Posted on 04/05/2009 8:10:35 PM PDT by betty boop
The Atheist Perversion of Reality
By Jean F. Drew
Atheism we have always had with us it seems. Going back in time, what was formerly a mere trickle of a stream has in the modern era become a raging torrent. Karl Marx’s gnostic revolt, a paradigm and methodology of atheism, has arguably been the main source feeding that stream in post-modern times.
What do we mean by “gnostic revolt?” Following Eric Voëgelin’s suggestions, our definition here will be: a refusal to accept the human condition, manifesting as a revolt against the Great Hierarchy of Being, the most basic description of the spiritual order of universal reality.
The Great Hierarchy is comprised of four partners: God–Man–World–Society, in their mutually dynamic relations. Arguably all the great world religions incorporate the idea of this hierarchy. It is particularly evident in Judaism and Christianity. One might even say that God’s great revelation to us in the Holy Bible takes this hierarchy and the relations of its partners as its main subject matter. It has also been of great interest to philosophers going back to pre-Socratic times — and evidently even to “anti-philosophers” such as Karl Marx.
In effect, Marx’s anti-philosophy abolishes the Great Hierarchy of Being by focusing attention mainly on the God and Man partners. The World and Society partners are subsidiary to that, and strangely fused: World is simply the total field of human social action, which in turn translates into historical societal forms.
Our principal source regarding the Marxist atheist position is Marx’s doctoral dissertation of 1840–1841. From it, we can deduce his thinking about the Man partner as follows:
(1) The movement of the intellect in man’s consciousness is the ultimate source of all knowledge of the universe. A human self-consciousness is the supreme divinity.
(2) “Faith and the life of the spirit are expressly excluded as an independent source of order in the soul.”
(3) There must be a revolt against “religion,” because it recognizes the existence of a realissimum beyond human consciousness. Marx cannot make man’s self-consciousness “ultimate” if this condition exists.
(4) The logos is not a transcendental spirit descending into man, but the true essence of man that can only be developed and expressed by means of social action in the process of world history. That is, the logos is “immanent” in man himself. Indeed, it must be, if God is abolished. And with God, reason itself is abolished as well: To place the logos in man is to make man the measure of all things. To do so ineluctably leads to the relativization of truth, and to a distorted picture of reality.
(5) “The true essence of man, his divine self-consciousness, is present in the world as the ferment that drives history forward in a meaningful manner.” God is not Lord of history, the Alpha and Omega; man is.
As Voëgelin concluded, “The Marxian spiritual disease … consists in the self-divinization and self-salvation of man; the intramundane logos of human consciousness is substituted for the transcendental logos…. [This] must be understood as the revolt of immanent consciousness against the spiritual order of the world.”
How Marx Bumps Off God
So much for Marx’s revolt. As you can see, it requires the death of God. Marx’s point of theocidal departure takes its further impetus from Ludwig von Feuerbach’s theory that God is an imaginary construction of the human mind, to which is attributed man’s highest values, “his highest thoughts and purest feelings.”
In short, Feuerbach inverts the very idea of the imago Dei — that man is created in the image of God. God is, rather, created by man, in man’s own image — God is only the illusory projection of a subjective human consciousness, a mere reflection of that consciousness and nothing more.
From this Feuerbach deduced that God is really only the projected “essence of man”; and from this, Feuerbach concluded that “the great turning point of history will come when ‘man becomes conscious that the only God of man is man himself.’”
For Marx, so far so good. But Marx didn’t stop there: For Feuerbach said that the “isolated” individual is the creator of the religious illusion, while Marx insisted that the individual has no particular “human essence” by which he could be identified as an isolated individual in the first place. For Marx, the individual in reality is only the sum total of his social actions and relationships: Human subjectivity has been “objectified.” Not only God is gone, but man as a spiritual center, as a soul, is gone, too.
Marx believed that God and all gods have existed only in the measure that they are experienced as “a real force” in the life of man. If gods are imagined as real, then they can be effective as such a force — despite the “fact” that they are not really real. For Marx, it is only in terms of this imaginary efficacy that God or gods can be said to “exist” at all.
Here’s the beautiful thing from Marx’s point of view: Deny that God or the gods can be efficacious as real forces in the life of man — on the grounds that they are the fictitious products of human imagination and nothing more — and you have effectively killed God.
This insight goes to the heart of atheism. In effect, Marx’s prescription boils down to the idea that the atheist can rid himself and the world at large of God simply by denying His efficacy, the only possible “real” basis of His existence. Evidently the atheist expects that, by his subjective act of will, he somehow actually makes God objectively unreal. It’s a kind of magic trick: The “Presto-Changeo!” that makes God “disappear.”
Note that, if God can be gotten rid of by a stratagem like this, so can any other aspect of reality that the atheist dislikes. In effect, the cognitive center which — strangely — has no “human essence” has the power of eliminating whatever sectors of objective reality it wants to, evidently in full expectation that reality itself will allow itself to be “reduced” and “edited down” to the “size” of the atheist’s distorted — and may we add relentlessly imaginary? — conception.
To agree with Marx on this — that the movement of the intellect in man’s “divine” consciousness is the ultimate source of all knowledge of the universe — is to agree that human thought determines the actual structure of reality.
Instead of being a part of and participant in reality, the atheist claims the power to create it as if he himself were transcendent to, or standing outside or “beyond” reality. As if he himself were the creator god.
This type of selective operation goes a long way towards explaining the fanatical hostility of many Darwinists today regarding any idea of design or hierarchy in Nature — which, by the way, have always been directly observable by human beings who have their eyes (and minds) open. What it all boils down to seems to be: If we don’t like something, then it simply doesn’t exist.
We call the products of such selective operations second realities. They are called this because they are attempts to displace and finally eliminate the First Reality of which the Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society — is the paradigmatic core.
First Reality has served as the unifying conceptual foundation of Western culture and civilization for the past two millennia at least. What better way to destroy that culture and civilization than an all-out attack on the Great Hierarchy of Being?
Thus we see how the gnosis (“wisdom”) of the atheist — in this particular case, Marx — becomes the new criterion by which all operations in (the severely reduced and deformed) external reality are to be conducted, understood, and judged.
Conclusion
Marx is the self-proclaimed Paraclete of an a-borning utopia in which man will be “saved” by being reduced to essentially nothing. With God “gone,” man, as we denizens of First Reality know him, disappears also.
But whatever is left of him becomes a tool for social action. He becomes putty in the hands of whatever self-selected, self-proclaimed Paraclete seeking to promote his favored Second Reality du jour (usually for his own personal benefit) manages to stride onto the public stage and command an audience.
Such a charmed person blesses himself with the power to change human society and history forever, to bring about man’s self-salvation in a New Eden — an earthly utopia— by purely human means.
Of course, there’s a catch: As that great denizen of First Reality, Sir Thomas More, eminently recognized, the translation into English of the New Latin word “utopia” is: No-place.
In short, human beings can conjure up alternative realities all day long. But that doesn't mean that they can make them “stick.” Reality proceeds according to its own laws, which are divine in origin, and so cannot be displaced by human desire or volition, individually or collectively.
And yet the Marxian expectation argues otherwise.
Out of such fantastic, idiotic, specifically Marxian/atheist foolishness have great revolutions been made. And probably will continue to be made — so long as psychopaths hold the keys to the asylum.
Note:
All quotations from Eric Voëgelin’s article, “Gnostic Socialism: Marx,” in: The Collected Works of Eric Voëgelin, Volume 26 — History of Political Ideas: Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
©2009 Jean F. Drew
April 4, 2009
NOPE... thats a calculated guess..
Faith is something else..
Faith is the evidence of what is hoped for..
The substance of what might or might not be..
Faith is irrational.. not fair.. even illogical..
Thats why faith is required by God (the real one)..
Know what I mean?... What do you know for sure?..
True enough. :)
So what's the point of the thought experiment?
Pedagogy. Just like with the exercises you find in physics textbooks.
As it stands, it has no "stationary object," no anchor or criterion according to which its phenomena can be compared and judged. JMHO FWIW
When we speak of a "stationary object" it is understood that this is not because the object meets some universal standard for being "stationary" (there is none) but because the object is stationary WRT to some inertial frame. The Sun is stationary WRT an inertial frame to a close enough approximation for the purpose of emphasizing the empirical difference between a real orbit as viewed from an inertial frame and an apparent orbit due to viewing a stationary object from a rotating frame. In the context of the merry-go-round experiment, the same could be said of the "stationary" target standing still on the Earth. Does this clarify things?
Sure. Lets take global warming for example.
CO2 is a green house gas. Doubling it will raise the temperature of the Earth apx. .8 to 1.2 degrees. Then the forcing's come into play. Water vapor is a positive forcing in the 1 to 5 times range, but lower level clouds are a negative forcing in the 2 to 5 times range and thunderstorms are also an unknown negative forcing as are most weather patterns like hurricanes. Then there are other variables like cosmic rays, solar radiation, UHI effects, Satellite measuring errors, etc. etc.
Each one of those items listed is known to a reasonable degree of accuracy. And if you think that the uncertainties diminish by the inverse ratio of the number of repetitions then I am sure that you can definitively forecast the exact temperature for Butte Montana June 18th, 2009 at 7 PM.
Heck I will be generous and give you a .10 degree error range : )
Yes it does, and thank you Zero Sum.
I can recognize the "pedagogical value" of such exercises. My initial reaction was motivated by concern that thought experiments be as "realistic" as possible. Yet there are all kinds of "thought experiments" going on wasting a whole lot of time and energy IMHO proposing things that have not got the least chance of being tested (e.g., panspermia theory and a raft of parallel universe cosmologies). It seems to me at the end of the day the insights of science must map to Reality. But some of these "thought experiments" seem to be constructing "second realities." They might be fun to think about, but: How on earth could they possibly be "tested?"
Meanwhile, there are plenty of "interesting" unanswered questions a bit closer to home. Such as: What is Life? Actually, it seems it's been the mathematicians and physicists who have been taking the lead on this question, from the 1930s forward (e.g., Ervin Bauer, Nicholas Rashevsky, Robert Rosen). They worked independently of each other, but their common object was to develop a mathematically-based theoretical biology. I'm just beginning to discover their work and am finding it fascinating. Suffice it to say that so far, their entire approach and findings have been mostly ignored by both the physics and biology communities.
Anyone interested in taking a look at these ideas, I highly recommend Robert Rosen's Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life.
I guess you and I weren't really speaking about the same thing from the get-go.... Sorry!
Thank you kindly for your reply!
Great example, LeGrande! Thank you!!!
Truly, the mathematicians and physicists have been much more illuminating on the question of what life v. non-life/death in nature "is." And strangely so, since biology is supposed to be the study of life. LOL!
Great example, LeGrande! Thank you!!!
Yes, excellent example...of imprecision which I already agreed can be “added” up. If that’s what you mean by “uncertainty” it’s a meaning I’ve never heard of.
Since you all seem to be more interested in proving you can know nothing certainly, I’ll leave you with that. You should all feel very comfortable with the post-modernists who together with the cultural Marxists have destroyed education at all levels in this country. They all agree with you that there is no truth (that anyone can know with certainty) and that everything is relative to one’s own “inner” convictions (read “feelings” or “revelation”).
The reason I think your views are very dangerous is because they are the basis of all the inclusivist multi-culturalism (the PC nonsense) that dominates our society today. “If nothing is certain and nothing can be proven, well than, anyone’s views, any culture, any society is as good as any other.”
I think you are all making a great mistake. I know it is contrary to the clear teaching of the Bible, but I would, like Voltaire, defend to the death your right to believe and promote and practice what you believe as you choose.
I would be at fault if I did not point out the following considering Paul’s method in preaching:
“And Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures.” (Acts 17:2) “Reasoned with them?”
“And he reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and Greeks.” (Acts 18:19) (Now why would he “reason” with them, if reason is not a means to certain knowledge?)
“But Saul increased the more in strength and confounded the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is very Christ.” (Acts 9:22) Apparently Luke did not have the advantage of all your wisdom on the subject because he though something as important as the Messiahship of Christ could be PROVED. Too bad you weren’t around to show him that nothing can be proved.
Wish you all well.
Hank
Science is based on falsification Hank, not proof. If we can't falsify it we generally accept it, that is why they are called theories, not proofs.
Is what? Did the Legislature in Texas have the right idea when they declared pi to be 3? Why can't pi be 3?
I think the Texas Legislature story might be apocryphal, but I think it conveys the idea.
On the point of pi being officially declared as 3 - I do not know the background but I hasten to point out that a stumbling block both to mathematics and science is the precision of the measure.
If you and I set out to measure a coastline but used rulers of different length, the shorter ruler would yield a larger result than the longer ruler. But both would be accurate according to the measure used.
That is the common example used to explain fractals. A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity on all scales.
Lurkers interested in seeing what a fractal looks like, click here for the Mandelbrot set. And then continue to click on a point of the graphic to zoom in, etc.
Yes, and for sufficiently large values of 1, 1+1 can equal 3 or any number really : ) Math is just a tool that we use to try and describe reality, it doesn't create reality, although some mathematicians may think otherwise.
I am a mathematical Platonist like Penrose, Tegmark, Godel, et al. For instance, the mathematician doesn't invent the geometry, he discovers it.
Indeed, I aver that all mathematicians are to some extent Platonist because the variable in each formula testifies to the universality of the expression.
“Indeed, I aver that all mathematicians are to some extent Platonist because the variable in each formula testifies to the universality of the expression.”
http://www.science-spirit.org/article_detail.php?article_id=333
I guess I fall on Bohr’s side : )
Here's a link for Lurkers interested in Gödel
While that may be a dandy summary of Marx's position, Hank, I don't know in what way it even remotely applies to my own. Analyze it, and you'd see that his view and mine are polar opposites.
Bottom line, when it comes to human souls, Marx is adament: There is no there there. Thus there's really nothing for "inner convictions" to inhere in; there's no such thing as "inner." The very idea is adamantly forbidden, abolished. This allows us to say that man is born a tabula rasa — a "blank slate" on which just anything can (and will) be written.
I believe that by virtue of being ensouled, man is not born a tabular rasa. My own childhood experiences discussed earlier convince me that my view is correct. There seems to be a lot that children "know," even before they become fully "rational." Call it intuition maybe. Whatever it is, it appears to be something in-built in the consciousness, not something that is learned by experience. The issue has been discussed for centuries under the rubric of "innate ideas" with no consensus whatever yet achieved.
However I dislike that term as a descriptor of the phenomenon. I like the suggestion of "innate"; but the word "idea" connotes the rational mind is preeminently involved. Yet my own feeling is that the phenomenon does not arise in the mind, but in the heart, in connection with soul itself. That is, in essential feeling, not in mind.
Essential feeling, of course, is a prime example of a "qualium." Qualia cannot be communicated person-to-person, nor can they be "falsified" in any way. They are utterly intangible. And yet these intangible things stand as causes for human action, and even (as in my case) form the core around which a life can be organized and lived in truth.
My view is based on primary faith. The Roman Church sometimes speaks of the fides quaerens intellectum, of "faith in search of its reason." When you think about it, this not only denotes a spiritual quest, but merely confirms the way human minds normally operate: one must start with faith (some faith), and then see whether or not it "maps" to Reality. My childhood insights continue to map to Reality. Go figure!
So as you see, I do not regard myself as standing in the same camp with cultural Marxists or the other po-mo, multi-culti fashionable. To me, they are "spawn from Hell!!!" And may they return there as quickly as possible!!! LOLOL!
They certainly are hell-bent on destroying Western civilization — and human souls to boot.
You cite Acts 9:22:
“But Saul increased the more in strength and confounded the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is very Christ.”Some observations. The Jews at Damascus were the very type of people who would demand "proof" to believe: arguably, they worshipped the Law, not God Himself. If anyone could prove anything to them, it would have been Saul: For he had been of the very same culture prior to his shattering epiphany on the Road to Damascus. [Talk about a "qualium"!!!] If Saul could have directly and vividly communicated that, perhaps more proof-needing Jews would have converted to Christianity. But we know that didn't happen.
It is the nature of qualia that they cannot be directly shared. Nor falsified. They are altogether beyond the reach of the scientific method.
Thank you so very much for reminding of this, LeGrande!
And yet it certainly seems it's not always true that "if we can't falsify it we generally accept it." Jeepers, one can't falsify God or soul, but some people reject them anyway. (It really is irrational when you think about it.)
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