The Invisible, Uncreated world of Being, Makes More Sense than the Material World of Becoming

Plato, Kant, Thomas, Augustine, and Jesus all posited a (post) hellenic worldview whereby behind everything in the physical world, there existed ideas, the non-material, the noumenal, God. Something Other, something not like what we see. From our life experience and our own human being/existence, we know that Being must exist.

Plato posited that there was a realm of the Forms whereby every essence existed in a non-material state. This means that when I use the word "is", the concept is a universal one that people can actually understand. The fact that no one can define "Being" is proof that we use in every language concepts that are beyond our explanation.

Crazily enough one deity is rumored to have said "I am who I am" - interpretted by many as "I am Being", and that for every human being, it is possible to say of this deity "in Him we live and move and breathe and have our being".

If Being (invisible world) is the whiteboard, Becoming (visible material world) is the writing on it. Without Being, Nietzsche rightly said, we can only speak in verbs. There are no nouns. You are not essentially anything, you are an accidental cluster of atoms constantly in flux until you die.... oh, and by the way. You weren't caused.... figure that out.

Accepting that all of existence and your own personal life does not follow logic (because logic necessitates causation which would require an existant non-material 'spiritual' entity to have created time and matter), accepting such a worldview would mean that everything is meaningless, there is no truth, there can be no true emotion between people. There can only be chemistry and biology and physics, and again remember none of those sciences can follow any pattern as this would imply logic or meaning. That is one alternative. It's as I've said objectively illogical (as it would be since logic doesn't exist). It's rather like a paranoid person who says all the world is conspiring against them, and then another person trying to explain to them that this is not true. The more the rational person explains, the more the paranoid person believes they are vindicated. (I stole that one from Chesterton).

For the rest of humanity, that isn't ready to kiss away Love, Meaning, Human Rights, and Reason, there exists another possibility in the invisible world. That's personally why I'd rather be a Platonist, or an Idealist, or an Aristotelian, or a Thomist, or a Jew, or a Deist, or a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Morman, or a worshipper of the Flying Spagetti Monster (provided he was immaterial) than be a materialist.

For the philosopher, Materialism is a joke, the phrase "the material world is the only reality" disproves materialism (language implies reason, which implies non-material principles, more "invisible" reality). Similarly a "God's eye view" of the world that claims God doesn't exist is impossible, as it would be a universal statement in a universe without universal truth! (oft repeated but true nonetheless).

Thus one can say "I don't think the (realm of the Forms/God/Noumenal/Ideal) exists" but the statement must be understood as an illogical claim, based on either emotion or unjustified opinion.

Humanities: 1 , Material Sciences: 0

So True

"In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished" - Karl Rahner

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis' quote where he says that if we were created for the finite, then why does it feel so empty in our soul? Why does everything scream for an ending if there is no ending?

Thoughts Before Work Tonight

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama (pictured above making cheese soufflet in his home)

I had a fine day today. I went to Tim Hortons, had Chocolate milk, listened to a good lecture by a genius historian (Prof. Sainsbury) and then had an actually good Latin class! craziness. Then I had a great lunch, and when I came home I decided I needed my Simon Schama fix so I lay down on the couch and watched him compare Ireland and India. He even talked about Thomas Babington Macaulay whom I had researched without remembering Schama talked about him.

Now I'm just waiting to go to work. It's been a good day, but it's weird having the fear of work and prospective essays looming over you. Then I realized: this is my life. I'm only viewing it on a daily cycle though. Like why should I relax the day before I work if I just have to work the next day? ANd I'll have to work my entire life, so really this, "just get through it" attitude is really the bane of my existence. What's the point in toughing out your entire life?

When I think about History and Schama and the job of a Historian I constantly think about how many people have gone before me. The Romans had a phrase we translated in Latin the other day. It was "to go to the majority", and it meant 'to die'. They saw the majority as those already dead. Schama said 1 million Irish died in the potato famine of the 1840s and 5 million people starved in India during one famine. 6 million people, dead.

...

What were their lives like? What did they think of God? What did they love and hope for?

I guess we'll never know. And one day I will 'go to the majority'. And people like Simon Schama (and myself) will write essays about me as one of the beleagured multitude. They'll try to place me into a group that all sought one clear goal, that fit somewhere. Whether I'm a proletarian wage slave who died working in a grocery store, or one of the many morbidly obese Canadians of the post-modern period who died from heart faillure due to excess, or one of the 'faithful departed' in a liturgy (better than unfaithful departed).

...

What kind of an account will I give for my life? I can picture it now: "Hi... I'm (name), I was of the (religion) faith, does that mean I'm in? ....Yes that's correct, mhmm glutton, lustful, etc yep. ... Ya I guess I was a Capitalist? is that bad comrade? ...oh I see...well I only shopped at Walmart because it was so cheap, though I guess that doesn't count... alright ... Ya I only did that with one girlfriend ..." and then the questions get even weirder "... well ya, I preferred Charles I to Oliver Cromwell ...but you do remember what he did to Ireland... oh you saw that on my facebook" It's so unimaginable to think of such an epic ending to such a transitory life.

So little of life is epic, so much of it just the drab everyday. So much isn't about Ideals, but rather endless compromise.

...

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd just do whatever the hell I wanted. I know that's kind of against the point, but seriously, it'd be like being invincible. It reminds me of when the Romans had trouble fighting the Germanic tribes because they believed in the immortality of the soul so strongly, they had no fear of death.

...

Plato makes a pretty good argument for the immortality of the soul.

...

well I guess I'll get ready for work.

Van Gogh, Happiness, and Work

You (dan, the only guy who reads this blog) will notice that my new profile picture is Vincent Van Gogh's Red Vineyard. I've had a thing for vineyards recently and I've appreciated Van Gogh alot ever since I learned about his life.

He was a clergyman who tried to cheer people up who were destitute coal miners. But he couldn't help them there (he thought). So he began to paint pictures of their toil and sadness so that others would be motivated to help them. But then he succumbed to depression and madness himself.

That is my oversimplified and probably wrong summary of Van Gogh's life. It is what I remember learning about Van Gogh, which teaches me something about myself. It is a warning not to allow yourself to be completely immersed in trying to bring about complete temporal/earthly happiness

Going to my gurus, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine I read on this issue:

"A certain participation of Happiness can be had in this life: but perfect and true Happiness cannot be had in this life. This may be seen from a twofold consideration.

First, from the general notion of happiness. For since happiness is a "perfect and sufficient good," it excludes every evil, and fulfils every desire. But in this life every evil cannot be excluded. For this present life is subject to many unavoidable evils; to ignorance on the part of the intellect; to inordinate affection on the part of the appetite, and to many penalties on the part of the body; as Augustine sets forth in De Civ. Dei xix, 4. Likewise neither can the desire for good be satiated in this life. For man naturally desires the good, which he has, to be abiding. Now the goods of the present life pass away; since life itself passes away, which we naturally desire to have, and would wish to hold abidingly, for man naturally shrinks from death. Wherefore it is impossible to have true Happiness in this life.

Secondly, from a consideration of the specific nature of Happiness, viz. the vision of the Divine Essence, which man cannot obtain in this life" - St. Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologiae" First Part of the Second Part, Question 5, Article 3

To translate as best I can Sts Thomas and Augustine say that basically while we can be happy in this life, we can't have complete happiness for 2 reasons: evil in the world (our ignorance, unhealthy appetites, bodily problems/sickness) and because true happiness is seeing God/ The Divine Essence.

For their vision of Heaven is the concept of "The Beatific Vision" that is, seeing God's essence 'face to face'. It's like looking at a beautiful landscape or a sunset or a piece of art that is so beautiful you completely forget about yourself.

I agree with those two, that sounds like heaven. I suck at art, but I'd like to say I appreciate some art, because it makes you do that (lose yourself, the literal meaning of extasy).

Today I have to go to work (in 20 min) and I'm nervous and despairing as usual, but I woke up today like everyday, seeking happiness. And the biggest part of today's work will be avoiding the error of Van Gogh and the error of myself. Trying to find complete happiness in temporal things. I need to align my understanding of happiness not with my ignorance and lust and inordinate bodily desires, but with the summum bonum, the greatest good, the divine essence, and the virtuous life.

If I can get through today by seeking happiness there, and not in the places I naturally (or rather unnaturally go), i'll be one step closer to Eudaimonea, that is fullfillment and happiness.

Sadness, The Chartists, and Isaiah

Since last night, things have been going terrible. I feel like my breath was. Last night I ate cheddar flavoured chips and orange juice, and a hot dog, when I woke up, my breath was so terrible I could taste it. That’s how life feels right now. So what could I do? I tried reading some Christian books but it felt hypocritical because I was in sin. I had very little sleep (I was up till 4am) and so I decided to lay down and watch Simon Schama.

Simon Schama is like a father figure to me. He’s a famous historian, very well read in the bible (he alludes to it every few minutes), and his modern liberalism makes me envious of his beliefs which I cannot share but in some ways admire, as a Conservative Pre-Modernist living in the modern liberal world.

Anyway, he was talking about Victorian England and the Chartists, they were middle-class and poor people who sought to make England a Democracy, and to go back to the rural world of medieval england. MP Fergus O’Conner was a leader of them, who after being turned down by the British Government decided that they would compile their money to buy plots of farmland and to move out of the cities into the countryside.
So they moved to Great Dodford, and farmed even though they had no experience. Their motto was “do or die” and some of them managed it. Schama says summing up this movement:

“what seemed to count for most was making a home not a revolution”



It was about taking back a proper life, not necessarily changing the world. There’s a verse in Revelation that tells us to “come out” of Babylon (the world). The Chartists remind me of that. Their dream to quit being ‘machines’ in industrial Manchester is something I understand after seeing Manchester. My Cottrill ancestors moved from Manchester in the mid 19th century as well to Hamilton (which I think is about the same if not worse). But it’s funny to think as I wait to go to work, that this same dream seems to reappear over and over again in us Anglo-Saxons. The desire to farm the land, to get away from the cities and machines. It’s a dream I see in every page of Tolkien. And come to think about it, it’s the image of the perfect New Earth in Isaiah, and it’s something that maybe one day I’ll get to partake in, if God has mercy on my soul...



“For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice for ever
in what I am creating;
...
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
...
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.” – Isaiah 65: 17-25

I'd really like to have my own vineyard where I enjoy the work, and where God answers before we ask questions.

I still feel sad today, and I'm sure tonight will be terrible at work, but maybe I'm a bit more hopeful now. Maybe one day that vain hope will materialize into a New Zealand adventure, I was looking at schools and jobs and religious vocations there last week...



This is a New Zealand Vineyard, perhaps I may have one on the New Earth...

Jones-in' it for some WoW again...

Last week in American history seminar a girl next to me started talking about how she was going to play World of Warcraft as soon as she got home and how she was having a LAN with her girlfriends. I felt like I had landed in some gamer's fantasy (girls actually playing WoW - "dry land is not a myth!"). Anyway I proceeded to tell her how long I'd been clean (From world of warcraft) and then my TA joined in saying he quit too, and everyone around the room started to go off about how they had all played WoW and either were still addicted or had cleaned up and moved on. But there's still the faint glimmer in my eye when it's mentioned lol.

I found these screenshots on my computer and I've started to get the old craving again, it's comin' back. I'm also done school in a few weeks and so my grades won't be an issue (my average went from 72 last year when I played WoW to 82). I still have the game Everquest sitting in it's package upstairs - I never even bothered installing it. But these screenshots reminded me of amazing times I had in Azeroth. It's actually kind of strange, because some WoW moments I would almost classify as some of the funnest times of my life. The other day I was thinking about Heaven and then I saw a girl playing WoW infront of me in lecture on her laptop and I thought - it's strange that my view of heaven is that it will be less fun than that game. It's as if I have the Blizzard creators higher than their Creator. So maybe I need to just imagine all the fun and good times I've had and make that sum a glimpse of Heaven.

This picture is from a guild raid that we did on Redrock Ridge where we camped on the roof of this building and I chain lightninged people and NPC's it was absolutely hillarious. Of course, apparently this is now bannable, which is ridiculous, but w/e, just another way blizzard ruins the game.

Aristotle talked about Eudaimonea - fullfillment/happiness, I distinctly remember last summer having put in a hard days work for 8 hours, worked with a friend and had a fun time for most of the day, and then coming home and sitting at the computer desk to play WoW while listening to some classical music. Months later when I read Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics I thought those kind of happy fullfilling moments where nothing is wrong with the world. I also think about sitting looking at the stars, etc. Good ol' Aristotle, I think he'd be a gnome mage. I wonder if I'll start playing again.... Blessed Virgin Mary pray for me!