As is the feeling,
So is the result.
A religion is a set of procedures that can be used to reconnect a personality — body, mind, intellect, spirit — with reality.
Saying something is irrational is saying that it is disconnected from reason, where reason is a synonym for reality.
Parmenides: Where there is Being there also is the Logos of Being.
Being manifests as Logos, Reason. Reason is the reality of Being.
Or put another way, reality is the corporeality of God. The universe is the existence of God.
Separation from reality is a terrible dis-ease.
The mind has this terrible ability to disconnect from reason, finding itself instead leaping about escaping phantasms and chasing fantastic visions of its own manufacture. (Freud, Marx, Sartre, Popper, Foucault, Derrida.)
A mind, like an army, should have one vision, one vision only please, and that tied to reality, to reason, to God:
To win every battle it makes
in every war it undertakes.
A mind disconnected from reason causes a man’s difficulties and struggles.
Since government is entrained by a hive of minds, government policy and activity has a plethora of opportunity to unhook from reality. Unhinged is modern usage for this phenomenon.
US intelligence operations and foreign policy swells have been disconnected from reality since the 1940s, since the ascendence of Communists (Progressives, Socialists) into positions to make and enforce visions other than the one that is legitimate by way of being connected to reality: expanding the sovereign freedom of America and Americans.
Instead, a list of subversions of USA and other nations’ sovereign freedom stands in place of what could have been rational, reality-tied US intelligence operations and foreign policy decisions.
1- Allowing the Soviet Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army west of the Bug River/Curzon Line.
2- Uncovering the Republic of China to be overrun by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.
3- Uncovering Korea to be overrun by the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China and their Korean surrogates.
4- Uncovering Vietnam to be overrun by the People’s Army of Vietnam.
5- Uncovering the Levant and Middle East to mauling by Communism’s Arab iterations: the Ba’ath Party (secular) and the Salafi-Shiite Jihad ([allegedly] religious).
6- Uncovering the Balkans to be overrun by the Moslem Brotherhood and other Salafi Jihadis.
7- Uncovering the United States of America to be overrun by the People’s Republic of China and simultaneously mauled by Salafi-Shiite Jihads.
Don’t tell me the Government of the United States has been fighting Communism for lo these many years. Principally State Department and CIA have been clearing the way for Communism’s rampancy, making straight the path before it, with a poltroon’s show of resistance now and again to maintain the US domestic economy and manufacture talking points for stump speeches and other propaganda.
This is a record of betrayal, not of expert counsel. The people who did those things meant to do those things, they were not overrun by circumstances, incompetence, or ignorance. They meant it. They were wittingly malicious with respect to America and Americans.
Americans did not lose the war against Communism. They were insufficiently vigilant about allowing to themselves leaders who wanted to do that but never told Americans that they did in so many words.
Even when the personality who would be 44th President — finally! — told Americans straight up that he wanted to uncover them so they could be overrun by Communists and Jihadis, Americans resisted admitting what they were being told and not a few, such Judeo-Bolsheviks, even welcomed the idea and its prospects.
It has been a long time since the Government of The United States of America connected to the reality that is The United States of America. This has been deliberate, not accidental and not fated. When a man offered to reconnect the same, minions of the Government of The United States of America resolved that he should not succeed.
What a picture!
The United States of America is reality. A government connected to a vision rather than to the reality that is the United States of America is no government at all. They are treason bot deserving treatment reality-tied, rational governments mete out to the same.
The US DOJ’s decision to dismiss charges agains LTG (R) Michael Flynn marks the first time since the 1940s that lines of the so-called US Intelligence Community / Foreign Policy Establishment have been broken and made to run.
LTG Flynn wanted Americans to face the fact that minions claiming to be their government were working against their national interests and their Government.
In this sense I mean that the dismissal of charges against LTG Flynn adumbrates corrections to irrational decisions taken at Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam, P’anmunjŏm, Paris, Oslo and Taba, Dayton, Marrakesh, Baghdad, (twice, also here and here), Vienna, New York, and Doha (also here).
Mark Tapscott made a post titled Can Atheists Do Good?
I participated in the following comment string thereat:
David R. Graham
Everywhere you turn, you are looking at God, all God, nothing but God. Every time you listen, you hear God, all God, nothing but God. Everything you hear, feel, see, taste, and smell is God, all God, nothing but God.
Update: Yeah, I got a down vote, someone is thinking!
moby67 to David R. Graham
That definition is broad enough to essentially eliminate god.
David R. Graham to moby67
True. And what is left after that elimination is God.
moby67 to David R. Graham
So eliminating god leaves nothing but god? How does that work?
David R. Graham to moby67
Try it. Eliminate all meaning. What is left? The meaning eliminator, no?
moby67 to David R. Graham
I think you’ve already eliminated all meaning. Nothing you’ve said makes any sense to me at all.
David R. Graham to moby67
OK.
brianmacker David R. Graham
If god is comparible with any state of affairs it has no information content and is meaningless. As meaningless as you’re using it in your comment.
David R. Graham to brianmacker
What is left after all information content is made meaningless is God. That, in fact, is the reality that terrorizes our Jacobin neighbors.
Read_ThFlyingSaucrsAreVryVryRl to David R. Graham
Is this true by assertion alone, or do you have some reason for making this claim? Or are you using the word “God” as just a synonym for “reality”?
David R. Graham to Read_ThFlyingSaucrsAreVryVryRl
Yes, and, Yes.
comatus to David R. Graham
This is fine as long as it’s all between God and me. For some reason, other men often have things they need me to do because of what God says to them. I have long believed that most of those “denying God” are really denying His interlocutors.
David R. Graham to comatus
How do you know other men are not you?
brianmacker to David R. Graham
I know because knowledge is gained by trial and error. I presume other men exist and test it (the trial) and abandon that belief if it is falsified ) the error. All the while holding all my beliefs tentatively.
I hold that “Other men are not me” as a tentstive belief, and since it is so well tested I csll it knowledge. I can test in mass ny ways. I see things I can verify they didn’t see like when playing cards. They see things I don’t and can report to me what they saw and I can verify. If we were not separate we would either see from a single viewpoint, or with multiple directly experienced viewpoints.
David R. Graham to brianmacker
How do you know we do not see from either a single viewpoint or multiple directly experienced viewpoints?
Is it not the case that most of our knowledge is directly experienced rather than mediated through testing (the five senses enhanced) of some sort, although the latter also happens, yielding copious results if one has any competence at it?
comatus to David R. Graham
You never studied philosophy. You studied theology. Big difference.
You’re jacking off, but I give you credit for your frenetic furor at it.
David R. Graham to comatus
Inaccurate conclusion and personal abuse into the bargain! Well then.
comatus to David R. Graham
No, that is masturbation. Not a philosophical inquiry at all, just the kind of trick question we throw the kids in the “Topics” electives. I’m sure you think you are “philosophizing.” You seem awfully sure of a lot of things, as it works out.
“Pharisee” is a religion. You’ve got a case of it.
Dale to comatus
Most don’t ever get to that point. It’s God and me. I know of only one preacher that agrees with me.
ETA: I thought I would have to wade through this thread to find a morsel of truth. Thanks for being the first thing I read.
It’s God and me.
VicqRuiz to comatus
As a wise Christian said to me on another forum:
I guess at the end of the day arguing about doctrine, and getting others to sign up to a list of doctrines we then police, is more fun than actually doing what Jesus said.
Brilliant summation.
David R. Graham to VicqRuiz
Doctrine derives from Greek docta, which means experience described in words so both the experience and the description of it can be subjected to scrutiny and recapitulated. Technically, doctrine is only experience which has been recapitulated many times over long time (“the experience of the race shows …”) and can be written plainly in common language, i.e., communicated.
Theories, speculations, guesses, and the like are not doctrines. Even what is provable is not doctrine. Doctrine is only that which has been proven repeatedly many, many times over long durations and so is reliable knowledge, can be relied upon without a doubt, guaranteed by experience, as theologians say.
Knowledge, interestingly, derives from Greek gnosis and that from Sanskrit jnanam. It indicates the essential unity of seer, seen, and sight. It has an erotic inference in the Greek sense of eros as love for that which is superior to one. I just know you wanted to know all that. 🙂
VicqRuiz to David R. Graham
Doctrine is only that which has been proven repeatedly many, many times over long durations and so is reliable knowledge, can be relied upon without a doubt
Can you cite some examples of Christian “doctrines” that meet this standard?
David R. Graham to VicqRuiz
God is love.
comatus to VicqRuiz
You certainly must have learned by now that “Pharisee” is a religion.
David R. Graham to comatus
No, my friend, Pharisee is an idolatry.
A person living without love is as good as dead. You are having love towards your father, mother, wife, children and others. There is nothing wrong in this. But you must see God in every one of them. This is the essence of the well-known prayer: Tvameva mata cha Pita tvameva . . . . This prayer addressed to the Supreme Being means – “Oh my Lord, You are the father, mother, friend and relative. You are knowledge and wealth. You are everything!” We should see God in every being. The whole Universe is a manifestation of Brahman (Divinity). You are divine but you are not realising it. When you do namaskaram with folded hands in obeisance, it means that you are offering your five Karmendriyas (organs of action) and five Jnanendriyas (organs of perception) to the Divine. Offering namaskaram itself emphasises unity. If you have unity and purity, Divinity will blossom there.
Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, April 11, 1994 / Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription
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