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
SOMETHING GOOD, THAT IS... '-)
It has been a blessing throughout.
snip: LOL Yes through my senses I can observe reality. You on the other hand are insisting that you are aware of another reality not accessible by our senses. Can you say projection?
Spirited: There is no man...either dead or alive...who has not dreamed, fantasized, and remembered old memories. Yet these things cannot be sensed. They cannot be heard, smelled, touched, seen, or tasted. By your illogic, for ‘ill’ it is, if the brain were cut open, we ought to be able to detect by way of our senses words scrolling through our mind as we think, we should see and hear dreams, and literally be able to comb through the vaults of memory. None of this is possible.
Cognition remains a mystery, especially to materialists such as yourself who, because senses cannot account for the immaterial, find themselves in the insanity-producing situation of having to deny what every right-thinking person knows to be true.
Cognition is in truth, ‘another reality,’ to use your own words. Yet because you are an ideologue, you must conform yourself to incredibly stupid ideas cooked up by fools of an earlier time. Fools who yearned to no longer be ‘in the spiritual image’ of their Creator. Driven by Dionysian compulsions, they yearned to become part of nature in order to escape created and moral boundaries.
If materialism is paradoxically ‘true,’ then right now I am typing out a response to a soulless meat machine called “LeGrande” who used his free will to choose an ideology that denies free will. It is not LeGrande who ‘thinks’ and ‘speaks.” No, LeGrande is but a wooden-headed puppet through which Nature speaks its irrational ‘thoughts’ as it pulls Puppet-LeGrandes’ strings. That is what it logically means to be “fully caused and determined” by Nature.
Why do I waste time responding to a wooden-headed puppet? Because by use of my free will I chose our Creator, Who made each man in His spiritual image, which means that each one is endowed with spirit, mind, and free will. Hence, while you must logically deny the source of your humanity because you perversely chose an ideology that reduces you to a wooden-headed puppet, I-—who by choice am in possession of the source of my humanity-— see not a wooden-headed puppet but a person who has been duped and deceived by fools.
Sorry but I haven't.
By your illogic, for ‘ill’ it is, if the brain were cut open, we ought to be able to detect by way of our senses words scrolling through our mind as we think, we should see and hear dreams, and literally be able to comb through the vaults of memory. None of this is possible.
Wrong again, putting an electrical stimulus to various places will recreate the memories.
No, LeGrande is but a wooden-headed puppet through which Nature speaks its irrational ‘thoughts’ as it pulls Puppet-LeGrandes’ strings. That is what it logically means to be “fully caused and determined” by Nature.
I have free will, if for no other reason than the uncertainty principle.
Thank you so much dearest sister in Christ for your kind words of support!
Yet I imagine there may be people who do not feel that way. Possibly they think I'm dense, I don't see what they're getting at, I just don't get their point: that God made everything, and He made it in a way that science can grasp; and so if He chose to work mechanistically, or if He used Darwinian evolution as a tool to manifest biological life, then what's the problem? A Christian can be a scientist too. Just keep "God out of the picture."
I can see all that, and very largely agree with it. But that's not what I've been trying to get at. To me, the real question isn't whether or not to leave God in the picture. (That's not a scientific question.) I see a larger problem, and it goes straight to the epistemological root of contemporary science. And that is the Newtonian formalism has become the tail that wags the dog. So much so that it is inconceivable to many people nowadays that something could be "science" that isn't premised on this particular formalism. I.e., Newtonian Paradigm = Science.
What I have been arguing is the Newtonian Paradigm does not provide a model that can cope with living systems. Period. Increasingly people are aware of this, inside and outside the scientific community. But resistance to other ideas is amazingly strong — in academe, in the journals, in the popular science writers. Meanwhile, it has been observed that not only biology but physics itself is "in crisis."
Now that would be fun to discuss further. However I don't know the level of reader interest in this topic....
The Bible predicted that Israel would become a nation once more.
Would you care to quote chapter and verse?
Jeremiah 30:3 For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.
What I have been arguing is the Newtonian Paradigm does not provide a model that can cope with living systems. Period.
And I think it is extremely helpful to keep returning to that central point.
Also, I believe such a debate ought to be very open as this one has been because some of our correspondents "shut down" when a sidebar turns to philosophy; others, physics; others, math; others, theology.
Nevertheless, the central issue that the current paradigm is inadequate to investigate living systems can be seen from any of these perspectives.
Only one with fingers in his ears, humming, stomping, gritting his teeth and thus refusing all insights could possibly miss it.
Which is the normal state of atheists.
LG has tried this before and has been provided with more than ample examples of fulfilled prophecy, which he promptly blows off as never having happened,...next please....
You’re wasting your time trying to convince someone who doesn’t WANT to believe that prophecy has actually been fulfilled.
Jeremiah 30:3 For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.
A little hard to claim that the people of Israel didn’t return to the land of their fathers.
Oh so true, dearest sister in Christ!
Perhaps part of the problem is the increasing specialization of science nowadays. Even the specialties have sub-specialties — all premised on the Newtonian Paradigm (because that's supposedly what science "is"). Everyone is trying to see through the peephole of his own specialization, and increasingly the big picture is lost from view. Because of the loss of the big-picture view, people do not see that contradictory to its claim, the Newtonian formalism is not the "largest model" of the universe, wherein physics is basic, and biology a "special case" of physics.
To turn that around, it seems to me that the "largest model" would not treat biology as a "special case." As relatively rare as biological organisms apparently are in the universe, they display unique behaviors — i.e., behaviors not found in the inorganic world — that any "largest model" would have to be able to "map to" Reality in order to be the "largest" model. Contemporary science hits the wall precisely here: The Newtonian formalism is no help in accounting for or explaining the organizational and functional behavior of living systems. That behavior does not reduce to particle motions alone. What is important is the relations obtaining between particles and with the systems they constitute. We are speaking of the intangible organizational principles (i.e., systems of causal entailment) at work in living systems. Newtonian science has no method for getting at this problem.... E.g., since the entire idea of final cause has been banished from "respectable" science, there is no logical way to explain what we even mean by "function." And that's just one problem with the status-quo thinking....
But since the 1930s, some really first-rate mathematicians cum physicists cum theoretical biologists (notice the multidisciplinary approach) have been working on it; e.g., Ervin Bauer, Nicolas Rashevsky, and most recently Robert Rosen. Mainly their work has not been much acknowledged, let alone appreciated, by most of their eminent contemporaries....
But that may be about to change. I notice that some theoretical biologists are beginning to "play with" some of Robert Rosen's ideas; e.g., the Kinemans.
Thank you so very much for your excellent essay/post, dearest sister in Christ!
Truly, the specialties have been all the more specialized - and the Newtonian "big picture" - often out of sight and mind - is no help in addressing functions.
Thank you oh so very much for your wonderful essay-post!
Yep. Mostly they do appear to be thoroughly indoctrinated. That is, they refuse to clarify the core reasons for their ersatz faith....
[[God made everything, and He made it in a way that science can grasp;]]
Science does grasp it: Information present in all species screams the need for an intelligence behind the design, and it’s a case where science can and indeed does come to a ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ conclusion based on the evidences present. IF nature isn’t chemicaly, or biologically able to produce the irreducible complexity, to move species informaiton beyond it’s parameters/limitations to produce NEW non species specific informaiton to create new non species specific organs, features, traits etc, then there must be another answer besides naturalism- mutaitons are credited by naturalists with miraculous supernatural capabilities that somehow beat all odds against it, and leapt over biological and chemical roadblocks as though it were superman, and supposedly ceated organs and features via mutaitons, which, as we know, can only work on info that is already present- it can’t create the necessary new non speices specific info needed for moving species beyond hteir own kinds.
Bottom line, not only is science able to scientifically grasp the need for an intelligence behind species, it can and does show it as well as show nature simply isn’t capable of creation- it’s only capable of modification, and modifications can not create the necessary new non species pseicific info-
[[LG has tried this before and has been provided with more than ample examples of fulfilled prophecy, which he promptly blows off as never having happened,...next please....]]
“Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter—no errors. (The remaining 500 or so reach into the future and may be seen unfolding as days go by.) Since the probability for any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 102000 (that is 1 with 2000 zeros written after it)!
(1) Some time before 500 B.C. the prophet Daniel proclaimed that Israel’s long-awaited Messiah would begin his public ministry 483 years after the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem (Daniel 9:25-26). He further predicted that the Messiah would be “cut off,” killed, and that this event would take place prior to a second destruction of Jerusalem. Abundant documentation shows that these prophecies were perfectly fulfilled in the life (and crucifixion) of Jesus Christ. The decree regarding the restoration of Jerusalem was issued by Persia’s King Artaxerxes to the Hebrew priest Ezra in 458 B.C., 483 years later the ministry of Jesus Christ began in Galilee. (Remember that due to calendar changes, the date for the start of Christ’s ministry is set by most historians at about 26 A.D. Also note that from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. is just one year.) Jesus’ crucifixion occurred only a few years later, and about four decades later, in 70 A.D. came the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.
(2) In approximately 700 B.C. the prophet Micah named the tiny village of Bethlehem as the birthplace of Israel’s Messiah (Micah 5:2). The fulfillment of this prophecy in the birth of Christ is one of the most widely known and widely celebrated facts in history.
(3) In the fifth century B.C. a prophet named Zechariah declared that the Messiah would be betrayed for the price of a slave—thirty pieces of silver, according to Jewish law-and also that this money would be used to buy a burial ground for Jerusalem’s poor foreigners (Zechariah 11:12-13). Bible writers and secular historians both record thirty pieces of silver as the sum paid to Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus, and they indicate that the money went to purchase a “potter’s field,” used—just as predicted—for the burial of poor aliens (Matthew 27:3-10).
(4) Some 400 years before crucifixion was invented, both Israel’s King David and the prophet Zechariah described the Messiah’s death in words that perfectly depict that mode of execution. Further, they said that the body would be pierced and that none of the bones would be broken, contrary to customary procedure in cases of crucifixion (Psalm 22 and 34:20; Zechariah 12:10). Again, historians and New Testament writers confirm the fulfillment: Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross, and his extraordinarily quick death eliminated the need for the usual breaking of bones. A spear was thrust into his side to verify that he was, indeed, dead.
(5) The prophet Isaiah foretold that a conqueror named Cyrus would destroy seemingly impregnable Babylon and subdue Egypt along with most of the rest of the known world. This same man, said Isaiah, would decide to let the Jewish exiles in his territory go free without any payment of ransom (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1; and 45:13). Isaiah made this prophecy 150 years before Cyrus was born, 180 years before Cyrus performed any of these feats (and he did, eventually, perform them all), and 80 years before the Jews were taken into exile.
(6) Mighty Babylon, 196 miles square, was enclosed not only by a moat, but also by a double wall 330 feet high, each part 90 feet thick. It was said by unanimous popular opinion to be indestructible, yet two Bible prophets declared its doom. These prophets further claimed that the ruins would be avoided by travelers, that the city would never again be inhabited, and that its stones would not even be moved for use as building material (Isaiah 13:17-22 and Jeremiah 51:26, 43). Their description is, in fact, the well-documented history of the famous citadel.”
http://www.reasons.org/fulfilled-prophecy-evidence-reliability-bible
Etc etc etc- There is more than enough VERY specific prophecies that have come true that anyone arguing otherwise simply isn’t interested in arguing in an intellectually honest manner
and just for hte record, I do NOT subscribe to Hugh Ross’s views on old earth age, or some of his more bizzarre comments, however, he has documented the reliability of prophecy, and this wasn’t based on his opinion, but rather on documented fact, and stands as trustworthy
Comming soon to a country near you:
In Hosea 5 we read a prophecy that mentions Israel, Ephraim and Judah: “The pride of Israel testifies to his face; therefore Israel and Ephraim stumble in their iniquity; Judah also stumbles with them” (verse 5). The prophecy continues: “With their flocks and herds they shall go to seek the Lord, but they will not find Him; He has withdrawn Himself from them. They have dealt treacherously with the Lord, for they have begotten pagan children. Now a New Moon shall devour them and their heritage” (verses 6-7).
Ephraim, the lost tribe of Israel, refers to we gentiles, incliding Brittain and the U.S, who become great with hte help of God Almighty, but who forget God, and stumble because God has turned His face from us because of our sins against Him.
This must come to pass before the end time, and Obama and the extreme left are leading us straight down that path with an apparent gusto and desire for us to join the EU- which incidently, has already been made up of hte 10 great nations which make up the last great Babylon, just before her destruction.
“Here then is a prophecy regarding all three nations—the United States, Britain and Israel (Judah). According to this prophecy, it appears that all three will fall within the span of a month. Verse 6 shows these nations turning back to God, but finding it’s too late. Because of their sins, He will let them suffer defeat and collapse.”
http://www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn74/sevenprophecies.htm
We may be witnessing our own defeat and collapse- which Christ said would happen ‘within one generation’ when the signs begin to be fulfilled! Obama being the cheerleader- the Pied-piper whom the masses will follow and worhip gleefully.
“Lest the idea seem outlandish, consider that Israel and the United States are perhaps the most maligned and criticized nations on earth. Among Muslim hard-liners, America is commonly called “the great Satan” and Israel and Britain “the little Satans.”
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