Bruce Charlton's Notions

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I will not try to persuade anyone, and it is not a matter of Christian importance - but I personally believe the legends that Jesus came to England in his youth, with Joseph of Arimathea: I just cannot help it, and it gives me great satisfaction!

Not because the evidence is in any way overwhelming - although there is some; but (presumably) partly because I spent my school-days just a few miles from perhaps the main place He is supposed to have visited (Priddy, in the Mendip Hills); and partly because it fits with my general understanding of what seems like the special role of England throughout the history of Christianity (including the role of that Englishman abroad - Joseph Smith).

Anyway - if you are likewise inclined, I have found a very enjoyable and engaging book on this subject for you; a book which collects pretty much all of the legends and stories of Jesus in England: The missing years of Jesus: The extraordinary evidence that Jesus visited the British Isles by Dennis Price.

The idea is that this visit was between the ages of 12 and 30, and was prolonged; but it was not part of Christ's ministry and He did not perform any miracles; but rather He was engaged in some kind of 'work' relating to the metal and stone (tin, perhaps silver, mining and smelting) trade and business interests of Joseph of Arimathea (who is here presumed to be Jesus's uncle).

I need to point-out that this book is not really Christian. I mean it is compatible with Christianity, but does not seem to assume that Jesus was the Son of God. It is written from a New Agey perspective - for instance, the lurid cover has a picture of Stonehenge, which Jesus is presumed to have visited.

Indeed, one thing I liked about this book's speculations was its linkage of Jesus's visit and residence, with the Neolithic monuments, about which I also have off-beat beliefs (i.e. I suspect some of them are relics of a proto-Christian, literate, monotheistic civilization).

Incidentally, Stonehenge (unlike some of the earlier monuments such as Silbury and Avebury) is here interpreted as essentially a demon-and-ghost-haunted place of death: animal sacrifice, and probably human sacrifice. So Jesus's visit is argued to have had the nature of an exorcism and new sanctification.

Aside, there are some good bits of scriptural close reading; for instance, I was convinced by the collection of passages which seem to indicate that Jesus (age thirty-ish, at the time of his ministry) was treated as unfamiliar by many people in the gospels, and was not immediately recognizable even by those neighbours and family who would have been expected to know him (not even to his cousin John the Baptist).

This seems to be there in the text; and is interpreted as evidence that Jesus was absent from Nazareth for many years during which his appearance changed.

Of course it doesn't mean He must have been in England; but He might have been...

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Either things are basically good - or not.

We (each of us) need to decide which - because the evidence is inconclusive.

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What is wanted, and needed, is the kind of confidence in the goodness of ultimate reality as may be found in a loving family or marriage.

Not doubt.

Would we say that doubt in the love or faithfulness of a good mother, father, spouse, child is healthy? No.

Unless there is a reason which can be resolved, then persisting doubt is a sign of psychopathology or error.

There can be not ever in a million years be proof, there is no 100% assurance, of the love or faithfulness of another person.

Doubt feeds on doubt - and indeed (with humans) often leads to its own confirmation.

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We must choose - and indeed if we want a good life, it only makes sense to choose that life is good: God is real and good.

Why not?

...Mostly (and bizarrely) because (we are afraid of making fools of ourselves, being 'duped' - being cuckolded by a sniggering 'fake god', taken to the cleaners, gulled, betrayed and laughed-at as childish, idiotic fools.

(God wants us to be humble -  well, there is humility for you! As much as you want.)

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But so what? Suppose it happened, supposed we made complete fools of ourselves - ultimately we would lose nothing at all. In a world that really was not good, was meaningless, purposeless... then nothing at all would matter- certainly not being a fool.

If we lived a deluded life of happy hope in vain - so what?

Pascal was right, Puddleglum was right, cynicism is a mug's game.

And cynicism's one and only (brief) consolation is the dog-in-the manger trick of trying to turn everybody else into a cynic - to spread the poison of doubt and despair.

(How absolutely maddening it is for the cynic to observe loving carefree joy. The only answer is to destroy that loving carefree joy - to twist it into shame and despair; but even then the mere memory of loving carefree joy is a nagging torment...)

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Invincible hope in the ultimate goodness of reality, and reality of a good and loving God, is as easy as being blissful on a sunny spring morning in a lovely place and some hours of leisure... but consider how often we ruin such times for ourselves by our guilt or angst or grasping?

It is so easy! - so long as you are not worried about appearing a gullible fool (especially not about appearing a gullible fool to yourself!).

When in doubt, give God the benefit of the doubt.

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I have been listening to a droll and informative lecture by Daniel C Peterson, who is a well-known Mormon scholar (and pundit) on the subject of using the internet to promote and defend Mormon Christianity.


He gives a good picture of the scope of the internet, and the new possibilities; balanced by a hard-headed appreciation of the limitations of traditional/ conventional missionary attempts - ringing doorbells, accosting people on the streets.

A few of his suggestions are:

1. Respond to interest, rather than cold-calling, Anyone who comes and asks about Christianity is much more likely to respond than a random individual - who may be annoyed (quite reasonably!) by an approach from a stranger.

2. Don't always be defending against criticism and ridicule; (if asked) sometimes it is better to emphasize the positive - especially if it is personal (explain, honestly, why you personally are Christian - what the faith gives you that you need).

3. The secular world often sees devout Christians as boring people, and Christians unwittingly may exacerbate this by always trying to reassure; therefore it may be better not to hide or downplay, but rather to emphasize upfront the 'strange' aspects of your faith, the supernatural, the distinctive etc.

4. Practice Triage - because your time and efforts are finite. Some people don't need apologetics and with other people it is a waste of time because they are not serious or not ready or have malign intentions. Direct your efforts where they are most needed and most effective.


This point about triage struck a chord, because I often see blog commenters who are, I believe, deliberately wasting the finite time of Christian bloggers (i.e. 'trolling') - and in the process making the comments section repulsive and inhospitable to those who might benefit from it.

This kind of thing may be a calculated anti-Christian strategy - and it is really quite common. I have also seen it in 'real life' as well as the internet. 

The answer is straightforward - don't let trolls dissipate your finite time and effort, and don't let trolling spoil the pro-Christian environment you are trying to create; don't let those who are (currently) beyond help, prevent your encouraging and helping those who might most benefit.  

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Make a judgement - and if you believe that trolling is afoot, ban them from the venue!

You may get it wrong, but the failure to triage swiftly and effectively may be much more serious than an error in triage.

Of course 'trolls have souls'  - but a ban might well be good for them! It is not helpful if Christians always behave like gullible idiots - and acts of insightful, realistic, tough-mindedness from Christians may sometimes be the most effective 'argument'. 

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http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/review-of-fellowship-literary-lives-of.html
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It struck me suddenly that God must have direct knowledge of reality, of truth, with no possibility of error - and that was perhaps the primary reason that He is God.

This may be what sets God the Father altogether apart and unique - His direct knowledge.

Of course, to us, the mechanism of direct knowledge is inexplicable - since any mechanism implies mediation which implies a possibility of error. So we must (it seems) think of direct knowledge as having no mechanism, but simply being... direct.

And the reason why God has this knowledge is one of those things that could not have a justification - it is one of those things that is primary and can only be assumed: It Just Is The Case that our Heavenly Father has direct knowledge.

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But then I remembered that we are His children, and our destiny is to become like Him; and that He has put something of Himself into each of us.

That something divine given-us must (it seems) include a capacity for direct knowledge without possibility of error.

Our capacity for direct knowledge is real; and it derives from God - which is its only possible source. 

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Why then are we so often wrong? Why is it that our knowledge so often seems like nothing but 'theories'?

Simply because we are grossly immature.

Our true knowledge is there but embryonic, overlain and distorted - sometimes it is inaccessible. When we try to state it, our statements are always incomplete and unsatisfactory.

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But all that is to be expected.

We are here - living mortal life - partly to choose-to, strive-to discover and grow our God-given capacity for direct knowledge.

Aside from the New Age/ Psychotherapeutic cant - we really do need to 'find ourselves', we really do need 'personal development' that can only come from our own decisions and efforts - but we should know that this finding and developing is actually a God-given, divine destiny.

This feels like a satisfying answer to (and way-out-from) the endless self-torture of epistemology, the philosophical search for knowledge about knowledge, for truth without possibility of error.

Hopeful, even optimistic - yet realistic. 

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Leadership is a rare trait - but it can confidently be identified; not least because we are 'programmed' to recognise and respond to leadership.

But, most appointed modern leaders are not leaders; indeed very few indeed are leaders - most are mediocre middle managers over-promoted by committees comprising the same type - and most of the rest are hysterics or psychopaths.

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The 'safe choice' nowadays - in a bureaucracy-dominated world - is for mediocre middle managers in committees to over-promote a mediocre middle manager into a leadership position.

This accounts for the majority of the national leaders in the West, including leaders of most major religious denominations, and social systems such as law, education, the police.

These are people who cannot be strategic (but adopt their strategies from others - even paying to have a strategy artificially manufactured by the phony posturings of management consultants, if no other source suggests itself); who cannot decide without a procedure to follow; who cannot take responsibility on themselves.

These are fake leaders who fundamentally can only be led; and who therefore engineer their jobs on the principle of 'teams' and 'teamwork', and 'team-building'; so that they are always following advice and seeking endorsement.

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We now live in a  world of mutually-interacting middle managers; of followers leading followers, the directionless leading the directionless; of arbitrary meta-procedures generating arbitrary micro-procedures validated by arbitrary committees of arbitrary 'experts'.

It is a world of management-speak, slogans, mission statements, targets, audits - all of which fail to disguise a total lack of leadership based upon an unchangeable psychological inadequacy.

Because, if you are not a leader, then you cannot lead.

For instance, nothing can be done to make the current Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury into real leaders - they are not leaders but middle managers; they never can be leaders and never will be leaders. Hype and spin do not affect the facts.

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We can see this in sport - including my favourite sport of cricket - because sport is one of the few areas of modern life where real leadership still exists; and where real leaders sometimes get appointed to leadership positions.

England have had two real leaders as national cricket coach recently: Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower (both from Rhodesia, interestingly). In between they had Peter Moores who was an over-promoted middle manager, who was sacked after about a year. Then Moores was re-appointed after Flowers, and Moores has just been sacked after a year, on the excuse of poor results.

In reality, Moores was sacked for the second time because the incoming Andrew Strauss was a successful test cricket captain, and a real leader; and Strauss knows for certain and from personal experience (being 'led' by him) that Moores is just an over-promoted middle manager and cannot ever lead.

Since nothing can be done about what Moores is, he must be got-rid-of regardless of short-term results or insufficient time in the job; simply because he should never have been appointed in the first, or second, place.

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Moores cannot help not being a leader, and I always felt sorry for him as someone so obviously out of his depth. Nonetheless Moores was wrong to take-on the job, and double-plus-alpha wrong to do it a second time, when he knew for sure that he as incapable of doing leading.

The sin of the over-promoted middle manager is not in failing to be a leader - that cannot be helped; but in failing to be honest about the fact that his is not a leader, and seeking and accepting a leadership position nonetheless.

It is for this, and for the consequent damage they inevitably do to their organisations, that I blame the current crop of mediocre middle management non-leaders such as Archbishop Justin Welby or his predecessor Rowan Williams; David Cameron or his predecessor Gordon Brown.

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But not all modern leaders are middle managers.

When the leaders are 'diversity hires' they are often hysterics (female or male) of the 'it's all about me' variety. For hysterics the job, any job, becomes a schoolgirl psychodrama, a popularity contest about how the leader thinks other people are treating the leader: are they respecting, are they being mean?

This is sometimes called narcissism but that is the wrong name - it is a form of hysteria or histrionics. As the name implies; the leader is an actor, and he perceives the organisation as a performance in which he plays the leading role.

The hysterical leader is not in the job for money, or power, or perks - but for the status. He wants to be admired, loved, he wants adulation - therefore the hysteric tends to surround himself with mediocrities. The hysteric may therefore be loyal to subordinates. So long as they flatter and worship him uncritically; then he will be happy with their performance.

Of course, hysterics inflict terrible damage when made leaders, because they do not care anything about the organisation they lead - the organisation is merely a means to the end of their own glorification.

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And some modern leaders are psychopaths - these are the leaders who exploit the organisation for personal gain: for money, power, sexual favours, for the pleasure of tormenting others, to settle old scores... for whatever they most want. Many gang leaders are psychopaths; and psychopaths quite often get into leadership positions in modern society because mediocre middle managers are often impressed by the psychopath's total self-belief and 'dynamism'.

Once in a leadership position, psychopaths engage in fraud and corruption, terrorism and blackmail, flattery and bribery, rule-breaking and making, jury-rigging and gerrymandering... they will do pretty-,much anything which seems expedient in achieving short term goals, and if they believe they can get away with it.

Anger is seldom far from the surface. The psychopath wants to be surrounded by strong allies, not mediocrities - but he will always turn against them (sooner or later). The psychopath is always 'paranoid' and believes he is being persecuted, plotted- and schemed-against (because nothing is ever his fault, and conspiracies explain his failures).

A psychopath may be gifted at telling people what they want to hear - but the psychopath is ruthless, heartless, impulsive, aggressive - his morality is merely a convenient (and therefore labile) rationalisation for his own gratification.

A psychopath in a leadership position is probably even more destructive than an hysteric; because the psychopath will deliberately destroy the organisation he leads, partially or completely, if or when he beliefs this will benefit him in some way that he values.

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Therefore, when choosing leaders for an organisation or institution or nation which actually requires leadership; it is important to choose a leader.

A leader might in practise do a good or bad job of leading, but a non-leader will always do a bad job because he can only do a bad job.
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There is really no necessity for Christians to be concerned with the ultimate (i.e. metaphysical) nature of Time; but they often have been, especially when wanting to think or talk about eternity.

(Eternity might be thought of as time from God's perspective; or time as it really is.)

There seem to be two options - either to regard eternity as something different from earthly mortal time, or as something essentially similar to earthly mortal time (and which transcends or contains earthly mortal time).

Earthly time is linear and sequential change; so if divine eternity is different from it, then eternity is seen as simultaneous rather than sequential, and about the absence of change.

But Christianity is all about change - not least because love entails change; or, at least, love is dynamic and sequential if it is accepted that relationships are the key metaphor for Christianity (God as Father, Jesus and ourselves as Sons of God; the primary commandments being love of God and neighbour; the Apostle John's definition that God is love - and so on).

So, if it is decided that ultimate, divine reality is simultaneous and static, then the core metaphor of Christianity is demolished; Eternal Heaven cannot be imagined as a place of ultimate love if Heaven experiences no real change.

Yet, if we regard divine time as being, like earthly mortal time, a matter of linear change - then there are problems of another kind. The idea of reality as un-endingly changing, or evolving forever, with no end-point and no cyclical recurrence, is pretty-much as alien to human nature and common sense as the idea of unchanging simultaneity.

The difficulty of squaring Christianity with eternal evolution and time as linear and sequential is that change is destruction, as well as building. How can things change forever without end or ending, without destroying everything sooner-or-later? It becomes hard to imagine that eternal change really is eternal progress; because here on earth our experience of perpetual change is usually destructive of meaning and purpose and associated with inversion of values - as with the senseless round of styles and fashions, or the existential horror of 'perpetual revolution'.

So, in my opinion, while I tend towards the idea of Heavenly Eternity being of the same general nature as earthly time (i.e. I believe that all time entails linear sequential evolutionary change) neither of the metaphysical concepts of time are really satisfactory from a Christian perspective; both can answer one set of questions only to generate a further set of questions; both will - if taken to be axiomatic and followed through - tend to dismantle Christian revelations concerning the primary nature and purpose of reality.

The only answer I can come-up-with - which is more of a change of subject than an answer - is that if we accept relationship as the primary metaphor given us by revelation; then the model for eternity is one of families and their generations in a progressing situation of ever-more, open-ended, increase in quantity and quality and complex interaction of loving relationships.

In other words the universe of reality is an ever enlarging and ever more extended family and family of families; and what binds them and gives primary meaning is loving relationships as they emerge, grow, interact through time. Nothing repeats, complexity grows, direction and objective progress come from the absolute and unchanging nature of love.

Reality begins without love, and love increases through time, and this process is eternal in the sense that we cannot imagine any point at which it must (or should) stop - so long as increase of generations continues, and each individual chooses to live by love, then there is always scope for more love than currently exists, and new configurations of love.

So eternity is seen from the inside, from the perspective of individual consciousness (whether human or fully divine in God) as the absence of an absolute limitation on the increase of love; rather than as if from standing outside of reality, from which stance eternity seems like a containing and limiting and static sphere.
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Note added: I just found quoted a passage from CS Lewis in The Allegory of Love which says (albeit about something else!) what I was trying to say about our experience of eternity: [Man] does not through phases as a train passes through a station: being alive [Men have] the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. That is what, somehow, our understanding of Time must encapsulate. Lewis tried to explain how nothing is lost from the perspective of static simultaneity - which is somehow also experienced as open-endedly dynamic; I would try to explain it from the perspective of unending linear sequentiality which is somehow also able to achieve permanence. Lewis's Platonism views things from an imaginary stance outside the train; mine from the imaginary perspective that there is no outside and all is seen from within the carriage. But 'somehow' 'always moving but never leaving anything behind' is what must be explained...

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http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/visual-hallucinations-imply-whole-brain.html
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Why is it that the Left has focused on ever smaller and smaller issues, until now the Left is exercised by issues so tiny that they are acknowledged as 'micro', as in the phenomenon of micro-aggression? - The prefix micro confessing itself to be 'one millionth of' a significant aggression.

This attention on ever more trivial issues is no accident, but because the position of the Left is so very precarious.

As the Left has triumphed ever-more-completely over Western culture, the conflict with what is spontaneous, natural and intuitive gets ever-more-extreme.

At any moment the whole elaborate and artificial, carefully and incrementally built-up edifice of Leftism in a particular person can collapse - years of deception, falsehood, the product of vast and intricate propaganda, manipulations and bureaucratic pressure... since it is ever more false, ugly and gut-level wicked it is terribly, terribly vulnerable - the slightest crack in the façade may propagate to and crumble.

Hence nothing is too small, too trivial, too insignificant to let pass - every slightest transgression needs to be stamped-on; the terror must be maintained, nobody of significance can be seen to get away with anything!

This is where thought crime comes in. Any stray word, fleeting facial expression, small inappropriate gesture, any omission of piety, is evidence of impure thoughts which must be stopped and punished because who knows where they will lead?

So far, the edifice remains in place, because of the ever vaster and more pervasive power of the addictive media. But the media must keep growing, the detection of dissent must be ever-more thorough, the sanctions ever more disproportionate to the infractions.

Because in spiritual warfare the odds are stacked in favour of God and salvation, and against the devil and damnation; as the tempter demon Screwtape openly acknowledges in CS Lewis's book. There can be repentance and acknowledgement of Christ at any time up to the last moment of mortal life, and indeed somewhat beyond.  

Having said all this - the world as it is now, in the West, under the influence of the mass media - is probably the most hazardous for souls that it ever has been in the history of the world; because never has the inversion of Good been so thorough and so powerfully propagated.

Nonetheless, it is important that we don't forget the weakness of the enemy; and recall that the thoroughness of modern thought-control as it moves into micro-aggression (and beyond into nano-aggressions?) is evidence of the extreme fragility of Leftism - not of its robustness, nor of its resilience.

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Apparently, this blog passed two million page views some time overnight - an extra half million since last August when I last announced the numbers.

This seems like quite a lot. But this total is for 3252 posts accumulating over the past five years, and there is a plateau/ slight decline in monthly views and the average impact of new postings; so my impression is still one of gradual decline.

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It is now five years since I was sacked from the editorship of Medical Hypotheses, and I began daily blogging.

Since then, the blog has spun-off three small books, and launched the information that simple reaction times (hence general intelligence) has declined substantially since the Victorian era.

But my main work and justification has been to make a daily Christian resource to encourage and help potential Christians 'across the line' into self-declared faith.

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During five years my own Christian preferences and focus have changed more than once (although mainly in the early era, and not much over the past two and a half years); and this has been due to the same factors that I deal with in my postings - i.e. confronting some of the specific and personal stumbling blocks to faith, and inconsistencies within the faith, to try and reveal and simple and coherent core to Christianity.

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My belief is that Christianity ought to be understood as simple and coherent enough to satisfy and self-motivate simple people (including children) in a common sense fashion; and when explanations get complex and paradoxical, I think we have probably strayed and are in danger of paralysis.

However, at the same time we must accept that any simple and coherent explanation will certainly be incomplete and biased compared with reality (in fact this also applies to even the most complex and paradoxical explanation - compared with the incomparably greater complexity of reality) - but the point is that the most important aspects should be coherent, and the simple core should be the best possible basis for a Christian life.

My hope is that this will help people to be strong in their faith; since a Christianity which has a significantly sub-optimal focus, or is not readily comprehended by everyday reason, seems likely to be weaker and less effective as guidance - this is perhaps why professional theologians seem so often to have done more harm than good (especially to themselves).

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My main social theme, running throughout five years, has probably been motivation: the belief that mass demotivation (as a result of alienation, nihilism, despair...) is perhaps the primary psychological problem in modern society, the major deficiency-state; a conviction that only a religion can motivate sufficiently; and that only some among religions, and only some types of Christianity, motivate sufficiently and in the proper direction.

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The psychological end (or aim) of my theorizing is motivation; but as with all difficult situations thing have to get worse before they can get better. And it is the daily, moment by moment, micro-motivations which get people through the day that become the addictions which destroy us and our society - I mean the obsessions and addictions to the mass media, to sex, to mortal earthly status.

I regard man as living in the End Times because our situation is unique in world history, and there is no pendulum swing we can depend upon-to correct the potentially fatal problems - we are in a positive-feedback state where errors are not self-correcting, but instead error leads on to more error of the same kind.

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The problems of modernity are well known, and have been described for more than two hundred years; yet thanks to progressive Christian apostasy nothing effective has been done to address them, and people are mostly paralysed by the situation - with a small but influential minority actively making things worse. 

The root of the modern problem must therefore be spiritual warfare, purposive supernatural evil - where evil is defined and conceptualized as destruction of The Good - destruction of truth, beauty and virtue in harmony.

We inhabit a world where Goodness has been inverted to a truly extraordinary degree - nowhere is this seen more clearly than the sexual revolution: that battering-ram of modern evil.

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In a world of deadly, soul-sapping, demotivating bureaucracy - where most people are themselves bureaucrats - sex masquerades as Life, Life as Freedom, and Freedom as transgression and inversion.

Sex has been detached from The Good, marriage and family elaborately re-defined as oppression; sexual transgression, inversion (and recently disease) are relabelled 'tolerance & diversity' and promoted - zealously, aggressively, with fanaticism - as The New Virtue.

Due to the scope and reach of the mass media, very few are unaffected, or significantly undamaged, by this; there is confusion, paralysis, zombie-obedience; the forces of darkness are winning.

That is what I mean by End Times. 

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But, thank Heavens, the odds are stacked in our favour!

This world is temporary, and in the context of eternity - thanks to the work of Christ, and with His help - each one of us without any exceptions can (if we wish) withstand everything that the combined forces of darkness can throw at us - and emerge triumphant.

So, although there is every reason for pessimism, there is no reason for despair - but rather invincible hope should lend us indomitable courage.

And there can be no problem with a Christian finding motivations for action in such a world as we currently inhabit!

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First Letter of John: 

2: My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: ² and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world...

4: ⁷ Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. ⁸ He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. ⁹ In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. ¹⁰ Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

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There is an apparent incompatibility between the Gospel message that God is love - especially prominent in John's Gospel and the first Epistle; and the idea that God is the kind of deity who requires propitiatory sacrifice.  

A propitiation is an act done to appease or win favour from a god - and therefore to regard the death of Jesus as a propitiation seemingly flies in the face of the understanding of the true nature of God as revealed by the teaching and life of Jesus. 

The Christian response to this surface paradox has been various - but one response has been to make the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ into something resembling the focal point of the whole religion - so that the most-emphasized teaching becomes the assertion that God needed propitiation by an ultimate sacrifice of His own perfect Son - and that after that had been done, the decks were cleared for Him to be a God of Love. 

The key question about Christ as propitiation was whether propitiation was something demanded by God, or something demanded by Men. 

Is the need for propitiation a divine characteristic, or a sub-divine (human) characteristic? 

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The answer comes from contrasting the core of Christianity being love, with the (occasional) use of a language of sacrifice and propitiation as an explanation. 

It seems clear to me that the concept of a necessity for propitiation is a pre-Christian (anti-Christian) one - the use of propitiation to (try to) manipulate divinity is apparently something natural and spontaneous in Men, but it is multiply-contradicted and explicitly-superseded by the teachings and revelations of Christ. 

My understanding is that the language of sacrifice and propitiation was being used about Jesus (and quantitatively, it was not used this way very much in the New Testament, and even less in the Gospels) purely as a concession to the imperfect state of Men's understanding and motivation. 

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In effect, the intended message was along the lines of:

If you insist upon regarding me as the kind of God who demands propitiation by sacrifices; then please assume that the death of Jesus was sufficient sacrifice and that I have now been propitiated once-for-all. 

So, please forget about that stuff, if you can; and please stop organizing your religion around the need for propitiation!

The things I want you to focus-upon is that I am your perfectly-loving Father. To understand what I want from you, and how I want you to behave; all you need to do is imagine yourself a perfectly loving parent, and consider what you most hope for from your children in terms of attitudes, motivations, behaviours... 

Then you may gradually come to realize the absurdity, the gross misunderstanding, of supposing that I would ever want to be, or allow myself to be, mollified and manipulated by sacrifices; whether personal, animal, human or divine. 

Of course I understand and forgive that you may fall-into such behaviours, even from the best of intentions; but please, please, please do not suppose that I demand or respond-to a religion based-upon propitiation, or that propitiation is what I most want from you. 

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Every election has a bad result, of course, since the process is bad - so that even if the result happened to be good, then because it had been reached in a bad way the outcome would do harm.

The striking thing about this UK general election was that it was wildly un-predicted, surprised everybody. That fact ought to be pondered. How can an election surprise everybody (as elections so often do)?

If an election leads to a grossly un-predicted outcome, what does that tell us about the validity of the election?

How would we ever know that the election was valid, when the results are grossly surprising to everybody?

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The answer is that the election result is pre-defined as valid - and as soon as the result was clear, the pundits explained what the election meant, why it was 'inevitable' (whereas 12 hours earlier they could not explain). 

All the while the obvious and true explanation is ignored; that the election was unpredictable because it is the mathematical outcome of an arbitrary and extremely complex multiplicity of factors - the total vote being massively subdivided by constituency and party, then variously summed, and each person's vote de facto weighted differently by size of constituency, size of majority, number of parties, tactical voting etc.

Another factor affecting the election is ever-increasing amounts of dishonesty, more with each cycle; but varying by location. In elections, as with all of UK official life, bureaucratic systems have been incrementally changed to make cheating easier.

Why? It is consistent with us being encouraged to lie compulsorily and habitually - for the harm of our souls. (Ultimately, the Left is about destruction of The Good.) Also, at any time, officials can temporarily pretend to be honest and then get rid of anybody they don't like, on the grounds that the victim has indeed (like everybody) been corrupt.

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With elections we buy a pig in a poke - we go through an extraordinary rigmarole of casting votes which are collected and counted in inconsistent groupings, dividing the votes variably by constituencies and parties, adding them and adding the results of these additions by other and different subdivisions... and in the end we are supposed to regard the outcome of this weird mathematical exercise as morally-binding, and indeed as a mandate for the winning party!

In effect, we have the results of a lottery being accorded moral force - but not a pure lottery; instead a lottery with so many biases and so much unmeasured and unquantifiable cheating and bribery and fixing going-on, that it lacks even the mathematical purity of a genuine lottery.

A lottery, then, that is non-random - the unpredictable, quasi-random outcome of multiply interacting non-linear biases...

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What deep, incalulable harm it does to each of us, to have such a rigmarole placed at the centre of national life and regarded as sacred!

My guess is that such a gross violation of responsibility and decency as this last election, is regarded by the forces of darkness as a vital, underpinning factor in the long-term strategy for erosion of plain morality; and its replacement with the ever-purer insanity of Leftist political correctness.

Because, whoever specifically is deemed the 'winner' of any modern election, the outcome is pre-ordained in that all participants are advocates of Leftist political correctness. All modern mainstream politics is extremely Leftist by world historical standards.

So, the UK General Election was therefore a non-random lottery between politically correct Leftist alternatives.

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With each general election the Left wins twice:

1. The Left always wins the election, because the election is between flavours of Leftism.

2. The fact and process of the election is itself a Leftist victory - a victory against responsibility, common sense and personal experience.

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The arts (and some other phenomena) come in two basic types which affect the imagination differently.

Some of the arts are like an alternative, virtual reality - they take the mind and draw it through an experience of stimuli and emotions. For example, cinema is of this type - the movie-goer is taken-into the world of the movie and moved-through the experiences.

Other arts of this type include theatre and opera, and most primitively the narrative song.

Such an experience does not allow, is not intended to allow, much space or scope for self-awareness or freedom - the ideal is an immersion in the sub-world of the art.

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But there are other kinds of art which allow space for the participant to become self-aware, aware of his own agency - these arts demand the use of imagination.

For example, the written poem - which historically was abstracted from a performed song, has a quite different effect on the imagination; relying far more on the reader than does the song on the listener. The written poem may be delayed, paused, re-read in part or in whole, in written sequence or any other sequence...

It seems that Shakespeare only became recognized as a great imaginative poetic writer (in the eighteenth century) when his plays were printed and read (indeed, the translation into German seems to have been a vital step in his recognition); this greatness was (presumably) not apparent when the plays were seen only in performance, because the audience were simply drawn-into the play, and experienced it as an alternative world in real time.

The novel, invented by Samuel Richardson with Pamela in the middle eighteenth century - was a major technical breakthrough in stimulating sustained activity of the imagination. On the one hand the novel provides considerable structure and guidance for the reader, on the other hand there is a necessity for the reader to provide a great deal from his imagination (e.g. character and setting visualizations, the 'acting' of the participants, much of the motivation and emotional responses).

In sum, the novel could be summarized as a play or movie that has been 'realized' by the novel-reader - who must take on roles of producer, actors, director, scene painter, costumier, editor etc.

Furthermore, compared with a play, the novel reader is in world 'out of time'; the play-watcher is necessarily drawn-through the play at the rate and pace of the performance - his mind filled throughout; but the novel reader proceeds at whatever pace he feels - and may pause or break away for any period, think and imagine, and then resume.

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Some music provides scope for imagination, space for the autonomous mind to know itself; but other music - especially songs and operas - take-over the mind, and draw it through a particular sequence, and at a set pace.

So, listening to instrumental music by JS Bach may provide a context for self-awareness of the autonomous soul; while attendance at Das Rhinegold by Wagner at Bayreuth would hope to be an immersive and overwhelming experience, a living of the world being depicted.

Some music (Debussy and Delius spring to mind) is very obviously designed as a background-tapestry for contemplation (or, in a more debased fashion, as mood or ambient music.) But other music is designed to overwhelm us, to control us, to compel us to recapitulate a fixed linear experience - outwith of vocal music, this was more a feature of later classical music, such as the 'late romantic' symphonies of Mahler or Bruckner or Tone Poems of Richard Strauss.

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This distinction applies to some church services as well. (Bearing in mind that some church services are not intended to be emotional or imaginative experiences, but function at a much more low key and matter-of-fact level.)

Some services take the participant through a particular set sequence of experiences and emotions which (more or less) 'fill the mind'. A successful Anglican liturgy is more or less of this type - and the effect of great language (from the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorized Version of the Bible)can be emotionally as overwhelming as any opera or symphony. But there is not much space for the imagination - nor is there intended to be.

At the other extreme was an experience of a full-on Greek Orthodox service on the island of Tinos back in 1978. I could not understand the language, and the meaning of the service was seen only in the very slow changes of visual theme (also, I was not a Christian then). But the service provided a backdrop or 'tapestry' of consisting of sonorous male-vice chanting, rich clothing and objects, ritual movement and music...

I experienced this as a sustaining context for a high level of awareness and the knowledge of freedom, with scope for the free imagination to work-within.

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Another way to think of this is that some (but not all) arts have (when they are working properly) the ability to wake us up!

It is this feeling of 'coming-to' in the world - when we have previously been 'asleep' or non-conscious.

This can be regarded as an emergence of the real self, coming out from behind the false/ phony/ social/ mass media or 'robot' self of trained/ instinctive/ automatic responses.

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The activation of the imagination (the real self) is certainly not confined to 'arts' - but can (and indeed should) be a feature of philosophy (in the board sense of the word - also including theology).

Real philosophy is of this type - and this explains why real philosophy is something that happens essentially in solitude, during reflection - not in company, not during teaching, and only seldom during discussion (when attention is usually grabbed, and the mind is usually filled, by the social context).

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My thesis here is that:

1. There is a need for stimulation of the imagination, because adult modern man is nearly always starting from a situation of alienation - and imagination is the destined cure.

2. Imagination needs structure, but it also need space.

3. Overwhelming experiences, immersive experiences (drama, movies, TV, etc)... these may be mistaken for imagination-stimulating, but they essentially keep-out the imagination. This is important! because sometimes they feel like imagination; and in a sense they are... but this is somebody else's imagination!

3. Imagination is more often about reading (in solitude), and landscape, and brooding-meditation and the like; in a nutshell, imagination is usually a start-stop business.

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In criticizing utilitarianism (or a hedonic calculus) as the primary way of considering life, I have usually focused on the problem of dealing with conflicts between short-term and individual (or small scale) happiness and long-term (or societal) happiness - and also the theoretical and practical difficulties of measuring and summating happiness.

But another problem is that happiness is conceptualized as an outcome - do this and you will become happy - and therefore to aim at happiness seems to require a great deal of precise empirical knowledge of the cause and effect set-up of the world.

In other words, to be maximally happy, you need to know exactly what will make you happy - you need to know the causes that will have the effect of happiness.

So happiness as a goal becomes a kind of 'science' of learning about, and implementing, the causes of happiness. Indeed, 'implementing' is the key word - once the causes of happiness are known, then morality becomes a matter of applying those causes.

If soma makes people happy, then it becomes a moral duty to administer soma to people. The aim of life becomes ensuring that everybody has soma.

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For the Christian, the main aim of life is love - love of God and 'neighbour' (ie. other people). Is love an outcome, like  happiness? Is love the kind of thing that is a consequence of doing other kinds of thing?

No, love is not that kind of thing. Love is - to a significant extent- a cause; something that affects what we do.

A loving parent is a different kind of cause than a hating parent; a leader who loves his country is a different kind of cause than a leader who despises his country.

Love is both a cause and an effect - Christians are told to add love to the world, and that more love is the hoped for outcome.

To have love as the primary goal in life does not require any empirical knowledge of cause and effect relationships in life; we can love, we can wish to love - to have love as the primary idea we do not need to do research, do not need to make discoveries about how things work.

Love makes sense as the main goal in life; it is something we can understand; it is just very difficult to attain.

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The Left versus Right political discourse is a snare.

Of course, Left and Right is a nonsensical distinction in the contemporary world. In The West all mainstream political parties, and nearly-all of the fringe, are on the Left!

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Politics is on The Left because its principles are secular - which is to say we have a God-excluding politics, a politics 'built-upon' some kind of utilitarian (pleasure-pain) calculus.

(Except that it is impossible truly to 'build' upon utilitarianism, so instead we get long-term destruction.)

The only real alternatives are The Left (ie. all mainstream politics/ media), or Religion (ie. The Right that does not exist).

Not Left versus Right; instead, (secular) Left versus Religion.

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Society is either secular - based on evanescent psychological expediencies; or else society is based on religion - and ultimately, overall, in the long run, aiming to run things in a way satisfactory to divinity.

The primary choice that is not-Left is therefore "which religion?" That question is the basis of real politics - now extinct.

(For the modern West there are only two viable religious choices, of which Christianity is currently the one less likely to prevail.)

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Government is properly just a means to an end. The big question should be 'what end?'

In our secular, increasingly anti-Christian world, the problem is that our 'end' - our aim - is wrong. Ultimately, Western people (en masse) do not know what are the right things to do.

But because public discourse excludes/ rejects Christianity; from a Christian perspective (which is where I stand) we are not even trying to do the right things.

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We do not have 'good intentions' that are thwarted by available political options - quite the contrary: in The West we are actively trying to pursue wrong goals and to live by wrong ideas. The big problem as we stand now is not the politics but the people; the people are corrupt, cowardly, pleasure seeking, trivial.

From where we currently stand, nothing Good can happen until after the people (en masse) recognize their appalling, evil-seeking, destructive spiritual state; and repent.

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Nowadays, in an increasingly-corrupt world of mostly-corrupt people aiming at ever more corruption; political analysis and discussion is therefore only of value when it leads to a consideration of ultimate goals - asking what, overall, are we trying to achieve'; what, overall, is our society aiming-at? And does that make sense: And is it Good?

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One of the fall-outs from my being sacked from the Medical Hypotheses editorship five years ago was a clarification of the wrongness of voting and a resolution not to vote, and to avoid (as far as I can) participation in voting.

Voting is a corrupting process - and for me the corruption is palpable. It feels like giving a sworn public endorsement to someone I know to be an evil liar.

The fact that it is futile is the least of its problems; the worst of it is the tacit agreement that voting is how things should be done, how decisions should be made - this 'should' being focused upon an arbitrary mechanical process which destroys moral responsibility.

Worse than this - voting has usurped responsibility; so that now it is abstract, impersonal voting and calculation which is seen as responsible and a person's judgement which is seen as arbitrary. The brutal, orthogonal senselessness of it is what first stuns then paralyses the will, drains the ability - even the desire - to evaluate....

To participate in the vote, to acknowledge the result, to live by the outcome... is vile. To say this is good: to say it is the best! - is to wallow in vileness.

Voting is, literally, un-loveable - and life ought to be about love.

We can only love persons, and obedience is properly due only to persons who love us.

Among mortal men this will be at best an imperfect, a defective, mixed, partial striving after the unattainable reality of leaders who love and care for us like ideal parents, like God. We should aim for that, in ideal and in practice, and not routinely violate even the possibility of love with meaning-annihilative exercises of voting.

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I posted on this wonderful folk song a few years ago -

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/come-all-you-little-streamers.html

- but now it is available on YouTube in a version which I really love - sung by Shirley Collins and accompanied by The Etchingham Steam Band - Ian Holder - accordion; Terry Potter - harmonica; Ashley Hutchings - acoustic bass guitar - and Shirley Collins adds a Hobby Horse with bells to the jig at the end.
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As a small child, my favourite outing was to the beach. I lived in south Devon, which was full of beaches - indeed this delightful, undeveloped little beach was within walking distance of our house:


But, more often than not, we would get in a car or two (if there were visitors or family friends) and visit one of the main beaches within a few miles radius; and all-too-often that beach was the dreaded Babbacombe, which had pebbles not sand.

This seemed to me a terrible waste of time. A pebbly beach was a fake beach, so far as I was concerned.

If you are going to bother to get in the car and go to a beach, why not go to a real beach, with real sand?

Especially one with fine white sand, like Dawlish:


Dawlish was the ideal - but a bit far for everyday usage - however, nearby Teignmouth (pronounced Tinmuth) was a good compromise, with its coarse, reddish sand:


But Babbacombe was a miserable place - the warmer the day, the more miserable it was.

Memories of sitting on uncomfortable pebbles, the agonies of walking barefoot on roasting-hot pebbles, avoiding the inevitably-present lumps of crude oil and dog's muck hidden among the pebbles...

Trying to bathe when the beach shelved too steeply and there was a scary undertow; and worst of all - no sandcastles, no water channel construction, no burying yourself or your sister or father...

Babbacombe pebbly beach - for a young kid, it was worse than no beach at all:


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Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=KJV

In this world, and a mortal life; ultimately all is 'vanity': futility - evanescent and insubstantial as a mist, vapour, or breath upon cold air.

And from this there is no honest escape, and despair is the only honest reaction. To ask a Man to be satisfied with this life, to 'make the best' of this life, to 'count his blessings' and then to be content... is a counsel of despair – bleak, nihilistic, hope-less.

Unless there is more, unless there is something beyond this life, and something different and better in kind – then once we have raised the question of value we truly have no grounds for hope.

This is why secular self-help has the cumulative effect either of evasiveness and spin – or else induces a deepening despair.

The choice is stark: vanity or hope. Which of the two it is to be? This is a matter that should ultimately depend on what you most-deeply believe is true.  (The advice of others will not suffice.)

If religion, strictly Christianity or something like it, is truly-false; then we must (because there is no alternative) live either without hope or with only a delusion of hope (and these amount to the same thing, in the end); subsist as best we may and by arbitrary, fleeting criteria.

If it is true, then (potentially) everything is changed, the world transformed; because hope is real.

Conviction cannot come from reason or evidence - at most it can be consistent with these. Conviction can only come from the heart, from deep within, from a primary understanding of the issue as a stark, existential dichotomy; and from a primary decision, a primary unforced-choice that is also an insight - knowledge of what is true, what is real.

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Continued from an earlier review of volumes 1 & 2:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/colin-wilson-spider-world-tower-spider.html

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I have now finished the final two instalments of Colin Wilson's four volume Spider World fantasy novel and am pleased to report that I found the quartet to be extremely good, both edifying and enjoyable.

I was especially impressed by the last volume - Shadowland - which had that rarest of things in a long book: a satisfying ending to round-out the whole thing!

En route, the book was a really gripping study of different types of consciousness (as exemplified by the various races inhabiting this world) -  these are mainly novels of psychology, and in particular exploratory of the highest or furthest or strangest kinds of consciousness (ecstatic, concentrated, sensitive, animistic etc.).

The Spider World books are, in my opinion, among the very best of Colin Wilson's books; and among the best fantasy books I have read.

They definitely deserve to be far better known - and indeed, in the first instance, Shadowland needs to be republished, since it is current (seemingly) available only in very expensive second-hand versions, or in Russian!
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