New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Philonous" data-source="post: 1556947" data-attributes="member: 22043">Well, where to begin. I read Pet Semetery! That’s similar!Well, actually, the year before I graduated high school “Re-Animator” came out. It didn’t much interest me, so I didn’t bother seeing it. Instead, I went to see “Prizzi’s Honor”, something I was thinking about just yesterday.Then, the following year, I went to see “The Fly” with a friend who got into science stuff. It was sad and beyond grotesque—although I do remember that one line from the film, “Insects don’t have any politics”. And then, well, Buckaroo Bonzai. “Why me, John Bigboote?”Then, later, that other big-concept modern movie of men falling victim to their own science. Jurassic Park—a Michael Crichton novel. Thing is, after Isaac Newton’s discoveries became published and popular in the late 17th/early 18th centuries, including his “Opticks” (1704), the Anglican minister Georg Berkeley published the first of his philosophical rebuttals against “godless empiricism”, “An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision”, 1709. Berkeley was—how old? 24 when he wrote that thing (and it’s masterful).A year later Berkeley followed this up with “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge”—then, 3 years later, rewrote it as a sort of debate in, “Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”—dialogues between “matter” and “a lover of mind”.And now you know where my pseudonym on this forum comes from.A brief animated video based on the book: [MEDIA=youtube]fs1MeDUgEOA[/MEDIA]Berkeley’s philosophy was rather straightforward: matter doesn’t really exist. Human souls and the consciousness of God; these are the only things are truly “real”, capable of standing up to arguments about intuition. And so why doesn’t all the furniture of a living room vanish as soon as the occupant dies, and there’s no longer another human being to remember it? Because God is omnipresent, and He remembers it. Things can and do exist in the mind of God well outside the mind of man. And about William Godwin’s anarchism. Well, I won’t talk about him specifically, but I will talk about how I feel about baronies. I believe in Matt 20:25-27.There were no baronies among the 12 apostles. Christ, himself, was a lifelong celibate; he created no barony. If this model is to be taken seriously then tribal bloodlines which insist they create divinely-elected leaders are outside the model, outside Christ’s teachings and example. Yet is it not conceivable God would bless a given autocrat to rule a nation for life?That much is conceivable—but blessing a “bloodline” is an Old Testament concept, and nothing that appears in the NT. All of the apostles were old enough at the time of their selection to make mature decisions for themselves. They were not children. They would each face possible death for following Christ even before the crucifixion. True enough, none were scholars or rhetoricians; yet they also weren’t young enough to merit any peculiar stares in traveling with a 30-year-old preacher.I realize these are nothing like the arguments of William Godwin, a man whose writings are those of an agnostic. I’m not here to defend his agnosticism. But I’m also not here to defend the lineage-based inheriting of autocratic positions. In our own system we have instabilities. The founding fathers of America went overboard on their skepticism—choosing a president every 4 years, and later putting a cap on 8 years is, in my mind, an error, and something of a miracle America endured despite this law. It encourages the public to elect blowhards, as well as settle too easily on “the lesser of two evils”. It’s the sort of thing done when you still believe your nation is basically “an experiment”, and not necessarily something destined to remain on the earth for any great while.And so with that in mind I believe, ideally, America’s chief executive should be elected for life.But notice I said “ideally”.What has happened in this nation in at least the past 70 years has been a systematic and wholesale destruction of the people’s morality altogether. I think you know (((who))) are the primary parties responsible. Yet aside from that the damage is done, and now permeates so many different areas of pubic thought as to make the public themselves largely animal-like, governed by emotionalism and material comfort, by greed and ego. And so this is going to eventuate in awful lot of small civil wars—at its height it will entail endless guerrilla skirmishes throughout a thousand different locales across what had once been a unified America. As it happens, expect real diseases—rather than some made-up covid nonsense—to spread like wildfire, taking far more human lives than the violence at even its worst.This is inexorable. God will lessen it; He will not altogether suspend it. And this is because after so many pearls of wisdom have already been trod upon it’s time for America’s overgrown children to learn from their own mistakes. An ominous thing to say right before Christmas. Yet as dark as things will get, I feel the mental darkness of the present is still worse—and I think Berkeley would agree with me. But you know who you answer to. And you know the premium you rightfully put on answering to Him bests any other perceived gain in this life. Remain ever in that way.</blockquote>

Verification