not real, which is intensely nihilistic. The word “subjective” needs to be rehabilitated as having to do with treating people as subjects, rather than objects. Subjects are moral agents with interiors; with minds, thoughts, feelings, desires, ambitions, and volition. To treat someone as an object is to relegate that person to the status of a rock, an “It.” This is what all sciences do, including psychology. A person is transformed into data and facts. They are reduced to the facets of those that can be measured. To treat someone as a subject, a “Thou,” is to treat that person as having an interior life as rich, important, and meaningful, as your own, rather than a one-way “study” of that person. You engage in dialogue with them to discover their inner life; their thoughts, feelings, and desires, with moral worth; subject to subject. The “subjective” then is what is most importantly real about a person. It is what is being asked when someone queries whether you know someone. The tragedy of much of modern life consists in treating people as objects to be manipulated. To stop doing this, it is necessary to rethink the “objective” is real, the “subjective” is unreal, division. The good news is that since someone just made up this point of view a few hundred years ago, it is possible to change it. It is not an immutable feature of the human condition or human outlook.

Contract : Society :: Cell : Person

Society is indeed constituted of social contracts; there is no other sort of contract; so that “social contract” is redundant; to say “society” is to invoke contracts, and vice versa. A contract is literally a “drag together” People work together to drag things from here to there, which they could not alone easily budge; they coordinate their activities in search of common ends.

But obviously any such contract supervenes the society in which alone it can have any … traction. No prevenient society, no contract enacted therein.

Our Deepest Loves Cannot & Do Not Err

Provided they spring honestly from motives of true charity, and to the extent that we are sane, our deepest loves must point toward reals. They must be reliable guides, or they would interfere with survival, and we would not have them.

So then also likewise with our deepest sorrows.

Freedom & Determinism & Time

Both determinacy and freedom are necessary aspects of temporal reality. And, so, because we are naturally and ineluctably temporal creatures, both determinism and indeterminism are true for us: but this, in different ways, for they pertain to different temporal epochs.

Determinacy pertains to the past of every occasion, and indeterminacy to its present.

Creation: A Simple Explanation for Children

Son: Dad, you got a minute?

Father: Sure, kiddo, what’s up?

Son: I’ve been reading Genesis, and …

Father: Whoa, hold on. You’ve been reading Genesis?

Son: Well, yeah, and …

Father: [sotto voce] Thanks be to God.

Son: … I’m worried about it.

Father: OK, no problem [girding his loins]; what are you worried about?

Son: Well, it just didn’t happen the way it says in the Bible.

Father: And you know that because …

Son: Well, my teachers told me how it happened.

Father: [grinning sardonically] And they know better than the Bible because …

Freedom – & for Some, Damnation – or Universal Salvation: Choose But One

If Universalism is true, you can’t choose to be damned. On the contrary, you are saved, sooner or later, no matter what you ever do. So, you are not free. No matter what you do, or fail to do, you shall be saved. So, it can’t really matter to you, what you do, or how horrible the consequences of what you do. How could it, since you are not free?

Sin on then, right? Knock yourself out! What’s the problem with that?

On Christian orthodoxy, you are free to choose – and, to bear the consequences. So, there is a moral order to things, that cannot be gainsayed. In that case, your choices matter. In no other way might they be available for you to make in the first place.

Which shall it be? Are you free, or not?

Go for it.

Bearing in mind, of course, that, on universalism, *you cannot go for it.* On the contrary: on universalism, your choices are moot; are  not, in the end, choices at all; for, you are not free – including the choice of whether to be a universalist.

This Joyful Eastertide

Easter is the only reason to be optimistic. If the Resurrection didn’t happen, then no man can be resurrected. In that case, death will certainly and totally consume all the things we care about. Life might go well for a time, to be sure. But it will all end in sorrow; and that end, that sorrow and pain, will be permanent, and incorrigible, and total. It will take all of us, and all our works. None of it will come to anything. All will be lost.

Everything You Do Is Worship

We think of worship as something we do mostly in church. It is time we dedicate especially to God. But every moment of our lives is dedicated to something or other; and we would not be doing anything we do if those things to which they are dedicated were not important to us; if we did not think them worthy of our attention, and of our effort.

Understanding Concupiscence

I do what I know I should not, and I fail to do what I know that I should. I am tempted to sin, even though I know it to be sin, and thus both wrong in itself and so also bad for me. Why?

Such is concupiscence: the inclination to sin, indeed literally the strong desire to sin.

If we – even we who have been washed by the waters of Baptism and the Blood of the Lamb from all taint of our Original Sin – know that sin is sinful, why would we desire to sin? Why should there be such a thing as temptation, at all?

Philosophical Skeleton Keys: The Leap of Faith

Until you have made the leap of faith, you can have no idea what it means. So you can have no very good way to make it, no? How does one know which way to jump, with no idea where the edge of the precipice might lie?

Such was the difficulty that perplexed me for many years, as I struggled to understand how to step through the membrane that separates belief from unbelief. You can’t step through it if you don’t even know where it is!