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1. Do you agree with the Holy Father Pope Paul II and most mainline religious denominations that evolution can be accepted as proven fact?
1.1. If you, as a representative of Karol Wojtyla and others, are asking whether I accept some obscure natural law that unfolds in their religious system which results in a proscription (prohibition) against the belief that there is no mundane intermediary between my consciousness and the heavenly father, the answer is “No”.
2. The majority of scientists accept evolution, why don’t you?
2.1. I cannot hear that “E” word out of its hermeneutical context (dynamic human relativities known now and applied to analyses of the past). So, the interview is over if further questions contain that word––its use here can only include the Dawkins’ God-Delusion. And by the way in that Dawkins was correct. The purpose of my radicalism is to draw attention to this reality: God is a figment of the imagination if humankind is a species that while emerging finally specialized in abstractions.
2.2. The question includes the continued original Reformation-Vatican issue––i.e., that I must make a life-standard decision. That is the question. I would opt for the most historic…rather than the most ceremonially adorned in history, not that historically limited one richly shrouded in the ritualistic ornate, that centralized complexity and its systemic Orders. By “most historic” is meant that hearsay (from revelation to oral education) that historically and fertilely contributed to the love of wisdom in Genesis and in reaction to, like, Anaximander’s metaphysic fish-source for human life.
3. Did you know that in 1996 the Holy Father said it is all right for Christians to believe that when he noticed that the human form was good God immediately created the spiritual soul?
3.1. The antecedent of “he” is remarkably ambiguous but reveals a rationalism augmented by mundane revelationism. I understand that in 1996 Karol Wojtyla had pope-ularized the idea that God was a figment of mind. He yielded to the Dawkins’ logic but went further into the logical trap set by Richard Dawkins’ 2006 popularization of the conclusion that God was a figment of “evolved-from-ape” mind. I understand that if one believes humankind’s morphology-changes eventually reached the point where consciousness invented God and religion, then that “informed” person “knows” (in a Gnostic sense) that God etc. is a figment of the imagination.
3.2. Karol simply deferred to a pronouncement that humankind reached a point of…praxis…whereupon God saw that “it was good enough and merited the soul” and immediately ordained that all take an eventual leap of faith into the foreordained centralized Church, i.e., all in “solidarity” give assent to “God” as ecclesiastically ordered. The only change here is nominalism v. biological realism; so, the question involves Rome’s ecclesiastic authority rather than Oxford’s Richard’s authority. Now, if the question is whether I believe Richard and/or Karol, the answer is an unequivocal “no”. (Nominalism involves the mistaken idea that words from an assumed reliable source are to be believed. A linguistic nominalist…might…be one who sees a name as a sign that should not be uncritically accepted––though probably a nominalist is more properly designated as an analytical linguist that is slanted toward logical positivism wherein all signs must refer to agreeable material, but generally a nominalist is caught in the fallacy of nominalism. Nominalism interestingly enough was the very issue behind academia’s struggling move from the University of Paris to Oxford, one issue being that when the church official did the rite right, the wine and bread became the actual flesh and blood of Christ. A nominalist could see the practice as emblematic but the nominalism-nominalist meets the Church-test showing acquiescence to the doctrine of transubstantiation––becomes real flesh and blood.)
3.3. Understanding the question involves a leap-when-ordered for those who want to believe in God and in spite of “science” too. This sort of leap is seen in Augustine’s words, which modified a bit would go like this: “I would indeed not believe the Gospel the evolved mind conjured up God and the Church if the authority of the Catholic church did not prompt me as well”.
4. By what authority do you voice an objection to the Holy Father’s prompting?
4.1. Understanding my “no” means that it is neither Karol’s way nor Dawkins’ way but rather the spirit of protesting that is revealed in the faith prompted by the objective biblical faith.
4.2. I can’t point at a conjured authority amidst comparable authorities, places that have buildings housing relics decked out with rapturous regalia, and I do not believe in intermediary offices but rather more in an informed direct access to the heavenly father.
4.3. If a contemporary source were needed to make this clearer, I would quote Karl Jaspers but with an understanding spin and a caveat: “The reason for believing is revelation… [But the caveat:] The Protestant revolution, having first rejected the ecclesiastic tradition to give full sway to the Bible, quickly restored a watered-down ecclesiasticism and thus betrayed its own original point (PFR, “Faith in Revelation, The Church”). However, I would add, it is not so much a watered down version as it is a steeple to steeple competition like the minaret to steeple “holy war”.
4.4. So, if you’re asking whether revelation’s prompting comes from the earliest standard scholarly translated and understood or the most recent “accommodating” Church, my answer is the former. And moreover Jesus pointed us back to “there are none holy except the father in heaven” and was tortured to death for taking a stand that did not wait on assimilating Hellenistic culture such as included Anaximander’s views on origins.
5. You’re identifying with those believing the world was created in six days?
5.1. I believe in what was revealed to humankind during a time when academia’s atmosphere included idea-seeds, pollutants, that led to highly romantic Greek thought about origins, which limiting the mind to mundane observation, i.e., looking for similarities and rationalizing differences, and then elevating them into absolutes.
5.2. I believe that Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 is most scholarly translated and interpreted as meaning a formative process occurred for us to think about when thinking about origins, and that formative process became void and disorderly. That is my cultural starting point––and what I am defending––e.g. that biblical “time” units give some safe systemic account about thinking about the beginnings of things that even in terms of present information remains ineffable even in the most reductive sense. It is still the better account than the suggestive account that promulgates that it took billions––say “6 long periods” for human minds to shoe-string left up its source.
6. Is it accurate to say that God is eternal and was involved when the temporal earthly human mind’s ascent reached a level where giving assent (the will to believe) to God’s existence was inevitable?
6.1. The question mixes two concepts, one is life eternal in an open universe and the other (second) is the origin of life on earth––though the latter now defensively and secondarily and reactionarily presumed distributed alien-like throughout a closed universe. In an open universe life on earth is part of the greater ineffable whole and not at some priestly big-noise event. The second concept goes beyond biology and bombards within a closed system resulting in the circularity of biogenesis. Jaspers puts it clearly (which, by the way, depicts “postmodernity”, that: growing uncertainty regarding the mind’s capacity):
The greatness of biology is revealed by the fact that in contrast to earlier unclear conceptions of transitions, it is coming to an increasingly definite realization that this origin is unfathomable.
6.2. The question contains a subtle even sidewinder––if not a covert––transition-maxim designed to revert back to rationalism and thereby reintroduces religiously the “E” ontology. If clarified it reads the old way again, that is: the finite conjures out of cosmic wind and noise a logical positivism (rationalism).
6.3. Furthermore question 6 contains the presumptions of the five previous interrogatives, although now only syntactically relevant (signs to signs in sentences). It has no semantic relevance (signs to things), neither cosmically nor mundanely, due to being absorbed in the infinity of the finite.
6.4. This question has some fictitious pragmatic relevance in the presumptions now shrouded in propositions that sound progressively intelligent. The pragmatic reality is that in the new arrangement, institutional religious and academic authority-titles are un-named––but are still there and all the more detrimental because individual autocratic plutocrats hide in buffer-corporate zones. These zones, when religious, are not called pragmatic, or good works, but rather “praxis” since the missionary meaning of “vocation” has been revealed.
6.5. Perhaps unwittingly this is a trick question, for now the inquisitor’s mind, and mine, stand on level un-mined ground that’s only more apparent than real. The tricky spin here is that this ground is imagined to be eternal ground in temporal space. It gets more tricky due to postmodern complexity (cognizance-limits) brought to bare on the two a priori forms of perception and conception: the infinitude of time and finitude of space––plus the relativity of time-space where concepts and percepts tumble and spiral mainly unpredictably.
6.6. The inquisitor has taken off court-attire (now a naked inquisitor in the social religious Court of Inquisition trialing “E” heretics). The inquisitor is speaking off the record (like for an undercover tribunal and the inquisitor is high-tech-wired and transmitting to the National Center for Science Education, “E” department, Informant and Enforcement section [my epigram of the NCSE]). You can see that given the forgoing qualifying hermeneutical information I can begin using the “E” word but only in its negative connotation.
6.7. The alleged level-arena infers that while using individual minds temporally, dissenters no longer have any fear that the answers can be exploited by the varied forces (religious, political, academic––collectively, coercively, covertly, and collusively, moreover national and international economical forces, as well as possible alien-cosmic forces).
6.8. The sixth question’s interrogatory syntax amounts to that old ambiguity: “have I quit beating God up with ‘evolution’”. It implies there is something not to be questioned but prostrated before––and it’s not God but is a god.
6.9. For me to agree that the mind is no longer limited and could now see God (through “E” spectacles) means I would have to be able to point to other minds more limited than now, and a recent mind more unlimited than then (identifying my mind with intelligent transaps––an individual or collective identified with presumed dark matter where abide more advanced intellectual entities). The case is that we cannot conceive of humankind ever being different than now in the morphology and psyche sense (the iceman of the Alps not withstanding).
6.10.What we have here is the play of thought at the limit of cognition that Jaspers mentions (Perennial): “…[P] erhaps it is meaningful to express the understandable through the play of thought at the limit of cognition”. However, the seriousness of the battle now mustering as a religious war, the “play” Jaspers refers to, has become a war-game for souls.
6.11. So, sequential questions about constants and changes must wait on agreements regarding the parameters of cognition. Then, in view of the limits and what tends to delimit, one of the two-occidental (Western) objective standards for truth (e.g. Catholic or protestant) can be considered as to which one takes into account the fallibility or infallibility of cognition, while tending to liberate or captivate authentic individuality during this time when “what everybody thinks” peer-pressure is at uncritical/critical mass.
7. The heavens and earth declare God’s glory and all the changes and constants are ordained. Do you agree?
7.1. Due to what my accepted standard reveals the first clause is acceptable. Without that historic standard I’d be right in saying the sky is falling––and it has before like in Geneses 1:2 and as in Arizona’s meteor crater.
7.2. So my answer is an…equivocal…“no”. The observation of order or solidarity (nor entropy for that…matter) is not the epistemic standard for truth, and this matter not only involves a complex fallacious question but false-cause and involves the consequent-fallacy too. It also ignores the issue, for the subject is historical and hermeneutical, i.e., the struggle between geographic centralized powers and the graphic biblical standard made available to individuals universally since the Reformation. So, if I say that my more objective than subjective standard states that nature declares God, then I accept that. My answer then, to conserve the standard, is an…unequivocal… “yes”.
7.3. Two examples can serve to show that the question involves play at the limits of cognition, and a spiritual answer:
7.4. A Charlie Brown cartoon offers a lesson in social enigma and simplified hermeneutics––A few quotations from a Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon pictures Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown lying in the grass looking up at the clouds:
Lucy says: “The clouds are very pretty. Linus, do you see any shapes in the clouds?”
Linus answers: “There on the left I see Thomas Jefferson at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with Benjamin Franklin seated at the table in Philadelphia. On the right I see the martyrdom of saint Stephen, with the Pharisees and Saul standing by.”
Lucy asks: “Charlie, what do you see?”
Charlie answers: “Well, I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie, but changed my mind.”
7.5. Even though it is not analysis of phenomena that declare the glory of God but the continued presence of the spirit, it is good to be informed, Like: the Hebrew word for “firmament” in Ps. 19:1 can refer to the arrangement of earth plates––and more or less suddenly.
7.6. In Dr. Smith’s science and religion class––Earl Hargrove President of Lincoln Christian College (now University) walked into the room and told how he and his infidel neighbor looked up at a starlit sky. Hargrove says: “I don’t know how anybody can look at this and doubt God’s existence.” I answered like Charlie, that though we say “There is the big dipper” that does not prove they exist. Then I added: “Even stars appear to fail.” Then Earl obverted the standard, and said: “Yes but the bible testifies that the heavens declare it”. I could honestly argue with his first standard (and the argument from personal charisma), i.e., analysis of nature, but not our ultimate standard.
7.7. If Earl had said that the heavens show that the bible correctly says the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork, that God is, then that answer is preferable to individualistic or collective observation. It’s better than a rational system or authoritative institution’s expressed convention-based opining. In a real way then, though nature travails it is biblical revelation that is autonomous but always includes reason.
7.8. No, neither the heavens nor the totality of what we know about nature are grounds for belief or disbelief in God. But information contributes to our “learned ignorance” regarding the infinity of the finite and the limits of mind, and the attitude that delimits.
7.9. In reaction to “percipients” (Greeks in the West) that man came from traceable-morphings because of morphological similarity (whether physique or DNA) another account was made in the form of the OT and included in the NT. So, it is not observed nature but the Bible and whatever communicative accounts precipitated the more current form that declares how nature should be approached. The declaration points the informed in the right direction to avoid hubris.
8. Does your fanatical position on a word-usage end communication?
8.1. It should mean unreserved communication. It means establishing communicative parameters that give no a priori advantage. Fanatics don’t communicate. Take off your title-collars and put down your “science” colors and meet as…researchers. Note I do not use the English word “creation”, “Father” or “Reverend” for pretentious reasons. Regarding the first, “create” came to be “In the beginning was the Word”.
8.2. Previously I used the word “radical”. The etymology of radical has to do with root meanings. “Fanatic” has religious overtones. The better word is probably something comparable to “revolutionary”. That word seems more dialogue-friendly and has a wider spread but includes an awareness of political/religious/”science” forces.
The only things we have identically in common are science and technology as reflected in the general categories of the understanding. These however are united only in an abstract, universal consciousness; in practice they serve both as weapons and media of communication.––Jaspers
8.3. Science and technology exploited, i.e., become weapons. Previously the word “battle” was used. I want to end this interview on a sublimating note and refer to a loving battle in which participants are sober, never caught inebriated by forces harmful to individuals (for instance, von Baer avoided romanticizing about natural metaphysics though open to organism’s archetypes, a kind of extra-physical entity guiding morphological development––one might now say perhaps through a dimension like dark matter).
8.4. It’s from a biblical standard that a note on the origin of humankind liberates communicants: Jaspers puts it this way:
My outline [parameters] is based on an article of faith…All [humans] originate from the hand of God and are created after His image…(Origin and Goal of History, Introduction)…[and from this given, humans] … cannot be derived from something else [we are] immediately at the base of all things (Perennial, Man).
8.5. Talk and play at the limit of cognition continues even if communicants agree that
All empirical causalities and biological processes of development would seem to apply to man’s material substratum, not to himself (Perennial, Man).
8.6. Like open-ended self-images (none can remember where they came from or know wholly what they are) material is not all that transparent though penetrable as always. The talk, play, serious research continues like with dark matter (this talk about dark matter is not a support for the “big bang” theory). The “mystery has grown deeper” though our “vision of prehistory has been somewhat illumined” still the fundament of our “origin has become more and more unfathomable” (Ibid).
8.7. So, until the “E” weaponry, now the Crusading knight’s gauntlet, is laid to rest and hospitality emerges, that word-usage continues to mean that consciousness’ mind conjured up its own source. Until then there is literally nothing on the hither and thither side of illuminated matter to talk about, i.e., no-thing’s speechlessness dimension is now-here.
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