Bruce Charlton's Notions

If the Fourth Gospel is regarded as the primary and most authoritative source concerning Jesus Christ; then it seems that Jesus hardly ever (maybe never) expressed "compassion" as we moderns would understand it. 

Jesus did a lot of alleviating suffering, including in the miracles and illustrated in parables; but the purpose seems always to have been teaching, not compassion. 

Jesus did very little in the way of expressing sympathy for individuals. On the contrary, his typical tone is one of scathing criticism, even a kind of sarcasm. Jesus was very seldom "nice", mostly "nasty! 

Of course Jesus did express and act-upon Love a great deal, more than anything; but my point is that compassion is not love - but an optional sub-set of loving behaviours, and one that Jesus neither asked-for nor modelled for us. 

Going through the IV Gospel up to the events of the Passion, it can be seen that compassion was not the focus of the major episodes:

The miracle at the wedding of Cana; Jesus is pretty sharp and scathing in his words.

The Nicodemus episode; again Jesus is almost mocking towards Nicodemus, in his efforts to snap Nicodemus out of his habitual thinking.

The Samaritan woman at the well; Jesus adopts a stern tone towards the woman.

The Nobleman who asks Jesus to heal his dying son; Jesus is very matter of fact, no compassion expressed.   

The healing by the pool at Bethesda; again no compassion - mostly focused on teaching about the Sabbath. 

Feeding the five thousand; Jesus goes to great lengths to present this as Not about feeding the hungry, but instead an illustration of the transience of earthly bread compared with Heavenly "bread". 

The woman taken in adultery; Jesus is very crisp towards her - despite that she is facing a horrible death, and instead mostly addresses the accusing bystanders on the subject of sin. 

Healing the man born blind; again, no compassion expressed, instead Jesus says the whole thing (including, it seems, the man's lifelong blindness) was so that "the works of God should be made manifest in him" - teaching, not sympathy.

And so on.

Jesus's message is about what we want most. 

Is it resurrected eternal life in Heaven - or... something else? 

Those who most want compassion, and regard "compassion for suffering" as the highest ethical value, should look elsewhere - Buddhism perhaps? But not to Jesus Christ.  

Or maybe they should consider where a primary ethic of compassion will ultimately lead them...

The UK election has been "won" by the Ahrimanic totalitarians who will try to push ahead more rapidly with Agenda 2030/ Davos/ WEF plans for a perma-lockdown world.

(Fake-justified by climate, equity, environment, inclusion etc etc.)

But against this, and sabotaging it, is the Sorathic ascendancy at the highest levels of demon-affiliated leadership; subverting the mono-bureaucracy-media with spiteful chaos.

And They will be pushing for full UK participation, indeed leadership, in an expanded WWIII - plus escalation of within-UK civil aggression.

Inter- and intra- national violence, with disease and starvation in its wake...

(The covert aim being the annihilation of the UK and its population. A spiritual war, because They believe the masses have become so corrupt as to choose damnation.)

I predict that short-termist, selfish chaos will beat strategic top-down control.

Because this is an entropic world... Dis-order is just So Much Easier!

**

NOTE ADDED: William Wildblood's take on the UK election is well worth a look. 

From Ludwig Wittgenstein a memoir, by Norman Malcolm

Wittgenstein did once say that he thought that he could understand the conception of God, insofar as it is involved in one's awareness of one's sin and guilt. He added that he could Not understand the concept of a creator... The notion of a being Making The World had no intelligibility to him at all.

**

How utterly extraordinary that a Great Philosopher found the notion of a creator God not untrue but incomprehensible, when every child and almost every human being in the history of the world found it natural, spontaneous, obvious that the world was created.

How extraordinary that anyone could suppose that strong emotions of sin and guilt were the best reason to believe in a God - but That God was Not a creator.

Yet such extraordinary stuff is now normal, mainstream, official, the basis of our society.

It's as if our world has been made by people who have something seriously wrong with them, something missing - and have remade life in their own, distorted and deficient, image...

**

Note: I should make clear that for significant periods I myself believed and expounded exactly this extraordinary stuff - so I know its whys and wherefores from the inside.

Further note: Previous posts on Wittgenstein.

A Big Problem in philosophy, is picking (or rather assuming) the wrong starting point for enquiry, for analysis and reasoning; and there has been and is massive propaganda to encourage this fatal error...

In particular to ignore or reflexly reject a child's innate and spontaneous assumptions, and to start from... Somewhere else... Anywhere else!

It turns out that these alternative starting assumptions are always abstract, difficult, unintuitive, artificial.

This applies to all traditional philosophy, especially since Descartes, and to Christianity.

To be A Christian, according to nearly all churches, one must First accept as foundational dogmas several counter-intuitive assumptions (regarding the nature of creation, God, Jesus...) within-which the entirely of Christianity is Compelled to exist.

Alternatively we Could assume what is natural, spontaneous, innate...

Can God read minds, and if so - to what extent?

It seems clear that God can read minds or else prayer, for instance, would be meaningless... It seems absurd to assert that God would require thoughts to be spoken aloud, or written down. 

And if this was so, there would be the usual problem of uncertain interpretation of such indirect and symbolic media God might misunderstand!

Yet, if free will or agency is real (which, for Christians it must be), then there must be something inaccessible to God.

Yet again, it makes little sense to suppose that we could conceal our plans from God, and successfully lie to God. 

Did Satan do this, at first - did he conceal his real nature and plans from God?

My conclusion is that God knows our conscious thinking, but neither God nor our consciousness has direct knowledge of our ultimate selves. 

Thus God cannot read-off our ultimate nature, cannot know by observation and fully and for-sure - how we really are - and neither can we do so.

In other words, God can know our thinking, but our thinking is not our-self. 

Both God and our thinking only know ourselves by inference, by observing what our-self does, including what thoughts emerge from our-self.

God could only know Satan by observation and inference.. Albeit that  observation included Satan's thinking.

But this model can't be complete (no model can be complete!), especially because it has only one-way traffic from the self to consciousness, which would mean the self could not learn. 

Since the self can learn, the self can't be divided from consciousness... 

Indeed, this is another of those "polar logic" situations where self and thinking may be distinguished but not divided, since they are not separate in origin or nature... 

Both thinking and self are attributes of All Beings, but the self stands for that individual unknowability which enables agency...

That "bit" of us which God cannot read.

Thus it was that Satan deceived God as to his nature and plans. It was possible because Satan was also deceiving himself. 

Satan did not even Know himself, except by observation and inference.

And neither do we.

 I find very little awareness of the profundity of shift in our civilization. A civilization renews itself across generations, but ours seeks its own annihilation.

This is just a fact, and quite explicit in detail. In every field or domain, subversion and inversion are most valued. 

There was, in all civilizations, a handing on and preservation of the meaning and importance of symbols whether in poetry, or science, or anything. Symbols carried the civilization through time, and the symbols linked back though the middle ages to Roman, to Greek civilization and beyond - for good and for ill, but that was the way it worked.

At some point the symbols began losing their objective nature. We were no longer sustained by the objectivity of the symbol. The symbol did not impose itself upon us...

What then happened, which was an evil thing - motivated against the divine - was that symbol was replaced by bureaucracy. Instead of continuity by objective symbol, continuity became organizational - from the overlapping personnel and procedures of system.

Now, "objectivity" comes from bureaucracy, and the actual bureaucracy works to subvert/invert the symbolism linking us to the past - and thereby remove a rival to its power and domination.

This is why poetry, science, music, farming, law, crafts, patriotism, religion... have all declined or collapsed: they are all symbols actively being killed by bureaucracy.

We no longer inhabit a civilization but a bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy is primary; because it redefines and deletes symbols at will, in order to weaken and destroy them.

In order to destroy creation, and thereby deny and replace creation.

 I'm currently rereading George Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein, and (first read) a short biography of Graves by Bruce King. Graves was a very early craze of mine, beginning age 14; and I began on Wittgenstein about a decade later. 

This time I'm struck by similarities between them. Both ruling class, both in the avant garde (contemporary members of the same circles): and/also sexually Platonic by nature. Both capable of "superb" statement - charisma and/or self-righteous and aggressive arrogance. 

Both made insightful diagnoses of the civilizational problems, both on the wrong side when it came to answers - their ultimate affiliations were to their "class", hence (in the twentieth century West) on the side opposing God and divine creation.

I have always, both before and after being a Christian, found it easy to know that I was doing the wrong thing (and, to a lesser extent knowing what I shouldn't do) - but very bad at discerning my proper future path.

Although I have known plenty of people who mapped out their lives and stuck to, and sometimes accomplished, their plans - I always thought they were making a serious mistake.

Nowadays I regard my inability - my personal deficit - as (through no virtue of mine!) in accordance with the real nature of the human condition.

We are supposed to be committed to those we love (at least, within the inevitable constraints of mortal life), but beyond that we sin by living for our future planning - and this is indeed one of the cankers poisoning the heart of human civilization.

Something maybe inevitable but a necessity we ought to repent rather than praise.

One lethal consequence of the mainstream modern assumption that death is annihilation, is that it renders this mortal life merely palliative. 

Because life is assumed to end in nothingness, mortal existence cannot be more than palliative: i.e. a series of temporary attempts to avoid or alleviate suffering... and maybe attain some temporary pleasures.

This nihilism is what seems like ordinary "common sense" to the modern Western mind, and has done for several generations. 

It is the great benefit of assuming a continuation of life beyond this mortal life, that it makes it possible to have a positive purpose - because there is the prospect of carrying-forward something of whatever we have done in this life. 

This benefit of a potentially purposive life, may derive from a variety of convictions about the nature of life-beyond-life (e.g. resurrection, reincarnation, forms of paradise etc). 

The point is that a continuation of our life after death is what makes purpose possible; whereas the contrary belief that we are extinguished at death, makes any subjective feeling of life-purpose into just a futile delusion. 

Given that so many people in The West (especially among the higher and leadership classes) apparently regard their own death as absolute the end of themselves, and anything else as mere wishful thinking -- many things about the experienced futility and evil of life in Western modernity become understandable - indeed inevitable.  

Because emotions are partly physical, we cannot lead a spiritually satisfactory mortal life. 

This statement sounds startling (or just plain false!) but it derives from the nature and properties of emotions; and their role in this mortal life. 

Emotions derive, significantly, from the state of our physical bodies - our body state (including especially the hormone and neural activity) as sensed and interpreted by our brains. This is not the whole story, but there is a sense in which we cannot get away from the physical when it comes to emotions. 

There have been many attempts through history to train people to become spiritually independent of the emotions - i.e. the tradition of religious asceticism. 

But all valid authorities agree that humans can never be wholly free of the passions: the spirit can never become independent of the body. The tyranny of emotions may be diminished, but this lessening is never more than a quantitative change; a reduction of the causative drive; but never an elimination of our subjection to emotion. 

Furthermore, when asceticism works and there is a successful diminution of the strength of emotions - this has bad effects as well as the desired good ones. There is some degree of demotivation, and of disengagement from life; because it is emotions that link us to the world, other people, other beings. 

For instance, the technical word for a person who lacks sympathy or empathy - which means the capacity to feel the emotions of another - is psychopath. A psychopath is one who lacks the automatic and innate response to resonate emotionally with others. 

It is this unemotionality which (to some degree) underpins cold, selfish cruelty without remorse.  

Thus on the one hand we are (to an extent) slaves to our emotions, hence our bodies - and bodies are subject to the entropic changes of degeneration, disease and death; and also to the temptations of evil. 

Yet if it was possible to reduce or eliminate emotionality; we would also thereby lessen vital aspects of our basic humanity. 

For me, this emphasizes that our mortal life is not the kind of thing that can be perfected; and that even the scope for improvement is limited, since there is a "swings and roundabouts" quality to many basic human changes. 

And, in turn, this brings me back to the fact that when Jesus offered Mankind the chance of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - a life in which we remain our-selves, and retain our emotional nature but perfected by love; He was offering the greatest gift that it was possible for us to receive - and exactly the best response to this fundamental problem of human existence. 

It is striking (when you think about it) how it is easy to recognize - and be confident of the identity of - evil actions; but not good ones. 

There are plenty of well known actions that are evil with such a high degree of certainty as to make it nigh impossible to imagine any situation in which they could deliberately and consciously be done from genuinely good motivations.   

Yet, because good and evil are not symmetrical, the same does not apply to good actions. I can't think of any action that is good in and of itself - what makes it good comes from the motivation, and from that motivation proceeding from a full accordance with God's creative will. 

This is why it is so much easier to talk about "goodness" in double-negatives; in terms of opposing evil rather than genuinely doing good. 

It is the doing of good that is the problem; because nothing "done" is good in and of itself - we just can't get away from why it is done.   

People really want good to be definable in terms of acts; because if it could be, then good could be made into a plan, described in bullet points; and "implemented" on the world and other-people.  

Yet it is the fact that good cannot validly be thus conceptualized that has made all schemes for making-the-world-a-better-place (i.e. the entirety of politics and social engineering) into the realm of such self-deception, lies and horrors.

I suspect that we can only really-do real-good in those sadly-brief moments in which we are ourselves really good - when really-are on God's wavelength, as it were. 

And of course that means that the real-good which is done by us is only seldom in any objectively observable or definable form - but most likely to be in our thinking, a particular choice, a word or phrase, or some very particular (maybe unnoticed) action.  

 A book recommendation for people who like this sort of thing. 

Salvation - resurrected eternal life in heaven - should be the direction of our life, not its goal. 

A direction provides a context and perspective for living. We know where we are going, we know we are going there - and we live in that environment of expectation. 

This direction shapes Christian life. 

But when salvation is instead understood as the goal of our life; then Christianity gets to be something like a politician trying to get elected, or studying for a scholarship examination, or winning a court case. 

We are already in God's family - it's a matter of recognizing that family as good, a matter of affiliating with our family (similar to the choice that most adolescents are confronted with). A matter of affiliating our purposes with those of our divine family; and therefore not affiliating our purposes with others who have chosen to reject (and attack?) that divine family.

Christian life isn't about believing and doing a "million" things derived from scripture, nor about obeying a million instructions from a church. 

It is (or should be) about aligning ourselves with a few, and simple, understandings of reality.

All this is part of weaning our-selves off the expectation that our personal faith ought to satisfy some external this-worldly arbiter; I mean the strange but prevalent notion that "what matters" is justifying ourselves to "other people" - (or to what we infer about other people, since we seldom really know with surety). 

It often seems to me that the greatest but most misguided act of faith is in the superior-to-ourselves honesty, competence and motivations of "other people" - whether those people are current or past, whether written or embodied in a bureaucracy. 

I see this as an attempted denial of ultimate personal responsibility for our own Christian understanding, faith and life; and I regard protestations that this deference to "other people" is due to the virtue of humility, to be nearly always a false evasion (as evidenced by their gross - ahem - "lack of humility" in all other respects!). 

But in the end this issue of humility just kicks the can; since understanding the nature, role and importance of humility is yet another issue about which we must decide whether to take personal responsibility, or to submit to the Superior wisdom) of other-people...

And then: how can we (how actually do we) discern which other-people are of superior wisdom to ourselves? If we answer in terms of a consensus of history; then which consensus? 

And why should consensus be wiser than the individual - who says, and is it right that those who say it must be believed? 

Wherever we squirm, we will find that ultimately everything has been underpinned by our own personal decision and choices. I think we will also find that the reality of our solid faith is much much simpler than the millions upon millions of explanations and rules and practices that are supposedly "Christianity" - and which we have actually derived by subordinating our personal responsibility to a wide range of "other people" - about whose competence, nature and intent we are essentially ignorant. 

That the highest level of the Western Establishment are all-out attempting to engineer an all-out World War III is now becoming generally acknowledged among those who are minimally-informed and can think. 

But their reason for doing so is still nearly-always misunderstood - because the ultimate explanation for why the globalist "elites" want such a war invariably grounds-out in terms of the desire for money and power. 

Whereas the real reason is spiritual, is evil; and is concerned with damnation rather than with this-world. 

In a nutshell: the global-elites want WWIII and they want it now because they are servants of demons (or actually demonically possessed); and the demons believe that the kind of war they desire will lead to mass damnation - in a way that world wars of the past probably did not. 

There are different levels of power in the Establishment, and different reasons why war would lead to damnation. 

The highest level of people of whom we know the names (but who are in fact dupes of the real global elites) are the likes of multi-national and national leaders, senior managers of mega-corps, media barons, tech moguls, and max prestige intellectuals. 

These mostly want WWIII because they believe it will make them richer and/or more powerful (and get more sex/ torture of the kind they desire); and because they regard the Little People as Human Resources at best, and useless eaters in the mass. 

Others among them have embraced transcendental value-inversion, and believe that war will enable them to persuade or impose such values upon the world.   

And such motivations are more than sufficient to ensure that when these lose power, status, wealth as a consequence of war and die, they will do so in despair. And some will actively choose damnation because to them, real-evil is regarded as "good" (and vice versa). 

The mass of Western bureaucrats, functionaries, officials, middle managers, teachers, entertainers and the like; passively approve of WWIII from a mixture of deliberate self-blinding and ignorance, dishonesty in thought/ speech and deed (so that they either refuse to believe what is actually happening - including in war, or interpret it to mean the opposite), and from their obedience to power in pursuit of status, security, fame etc. 

These myrmidons-of-evil are mostly fuelled by fear, resentment, envy, pride, luxury, and other sins that they regard as virtues. 

They disbelieve in the reality of God, divine creation, and Jesus Christ - and will choose damnation because they regard the whole idea of salvation as childish, dumb, insane, or evil.  

Although not so extremely evil as the above, and more likely therefore to repent and choose salvation (post-mortally, if not before) the Western masses are Godless and a-spiritual; and therefore have become thoroughly corrupted by short-termism and selfishness, by cowardice and hedonism.

These too are likely to choose damnation - in substantial numbers, at least. 

This - or something like it - is the economy of damnation that has led those most demonic (who are also among the most powerful) to unrelenting and strategic efforts to engulf the world in war. 

Past wars were often double-edged in their effect on damnation; with Men pushed towards extremes of virtue, as well as vice. 

But now, with the world as it currently-is; global and unrestricted war apparently looks to the demons like a near certain bet for damnation on a truly colossal scale - which explains the escalating rhetoric or and unending stream of ever-more-extreme provocations and atrocities.  

**

Note: The economy of damnation works on probabilities and percentages of men in the mass. Of course, any individual is always free to repent up until the final post-mortal commitment; but the demons can do nothing about that. They work by trying to make it as sure as possible that repentance will not happen - by inducing people to want and choose... something (anything!) else than salvation. 

Heidegger is credited with having given a name - in German Geworfenheit, in English "Thrownness" - for the situation in which we already-find-ourselves in the world; that realization (which often happens during adolescence) that we are in an already-existing world - as if we had been thrown into existence, and must make of it what we can. 

Thrownness is, it seems to me, part of the development of consciousness - an aspect of the awakening of self-consciousness; which on the one hand is a separation from The World; and on the other hand the possibility of freedom. 

Thrownness can therefore be understood (and felt) as fundamentally negative-alienation or as positive-agency. 

Thrownness is, of course, both alienation and agency - the one cannot be without the other. But if there is meaning to thrownness, fundamentally one aspect must be primary, and the other secondary.

People react to the sense of thrownness in many ways, often (it seems) negatively - as when they complain "but I didn't ask to be born!" 

And when people react in that way, they seldom realize that by doing so they have already "begged the question"; in other words, by regarding thrownness as "not my fault" they have already assumed that their own life has no purpose or meaning. 

However, as always, the experience of thrownness is not a raw-fact; but brings with it its own interpretation - it arises in the context of a theory which gives meaning. 

Indeed; feeling that one has been "thrown" into the world willy-nilly, and without consent, to sink-or-swim; is embedded in a set of assumptions - which seem to me to point-at an unloving, or perhaps evil, deity who does the "throwing". 

More often, thrownness is supposed to be evidence for (or consistent with) atheism: an emotional subjective response to the operations of blind and indifferent material-causality and/or random chance.  

Yet, even for a theist who believes that this is a creation we inhabit, and that each living-soul has some purpose and meaning to his existence; there is an underlying existential aspect to this awakening into awareness of "me, here, now" - because it usually seems that creation is already up-and-running, and already has a divine purpose and "rules". 

We therefore find-ourselves confronted by a necessary choice: 

Do we, or shall we) personally approve-of, or do we instead reject, this ongoing creation in which we awake and find-ourselves?   

It seems to me important that we recognize this as a choice, and take personal responsibility for the way that we answer it.

Indeed; I think this is one of those choices that always gets answered in our lives: implicitly if not explicitly, unconsciously when not consciously...

That is: we shall always be taking either an adversarial or affiliative (negative or positive) attitude towards ongoing divine creation. 

Either choosing to join-with and be an ally to God; or else God's enemy. 

I tackle this vital matter over at the Notion Club Papers blog - focusing on the specific example of the author and "Inkling" Charles Williams (1886-1945).

Thinking is much more difficult and rare than doing - it is also of low status; which is why so little thinking gets done. 

I first realized this some forty years ago when I began to work as a laboratory research scientist, and noticed that there was (in the biological and medical sciences anyway) extremely little thinking about the meaning of what we were doing. 

There was, indeed, active hostility (and scorn) directed against anything that challenged, or even seriously analysed, whatever the currently-accepted meanings and purposes of research-doing. 

The ratio of doing to thinking was so high, that it seemed to me that very few bioscientists ever thought consecutively and in a focused way for even ten minutes about their subject, or even their results. 

(I formulated this in a kind of slogan that anyone who did succeed in thinking for ten minutes about the implications and purposes of some research, thereby became a leading theoretician in that field.)

I was much more disposed towards thinking-hard than I was to doing-hard (long hours in the lab were mostly a chore, though this was my daily work environment for more than seven years, in the end); I soon decided that my "edge" as a scientist would come from focusing on solo theory rather than the usual practice of trying to generate vast quantities of data by forming vast teams of collaborators*

I felt, and still feel, that this was a flaw in the biosciences and medicine (attempting to remedy which was why I edited Medical Hypotheses for seven years) - and I think the same applies to other sciences. 

So far as I can gather - even the theoretical scientists don't really think, but just apply externally-learned models in a routine fashion. In other words; theory is not thinking! - or, seldom so.  

Eventually; this insight became a kind of Master Theory about Life! For nearly everybody, it seems that the ratio of doing to thinking is way too high; indeed apparently infinitely high in many people (i.e. they never think consecutively and in a focused way; so the ratio is some-quantity, divided by zero).  

And this is a major reason why our civilization is where it is: self-painted into a corner where it is purposively destroying itself - and simultaneously trying to bring-down the rest of the world from spite.  

No amount of doing will help - only thinking. 

Some serious and sustained thinking... very likely coming at the cost of less doing. 

*Note - on-average modern researchers do Not, contrary to almost universal perception, publish significantly more papers than earlier scientists who worked largely alone. What the moderns actually do, is work in much larger teams, and share in more publications. The bigger the team, the more shared-publications. But when the number of publications is divided by the number of authors (which has increased many-fold) - there seems to have been no significant change in average publication rates. 

We cannot know what to do, so long as we are wrongly-motivated.

This is something everybody seems to find it very difficult to grasp and hold-onto... 

That, while we are in a situation of wrong-motivation, we cannot know what is best for us to do. 

Therefore; any plans we make while wrongly-motivated, will be bad plans - will make things worse. 

As Western society as a whole, and a large majority of its individual persons, are here-and-now so very wrongly-motivated - there is currently no possibility at all of making - or even recognizing - plans for a better future. 

Yet, this is what people constantly clamour for! Indeed, they demand detailed flow-charts of how to manufacture a better future. 

Unsurprisingly; all the strategies that emanate from The West, and are supported by the usual run of corrupt and dishonest Westerners - are dystopian in the extreme! Their methods and aims are nightmarish, claustrophobic, anti-human, anti-life; because that is the only kind of plan we can imagine. 

This ought to be obvious common sense. And it is a measure of the depth of corruption that it is not obvious - and that so many people instead suppose that people and societies who have embraced value-inversion yet deny it, might somehow be able to contrive a "road map" to social regeneration...

Before we can even imagine a better world and how to get it - let alone commence to make such a world; we must first become better people...

Indeed; not just "better" but transformed people: transformed in terms of our motivations; or it could be said transformed in terms of our perspective on reality and our place in it.

This sounds wildly optimistic and ambitious; and yet it it is a thing that any person can do for-himself; and cannot be prevented from doing.

It's all a question of wanting; and so we return to motivation...  

In his Exegesis; Philip K Dick often returns to the theme that God - and The Good - could be found among the "trash" of civilization - and only among the trash:

The right place to look for the Almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley. And for Satan in vast cathedrals etc. 

This fitted with PKD's sustained interest in historical Gnosticism; by which this world is made by The Devil, who is an evil demiurge; such that God (and Good) can only penetrate this world (and eventually redeem it - make it good) by stealth and in-disguise. 

Such Gnosticism (which he knew of partly via his friend the Bishop of California Jim Pike, who was involved in translating the Nag Hammadi library) appealed to PKD because he was very aware of the evils of this world, especially its suffering. 

PKD could not make intuitive sense of the traditional-orthodox-canonical Christian view that such a world as we inhabit was created and sustained by a wholly-good and omnipotent God. On the other hand; PKD was not satisfied by the explanations of Gnosticism either - and therefore the Exegesis displays many oscillations and explorations, and never settles on a final or wholly-satisfying explanation. 

Leaving aside what I regard as the mistaken metaphysical assumptions of ancient Gnosticism (and indeed traditional canonical Christianity) - there is certainly a strong case to be made that real Christianity is now to be found only among the detritus and at the edges of modern Western Culture; and not in the cathedrals, temples, churches, seminaries and theological colleges, or their like. Nor indeed in mainstream mass media; nor high status education and academia.  

As Western Culture has become totalitarian and corrupted - then every-thing that is mainstream, official, popular, powerful, wealthy and high status; has been brought within the evil-motivated totalitarian System, and under the ultimate control of literal demons. 

Here-and-now; any-thing that is not on-board-with, and supportive-of, the totality of systemic evil is forced to the margins; and demonized as "trash". 

Christians themselves are already - and increasingly - regarded-as, and treated-as, trash by the world of mainstream officialdom and mass media; and the more truly-Christian a person may be, the more he will be despised. 

So that the end-result is superficially very much as assumed by ancient Gnostics and their sympathizers such as PKD; despite that PKD was essentially a man-of-the-left, and there is a significant element of 60s counter-culture "nostalgie de la boue" -style posturing about the notion of seeking "God" in the trash!

Nonetheless, and despite all reservations and contextualization; it is probably true in essence. 

Although most of the trash of our civilization is indeed rubbish, and some of it is very evil; as of 2024, in The West, we won't find God anywhere else. 

The Western ruling class's preparations to create and escalate global war have been yet another Litmus Test of our time...

Revealing that the vast majority of even those commenters who regard themselves as solidly anti-Left "realists", cannot comprehend how bad things really are. 

There has been for many years, and it is still increasing, a repetitive trope about how dumb, stupid, and all-round incompetent are the Western leadership class. 

Anti-Woke analysts and commenters work themselves into a frenzy of exposition concerning declining IQ, declining competence, and idiotic doubling-down on mistakes. 

All this is perfectly true, in itself - but incompetence is not the underlying and causal problem! 

The big problem is evil, not incompetence. 

The problem is evil motivations.

The problem is what the ruling class want; not their inability to achieve it!

If the ruling class were more able and intelligent (and less corrupt) then they would be using their competence to do more evil. 

The reason this is a Litmus Test is that it reflects the inability of most people, of almost everybody - it seems, to acknowledge and recognize the reality of deliberate, purposive evil.

Most people don't even seem to notice that the "incompetence" always works in the same direction (i.e. towards evil) - whereas genuine incompetence would err on both sides of right action, and would sometimes seek good by accident! 

And if you can't see evil when it is staring you in the face and doing its best to destroy the world... well, then you are absolutely certain to get it badly wrong about the motivations of the Western ruling class.  

My understanding is that we originated in terms of divine creation as spirit-Beings, living in a situation of "obedient love" with respect to God. 

In that sense we began as "angels" - perfectly-Good servants and messengers of God, but without agency (i.e. "free will").

This was our spiritual childhood, because we loved by means of obedience. We found our-selves living "in" God's love, but un-consciously; therefore passively and spontaneously we accepted love as the basis for life (and creation). 

As consciousness developed (some Beings developed faster than others, and probably some did not develop to this point) we became agents capable of choice. Capable of choosing to accept or reject our then-current state. 

We became capable of choosing to reject the state of living "in" love. 

Then some pre-mortal spirits (i.e. the demons - and perhaps the Devil first of all) chose to reject and oppose God and divine creation. The rejecters remain as pre-mortal spirits, but have chosen disobedience to God and opposition to divine creation. 

Thus evil entered creation.   

Others chose the next step in development; which is to incarnate as a mortal Beings - after which temporary phase there is the opportunity actively to choose to live eternally "in" love; as resurrected incarnate Beings in the state of Heaven. 

Thus; we begin as spirits unconsciously living in a child-like state of obedient love; then (due to Jesus Christ's work) those of us who chose the temporary path of mortal incarnation will have the opportunity consciously to opt-into living eternally in a mature-adult state of chosen love.  

The pre-mortal state is one of living wholly in-love, but it is not Heaven; nor is it conscious, nor active. 

Heaven is a wholly-Good state inhabited by those who have-been mortal incarnates, and who then have consciously chosen to live eternally in-love.  

The point of this post is to emphasize that we have not known Heaven. Heaven lies in our future (if we make that choice) but not in our past. 

In this UK and US election year, people are induced to focus on power, and what they think they might do with it if they got it - or what those we most dislike might do it us if the power went to them. 

But in a society in which evil motivations predominate - and where personal motivation is at an all-time historical nadir - such that people are easily induced to be motivated for or against almost anything, and then abandon or reverse this motivation on a sixpence... 

In such a society of endemic, pervasive, near-universal demotivation and false motivations - the distribution of power is of very subordinate relevance.   

Unless the problem of motivation is first solved - that is, unless people are motivated towards Good rather than evils, and their motivations are internal and personal rather than passively responsive to external manipulation - then distribution of power is almost irrelevant. 

In a situation where Good is absent altogether (or motivated so feebly as to be a misleading distraction); we can (and are encouraged to) analyse and quibble about the lesser of evils, which particular fake-puppet-personality we prefer from a cast of obedient-drones and controllable-psychopaths.

But all available options are wrongly-motivated; therefore all options are evil - and, in a complicated and chaotic world - a world consisting of distortion, hype and outright lies; which particular option is the least evil cannot be predicted.  

The imperative is to recognize just how very bad things are - ultimately in a spiritual sense - and that from this spiritual corruption comes the situation of endemic, pervasive, near-universal demotivation and false motivations. 

Hardly anyone I speak-with or read seems remotely to realize the depth and extent of our current civilizational malaise - and this indictment includes all the most famous and influential "dissenting" voices.

From where we actually are, the only positive way forward entails a transformation and reversal of many of those assumptions that we hold most dear, or regard as obvious and unchallengeable. 

That is just how it is. 

Whether it is at all likely to happen is another matter! But that's what must happen - else present trends will continue towards predictably destructive ends. 

When so many people expend so much energy propagating that you've got to believe-in... something; then you eventually realize that nobody really believes in anything. 

For a long time, people could be induced to believe in things by social structuring; then for a while-more belief was created and sustained by inducing people to participate in rituals, study, self-disciplines; and then that phase passed. 

For a short period more; it was widely asserted that this inability to believe meant that anyone could believe anything - simply by choosing. 

Someone could - by wanting - learn to "believe-in yourself", or believe-in any kind of religion, spirituality, or political ideology...

Someone could (it was said) induce belief by replacing external social structures with a personally-chosen framework....

The implicit theory was something-like this: 

First; you chose what to believe...

Then you build your own belief-sustaining system...

Finally you stepped inside and... 

Believed - from then-onwards.  

Yet that interchangeability of belief also implied that if you could believe any-thing, then you ought to be believe... whatever was currently-approved/imposed by the rulers. 

Because if not, if there was no consensus of belief; then "chaos would ensue"; than which anything is better (so most people felt). 

Meanwhile - nobody really believed anything: because belief was (for pretty obvious reasons!) self-subverted by its own arbitrary-ness. 

If we can "believe anything" then, actually, we cannot believe anything.

And that is where things now stand. 

Believe-in doesn't work. 

Now, what we need is to-know. 

And that means we need to know without having first to believe-in. 

And that means we need to know directly, by a single inner act of knowing that does not depend on any intermediaries that must be believed-in...

That is we need to know without believing that words/ concepts/ symbols capture -real-reality, we need to know without having first to believe-in some particular person or institution (or church).  

Direct-knowing in this way can be called intuition - and it not only can but must become the ultimate basis for life, because it is the only potentially solid basis: the only basis that is not merely a floating island adrift in the sea of culture. 

Direct-knowing is when the island of our expressed belief is merely the tip of a root that extends to the bedrock of reality. 

And on that rock...

 1. Mainstream Western Secular Materialism

This world is entropic - Life arises accidentally from unlife and soon reverts to it. All that is personal and distinct is temporary and tends towards disorder. Annihilation of every-"thing" is the ultimate destination.

2. Oneness

This world began and ends as One, anything else is illusion. The tendency is towards dissolution of all that is distinct; all beings, all persons, all "things", our-selves.

3. Christian 

The persons, beings, forms of this entropic and illusory world, are a learning-stage or phase, en route to the potential choice of eternal resurrection.

The distinctively Christian essence of resurrection is that our ultimate goal and destiny can be one in which some individual persons, beings, life, forms... order and structure; may choose to become everlasting.

These three world-views are incompatible. Only one can be real, and we can choose only one. 

I think it is best to consider which we would most desire for ourselves; and if the answer is Christian, then recognize that our destiny is one that we must (therefore shall) choose.

It seems evident to me that nobody is naturally and spontaneously Good - that is, nobody lives wholly in harmony with God's creation and intentions. Indeed, we don't, any of us, get anywhere near this ideal! (i.e. We are all "sinners", as Jesus said.)

Why should this be? Why is it that - as created Beings dwelling in a wholly-Good-God's creation - we are not wholly-Good? 

My answer is that we ourselves are not wholly created Beings; but are instead eternal Beings who existed from before divine creation; and therefore we are now a mixture of God's creation and our primordial selves. 

Our primordial selves are what make us genuinely free Beings, and also what means that we are not wholly aligned with divine creation.

That we are "mixed" entails that some of what makes us is a "product" of divine creation, and some of what makes us is not.   

Thus we find-ourselves. We know from experience what it is to be in harmony with God's creative will; and we also know otherwise. 

At one level; this finite mortal life is therefore a time of choice; when that which is free in us needs to make a choice whether to affiliate with God's creation... Or not. 

We are what we are; and in terms of God's purpose for our mortal lives, this means that we not meant to be naturally and spontaneously wholly-Good - but to make this choice...

Do we want to commit fully and eternally to live in harmony with God's creation - in which case we choose to follow Jesus Christ to Heaven (that being the method by which such a goal is attained)? 

Or, do we want to disengage from creation; and return to something like the primordial state of isolation, non-communication with other Beings, a state of barely-conscious "beingness"?  

Or, do we choose to oppose God and divine creation... Perhaps because we resent having being co-opted into this scheme in the first place; or because we dislike our presumed role and situation in the scheme of creations, or because the price of choosing Heaven is too great (i.e. we do not want to live forever wholly by love) ... Or for any reason.

That is the choice of this mortal life; and there are no other options. 

A feature of Mankind in these times is that we cannot be made Good unless we are aware of it, and agree to it. 

'Twas not always thus; because in the past Man's consciousness was (to an extent, albeit declining through history) much more shared and pooled (and, to us, dream-like), consciousness was less alienated from The World, less aware, much less divided and personal. 

In that situation, a great deal of our Goodness was absorbed passively from our surrounding situation - much as happens with most children even nowadays.  

In that situation, it was possible to improve people "by stealth" by appealing (in effect) to their "subconscious" mind - by contacting and influencing not-conscious mental processes, that were not subject to voluntary control. 

It was then possible (to some extent) to Make Men Good. 

And this was, indeed, the basis of "Christendom" - of human societies organized on the basis of Christianity - such as those of the Eastern Roman Empire ("Byzantium") or the Roman Catholic nations of Medieval Europe. 

But now, and especially in the West, Men are alienated, cut-off from that spontaneous group-consciousness. 

So there is little or no power in the world now to make people into better people (I mean better in Christian terms - spiritually better, more Good). 

Instead, people must make themselves better, and must do so by conscious choice.

As an example of the ineffectiveness to do good to people; consider The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, which I regard as an exceptionally Good book (Good in terns of its values) - as well as being widely popular. 

Since there is a Good book read by many millions of people, one might suppose that this would mean that LotR is doing Good to some (or many) people. 

But that certainly does not seem to be the case! The evidence is that those who are most engaged with Tolkien's work; whether as readers, official fans, scholar or whatever it might be - are strikingly "normal" (for here-and-now) and mainstream in their expressed sociopolitical views. 

In other words, there is nothing to suggest that reading Lord of the Rings repeatedly, in depth and with avidity; has made any significant difference to their Goodness (by Christian standards). 

Indeed, it is clear that even immersion in Tolkien, is perfectly compatible with living as a cheerful and willing servant of the totalitarian agenda of evil!   

If it was possible to do Good by stealth - then that would be happening with Lord of the Rings! 

But it is not happening - there is no sign of it. Those who benefit from the Goodness of LotR, do so by being consciously open to that Goodness and actively embracing it. 

Otherwise Good is not done. 

This applies generally. Christians cannot change sociopolitical circumstances to Do Good to people. 

However the situation is not symmetrical; and people can be (and are, on a massive scale) be corrupted to greater evil, in a passive and un-conscious way; and there is a truly colossal apparatus of media and bureaucracy that is net-dedicated to exactly this agenda. 

Therefore, as so often (and to quote Lord of the Rings) we cannot use the One Ring to fight Sauron: that is, Christians cannot use the apparatus of propaganda and influencing to pursue a Christian agenda by passive and unconscious inculcation of Good values.

Here-and-now: Men can be "made evil" (only needing passive and unconscious consent); but Men can not be made good. 

And, insofar as this appears to work, and some "Good value" is successfully implanted by stealth; then it will in fact achieve the opposite of Good overall.

Because by encouraging people to be open to and live from external values (of any kind) - to embrace values that they have absorbed passively and unconsciously - creates a mind-set that will be overwhelmed by the far greater quantity and socially compelling influx of external values in support of the Agenda of Evil. 

NOTE ADDED: An extension of this argument is that systems of training or initiation - that used unconsciously to inculcate positive values into such groups as doctors, lawyers, priests and monks - now do no positive Good whatsoever... unless, met with a positive, active, conscious will and decision; on the part of the trainee/ initiate -- such that any specific programme of training/ initiation is rendered inessential or redundant. In other words; we can no longer train people to be better people (but only worse people)... Furthermore; this extends to societies - such that even if it could happen in the West (which it couldn't); a restored "Christendom" would no longer work. 

Why not sin? 

First - we need to get rid of the double-negative theology implicit in "why not sin" and reconceptualise the problem as the positively aspirational: "Why be Good?". 

After all; I understand sin to be any and all departures from the positive situation of living in full harmony with the wholly-loving aims and nature of God's ongoing creation. 

"A sin" is thus any thing - any impulse, thought, action - which does not harmonize with divine love. There are therefore innumerable "sins", and everybody "sins" nearly-all of the time. 

Since sin is best defined in terms of departure from Good; it is clearly much better (positively) to aim at being-Good - rather than (negatively) trying not-to-do not-Good! 

(To get some-place - i.e. heaven - it is insufficient to be told when we stray off the path; we most need to know where we are going, and how to get there!)

For me; the answer to "Why be Good?" is that I desire to live "wholly by Love" - to live in accordance with God's ongoing divine creation - which derives from God's love, and is motivated by love. 

Indeed; anyone who wants Heaven, surely wants to live by love? 

(Else why would he want Heaven forever?) 

Expressed otherwise: Why on earth would anyone who ultimately desired to live eternally in complete accordance with love; not want to do so here-and-now, and all of the time? 

Wanting to live by love is just characteristic of the kind-of-person who wants eternally to dwell in Heaven after death. 

Yet of course we are tempted - over and again, very frequently - to live other-than by full accordance with love: to live out-of-harmony with divine creation, because it is short-term gratifying for us to do so. 

And therefore we often fail to resist these temptations; and we sin for much of the time. 

So we do not, as a matter of fact, resist temptation - and we do instead often choose to live out-of-harmony with divine creation. 

Given that fact; it might be asked: why should we even try to resist temptation? 

Why - since we fail all the time, and will continue to fail - don't we just accept the reality of sin; and sin whenever it is gratifying or convenient?

But I have already answered that question. 

The answer to "Why be Good?" is: 

If I am someone who desires resurrected eternal life in Heaven; then no matter how often and badly I fail to live the Heavenly life during this earthly mortal life - I will never stop repenting my failures, and never cease from trying to live better; simply because a life in harmony with God's loving creation is the life I want, more than I want anything else. 

H/T To David Earle for a comment that helped trigger this post.  

It is striking how often the expressed Christian understanding of Heaven is extremely "minimalist". In other words; the idea is that very little happens in Heaven. 

Furthermore, in such a Heaven we ourselves are simplified (by subtraction of all sin).

Heavenly life is thus described very simply; including discarding almost everything most people might most value in this mortal life; such as family and marriage; and our most cherished creative and other activities. 

Sometimes, indeed, Heavenly life is reduced to the single activity of communion with the divine. 

This sounds, on the face of it, pretty un-appealing - except as a relief and escape from suffering. 

The usual answer to such objections is that we shall ourselves by-then have-been transformed... 

Such that what seems now to be an aetiolated existence; will, when we are actually in that situation, be wholly satisfying; indeed joyful beyond our current possibility of understanding. 

It is probably clear from the above that I - by contrast - regard Heaven in a "maximalist" kind of way; as greatly enriched by more, and continuousness, of broadly the same kind of positive things that are best in this mortal life. 

Thus I regard Heaven as a place of more, and more loving, and everlasting relationships - including family, marriage, friendship; and ultimately loving relationships of other forms with other kinds of ("non-human") resurrected Beings such as animals, plants, and natural elemental Beings. 

And I regard Heaven as a place of "work" - the best kind of work; that work which derives from creative love. 

Which is to say creative work, fulfilling work; work that adds-to, enhances, enriches divine creation. 

But to return to the minimalist view of Heaven - assuming (as I do) that it is indeed mistaken, and apparently rather ineffective as a positive inducement; it is interesting to speculate why it arose? Why might people have decided that Heaven must be minimalist?

I think it is partly hinted above, by the idea that after sin has been stripped-away; not much would remain. 

Maybe also that it is easier to imagine perfection (which is how some people regard Heaven, although I think this is a mistaken emphasis - because implicitly static) if that perfection is simple?

I think there is also a residue of "historical Gnosticism"; by which I mean the pre-existing (among pagan Romans and Greeks) Neo-Platonism that captured mainstream and traditional Christianity (and not just the recognized Gnostic sects). 

This philosophical ideology (permanently) embedded within-itself what might be termed the religion of "Gospel Christianity" by its metaphysical insistence on philosophical concepts as a mandatory framework for Christianity. 

(Such as an infinite gulf between creator and created, strict monotheism (leading to the abstractions of Trinitarianism in order to encompass the divinity of Jesus); creation being from nothing (rather than an organizing of pre-existent chaotic "stuff"), and God and the divine world being "outside of Time". There are more.) 

Other aspects of this pre-Christian philosophy included a belief that the material was innately evil, and the the purely spiritual was therefore the proper aim; and this led to an ascetic ideal that strove to achieve the greatest possible independence from the material body during mortal life; essentially by subtractive disciplines. 

From this perspective, it is natural to regard Heaven minimalistically, and the denizens of Heaven likewise. 

And the assumption that the divine world - in order to be wholly good - must not change; probably led to the deletion of sequential Time from Heaven - such that there was neither need nor possibility of resurrected Men doing anything in Heaven. They would simple "be". 

(Even the doctrine of resurrection after death, which could hardly be ignored; was transformed into an abstracted, spiritualized, "resurrection body" - which body ended by being hardly regarded as material at all - but instead something more like light than everlasting flesh.) 

Of course the minimalist Heaven may include elements of reaction against pagan (and other) understandings of the post-mortal life as simply a continuation and enhancement of this mortal life - with more of our desires fulfilled, and less of the sufferings. 

These are seen as wish-fulfilment merely - and wish-fulfilment is not (by such an analysis) distinguished from selfish day-dreaming fantasies (e.g. imagining post-mortal luxuries of sex, feasting and/or fighting - according to taste). 

It was probably not until the advent of Mormonism from 1830 that an explicitly maximalist understanding of Heaven (more consistent with the Gospels, common-sensically understood - especially the Fourth gospel) was rediscovered and linked with a metaphysical theology. 

This included a focus on marriage and procreation, family life, and co-creative activities in loving cooperation with God the Father - and a "evolutionary" emphasis on divine creation as eternally "ongoing", continuous, eternally being added-to. 

Ultimately, as always, this question of minimalist versus maximalist understanding of Heaven, reduces to a question of personal discernment based on the deepest intuition that we can arrive-at. Having consciously clarified our awareness of the alternatives, we each need to decide which are true possibilities, and which we most desire for our-selves.

**

Note: This post was stimulated by a comment from NLR at the NCP Blog.