As a thought experiment, consider life in a remote-controlled robot suit: an ‘exoskeleton’ or ‘mech suit’ – so we dwell inside a metal shell that is being compelled to do things by a remote control mechanism.

Imagine being inside this shell – thinking freely about the world, understanding in some ways, and wanting to act in some ways – yet our actions, our limb movements – what we do – is being compelled by the robot suit (and whoever controls it). So, we are constantly observing our bodies doing things we do not want to do, under compulsion of the robot suit.

Inside this shell we can think freely – but our limbs are (mostly) being forced, by the superior strength of the robot suit, into doing things that are not chosen by us – but are compelled on us. However, to be more accurate, we should regard the power of the robot suit to be greater than our own muscular strength – but only quantitatively greater – because it is sometimes possible for us to resist and even overcome the robot suit for some period of time – by exerting all our muscular strength against it. However, this overcoming the suit is exhausting, and therefore sooner or later we will tire and the robot suit will again take-over…

Thus our situation is that on the one hand we are compelled to act in specific ways by the external control of the suit; yet on the other hand we can sometimes force the suit to act in ways that our free-thinking desires.

This combination of freedom and constraint may then be used-against-us; if our thoughts are judged by our actions – from the correct fact that actions are visible while thoughts are not; plus the false assertion that, because we can sometimes act as we think, then we could (in principle) always act as we think… So people whose thoughts are detached from their actions, but not wholly detached, are treated as if their actions are of first importance, and their ‘real’ thoughts can be inferred from their observed actions.

This is deadly: because instead of thought being free and knowingly-experienced as free – thought becomes regarded as constrained by action.

And if/ when a society can (mostly) compel action (like a robot suit compels action), then society can claim to control thoughts – because thoughts are (in practice) being assumed by inference from actions; thoughts are being regarded as secondary, to the point of irrelevance…

Society puts us in a robot suit, which externally-forces us to do this-and-that – then society tells us that we chose to do this-and-that! That we wanted to do this-and-that. That what we did and continue to do is the real us…

Read the whole thing at my Bruce Charlton’s Notions blog…

Our world is at war. Every year the forces of dark grind away. Every year the Lord of the Armies of Light, Santa Claus by name, sallies forth and reverses much or all of their inroads.

The deadliest weapon in the arsenal of Light is their mirth. Their laughter slays. They are fiercely, immensely jolly.

The Castles of Christmas are their unbreachable redoubt. They return there every year to regroup and rest where they cannot be touched.

It is said that the castles have one weakness. If ever the merry laughter ceases, the walls will be breached.

But it hasn’t happened yet. Because Santa Claus and the other men of Christmas have a secret.

They know that at the heart of the Castles, there is a land where a Child is in a manger under a starry sky. And that land can never be breached. There is no weakness, no trick, no eventuality, that can take that refuge away.

When the reverses are piling up and the War of Christmas is going grim, Santa and his men begin to think about the great surprise that the dark will have when they breach the Castles, and the hilarious anticipation of that surprise makes them break out in great ringing laughter.

Excerpts from my most recent understanding of what I regard as the core of Christ’s gift to us…

I assume that mortal life is about learning, spiritual learning – that is, we have experiences, and therefore, if we make the right choices, opportunities to make spiritual progression towards divinity (i.e. theosis or sanctification). I shall call this primary purpose of mortality divine-learning…

But what does this ‘divine-learning’ mean? Well, what this learning is Not is learning in the everyday or scientific sense of observable ‘behavioural-change’ in mortal life. Because behavioural-change can’t be what learning is about; because we humans are not designed that way, and neither is the world.

Divine-learning – that learning from Life that you and I are living for – is about something much more than mere behavioural change; it is about a real, permanent… indeed eternal and spiritual change. The learning of our mortal life is designed to benefit our eternal life. Divine-learning = Positive spiritually-progressing change that affects that which is eternal in us, lasting forever, beyond our mortal death.

Thus, when we (mortal incarnate Men) learn in this divine sense; it entails a change in reality. It is repentance (a gift made possible by Jesus) that makes this learning possible.

(Before Jesus – repentance was not possible; without Jesus, repentance would not be possible – thanks to Jesus, repentance became always possible for everybody and anybody – including those who lived before Jesus.)

But what is repentance? – in this ultimate sense of divine-learning which goes far beyond observable mortal behavioural change?…

Repentance was a gift of Jesus – his incarnation, death and resurrection. By repentance, Jesus brought-in the change that from-now-on Men would not only learn passively and unconsciously (like young children)… but in the new dispensation that Christ initiated, our learning would be self-active, conscious, explicit to our-selves. And this is repentance; repentance is actively learning from our mortal experiences, and knowing that we are learning, and knowing what we have learned. And this is what is permanent – going beyond the contingencies of the behaviours of our mortal lives.

Repentance = explicit and permanent learning from the experiences of mortal life.

“For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Enjoy these goodies. (more…)

Once upon a time there was a kingdom so orderly that its laws and institutions had all sorts of branchings and variations, like a healthy, growing tree.

One of those odd little variations was the Christmas King. (more…)

For the past two months I’ve been “buffetted” a bit, haunted by a testimony/story I was supposed to share during the testimony meeting after October General Conference.  It, the telling of the story/testimony, replays in my head and sometimes I act/speak it out loud.  Maybe it’s like an amateur musician/composer who has to “get the music out of him.” I have OCD and PTSD, so there might be some of that in it, too.

 I think I finally figured out why, and I think the principle is general enough to share with the JrG audience.  It might have been for my benefit too, but I already know what happened. So I think the Lord wants others to know what He’s doing — Isaiah 12:4 and Psalms 105:1.  Somehow, someone else needs to hear what happened, perhaps as inspiration to do likewise, or to do something similar.  And perhaps the telling of the story would change my relationship with one or more ward members. (more…)

The temptations of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness seems to have the implication that God did not fully know the mind of Jesus, and needed to test him before Jesus’s ministry could begin.

If so, this would seem to confirm what I think is implied by the (specifically) Mormon theology of the nature of God and of Men.

Because, by ‘mainstream’ Christian theology, God created everything (from nothing) and therefore knows everything – so (by this argument) our minds and hearts must be wholly-transparent to God; because there is nothing of us which is not made and sustained by God. Also, for mainstream theology Jesus is the same person as The Father, so from that perspective as well, there would be no need for testing.

But, according to Mormon theology, we are coexistent with God from eternity, there is something in us which is not of God, not made by God. This is (as I understand it) the basis of our genuine free agency.

All this perhaps entails that there is in-us that which is not accessible to God; which God can only infer and test by observation. My assumption is that there is always this hidden element about every personage (including Satan) such that God cannot and we cannot know-directly the innermost individual-eternal-being of any person.

Which is why tests, although fallible, are necessary.

None of us is as dumb as all of us.

I realize this is not original with His Majesty, but he’s been repeating it a lot lately.

This morning on the radio they were talking about the year’s most frequent Google searches. It was said that the most searched person was Matt Lauer, which prompted my internal question “Who’s Matt Lauer?” And though quick use of an internet search engine would indeed educate me, I have a hunch that I would prefer remaining ignorant.

I live in an area that has a lot of conifer forest.

(more…)

(Note, this is cross-posted from my ‘Notions’ blog – it is aimed mainly at non-Mormon Christians; but it may also be of interest here… As you probably already know; I am continually astonished and fascinated by the way in which Mormon Christianity is based on such a radically different set of metaphysical assumptions concerning the basic nature of reality.)

We are incarnated into this mortal life – and each person finds himself or herself in a different situation: different times in history; different places on the planet; different sex, class, race; different parents…

There seems to be only two basic possibilities:

1. That the allocation of souls to bodies is a random process. We are equally likely to end up anywhere.

2. God ‘places’ us into some specific situation.

The first ‘random’ possibility implies that our situation and sex is a matter of indifference to God and to our-selves – one situation is as good as another. This choice is pretty much entailed by the mainstream Christian belief that each soul is created some time between conception and birth – each soul starts out identical, so there is no point or purpose in placing a specific soul in one place rather than other.

The second ‘placing’ idea implies that we have different needs in mortal life – and this implies that souls are different at the point of incarnation, which also implies that we have a pre-incarnation existence. This doctrine of pre-existence has been non-mainstream for Christians since about the time of Augustine of Hippo – but is held by Mormons among others.

This is a good example of the way that metaphysical assumptions affect theology. Mainstream Christians are pretty-much compelled to assume that our situation in life is random, and meaningless – in now way is our actual life-situation ‘tailored’ to our spiritual needs.

Whereas Mormons, and others who believe in pre-existence, are compelled to assume that God must have placed us into our specific life-situation with at least some regard for what situation will benefit us; and potentially this placing would be highly-exact (although human free will or agency will surely make it impossible for the placing to be fully-exact – since any niche would be changed by the choices of the people around it).

Aside: the question of sexual identity – man or woman – is another point of disagreement between mainstream and Mormon. The mainstream view sees the human soul as newly-created from-nothing – and sexual identity therefore as secondary, and in principle it might be male, female of something-else, or nothing. This links with God being neither man nor women, but containing both.

But for Mormons it is doctrine that every person is either man or woman – nothing else is possible in a deep and ultimate sense (whatever the effects of disease or environment), and this identity goes all the way down and back to eternity. Furthermore God is a dyad of Man and Woman: Heavenly Father and Mother; Jesus was a man; angels are either men or women etc…

It can be seen that Mainstream and Mormon Christianity, while both being genuinely Christian, are based upon distinct metaphysical assumptions.

And these basic assumptions lead to big differences in how we personally regard our specific situation in life: for Mormons our situation is meaningful because designed for our needs; whereas for mainstream Christians our situation (and indeed our sex) is random.

A Philadelphia city council committee wants small businesses to remove safety glass. Vote pending by whole council.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/crime/council-bill-removal-safety-glass-windows-beer-delis-meeting-20171208.html

The reporter conflates a couple different issues, so I’m unsure if the real issue is the bullet-resistant plastic windows, or a licensing issue about selling individual cans of beer, and how the 30 seat threshhold figures in.  Snippet: (more…)

We are trying to operate a capitalistic system under a government that dislikes the system, and would, if it had the courage and power, replace it with a collectivist system. This inner conflict between the nature of free capitalism and the real purposes of the government has created a deadlock. Business cannot proceed because it is terrorized by New Dealers. The New Dealers cannot proceed because, being only half-hearted collectivists, they dare not follow out the logic of their own ideas.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modern world an admirable class of persons who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.  William Morris and his followers shoed how much brighter were the dark ages than the age of Manchester.  Mr. W.B. Yeats frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to the forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear.  Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved.  There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games.  There there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas.

It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight.  It is even possible that Mr. W.B. Yeats never pulls crackers.

If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions?  Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.  If this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar.  Nor can there be an reasonable doubt that they were vulgar.

-thus G.K. Chesterton

The problem with “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is the “for tomorrow we die.”It is the justification.  Seizing a last few defiant gasps of happiness before the great dark is a lie.  Rejoicing now in anticipation of greater rejoicing later is the true rule of the universe.