Posted by charles
I quit the UGA Police Department, forever, on Wednesday, August 6, 2008. The week before, I interviewed with a middle school here in Athens to teach science. By the following Monday, I was offered the job.
My first day was great, and I can already appreciate the hard work and the reward ahead. Middle school is a rough time for kids. It might be rough on some days for me. But, it's a different kind of rough altogether from when I worked with UGAPD. You can accept that kids will act like kids. It's harder to accept when adults act that way.
Posted by charles
Master Joel | Posted 6/27/2008 1:11:23 PM
This question goes out to all people who consider themselves liberal:
Why do you think people choose to be conservative?
———
Polemos | Posted 6/27/2008 7:19:47 PM
People choose to be conservative because they lack the courage to be true to the Gospel. Smitten with the false consciousness of the pursuit of wealth and the religion of money, they endeavor to maintain any hold that capitalist worship has over them, even if it means supporting a military whose primary purpose is to kill preemptively.
———
Meteo X | Posted 6/27/2008 9:08:31 PM
"
People choose to be conservative because they lack the courage to be true to the Gospel."
'
cuse me? I know you didn't just call me a stereotype and a false Christian, so I'd like to explain yourself.
Now.
———
Polemos | Posted 6/29/2008 2:37:47 AM
Meteo, perhaps I could begin to explain it this way. The profound claim of the Gospel, and note my use of the singular as opposed to your plural, has less to do with the life afterwards than with the life now. Whereas Paul understood the imminence of the return of Christ in such a way that his expression of the Gospel's social effects very much underplayed what was possible in it, I take the manner in which he devalued those social categories--presumably so as to detach the people of the Way from investing themselves into those categories, a presumption that finds its repetition in the Gospels using the motifs of people "letting the dead bury the dead" or selling all one's possessions to follow the Messiah--to have the unintended consequence of producing the ethical ground from which all social revolution can come. Paul's apathy towards changing the world led him to say interesting things about the relative futility of what the world comprises, but that the world is still here and Messiah not yet returned gives us an opportunity to put into practice the subjective detachment the Gospel meant for Paul. Let me try and say it simpler: the Gospel does not provide us with an ethical system for treating and dealing with others in a distributed justice--what you find in Aristotle, for example--but rather what the Gospel does is erase the social value that differences subsist in. It doesn't make Jews treat Greeks fairly, or men women, or masters slaves. Rather, it empties these terms of their social importance and clears the space for a very different ethical activity. One whose very formation is specifically antisystemic. What the Law attempted to ground through the manipulation of desire, the Gospel achieves through divesting desire of its obsession in the mystery of the other.
Conservatism, by its very nature, is deeply and permanently obsessed with the fantasies and desires of the other, constructing for itself as many others as there are desires for it and investing all of these fantasies with its transferred desires. What capitalism has thus far been able to do is combine this kind of intersubjectivity with a rabid dismantling of specifically those things the conservative thinks are valued and foundational. It is the nature of capitalism to reduce the world into resource, but the production of potential appeals to the conservative insofar as the idea of limitless material wealth appeals to those who think that his own desires are better preserved by restricting the wanton desires of the other. The other is an illegal immigrant who steals hospital treatment and passes the cost onto taxpayers, a welfare mother who [fuck]s nonstop and passes the babies onto the taxpayers, a convicted criminal who benchpresses in prison while learning criminality better and passing this tuition onto taxpayers. Obsessed with fantasies of
desire without consequence, of success only achieved through merited effort, conservatives conceive a marketplace of selection that is tantamount to Darwinism, believing that their successful restraint of desire produces the true achievement. Of course, the fundamental paradox in this is that the conservative never can enjoy what she possesses no matter the indulgence, because she is always redefined in her enjoyment by the perception of the other's unrestrained and achieved satisfaction. It is this same restlessness within the conservative that feeds into the material incompleteness of capitalism, and all too often the conservative confuses the two as the same thing in the end: the pursuit of happiness as an accumulation of right to enjoy.
———
Magyar15 | Posted 6/28/2008 9:19:55 PM
Polemos, what about economic liberals who vote Republican because of social issues?
———
Polemos | Posted 6/29/2008 2:57:07 AM
Magyar, what about them? I say that any capitulation to Republican ideals, particularly on social "issues," is nothing more than empowerment of a particular economic paradigm that fully supports and embraces capitalism. But, as I suggest above, capitalism doesn't care about social issues, social formations, or social justice. An anchor department store makes more money if it sells wedding accoutrements to all of lesbians, gays, polys, and heteros (
link), so what loyalty does money have to marriage of a certain kind? What loyalty does money have to children forced to sew together fabrics into shirts? The pursuit to find the cheap goods, the material produced in such a way as to lower its cost to any consumer, directly and undeniably leads to producers and retailers seeking out manufacturing methods that are themselves inexpensive to replicate and maintain. Child slave labor, regardless of any social value we put upon childhood, labor, or slavery, saves people money. Money demands this, because money doesn't care about morality and it never will.
For this reason, any political program built upon the fair or just distribution of money is doomed to defeat itself as a moral good. This is the irony of Republican language that on the one hand celebrates the frugality of the marketplace as a global phenomenon and on the other hand celebrates traditional family and national values. It is ironic because the actual and true organizational skill of capitalism is that
it erases all traditional values, since the nature of tradition is precisely to be a buffer and impetus against changes. Tradition smooths out the dangerous effects of time, geography, and nature and the human tendencies to envy, fight, and war with one another. Tradition does this by seeking to create a temporality within the social fabric, of a remembrance of things past, so as to better ground our activity in a sensible, if intangible transcendence. Thus, tradition works against the constant re-organizational activities of capitalism, as a friction to the progress of seeking out ever-increasing quests for efficiency and production of goods utilizing fewer resources. For that very reason, capitalism must eliminate as many traditional impediments to its operation as possible, and is why every small town that gets a McDonald's-Burger King-Wendy's price war ends up with the same neon-color glow as every other small town. The characters of local tradition are submerged under the larger fabric of capitalist competition, to the point where such traditions not only lose their social effect, but their subjective investment.
The quickest way to disabuse a Christian of her beliefs is not to show her the contradictions in the Bible, but to buy her a car that uses a lot of gas. Jesus knew this when he told his friends that we could not serve both God and Money. As she looks for the best rates about town for gas, already the mental architecture of capitalism situates itself in her mind and whispers its loving tales of the highest quality for the least effort. Efficiency, not reason nor science, is the end of spiritual religion. But it is the beginning of a monetary one.
Posted by charles
Vydao | Posted 6/23/2008 8:26:24 PM
are things good or evil because god says they are, or does god say things are good or evil because they already are?
if things are good or evil and thats WHY god says they are, then god is held to a standard even higher then himself. But god is the highest thing possible. Therefor there is a contradiction, and god doesn't exist.
if things are only good or evil after god decrees them so, then god is simply a point of view, no better or worse then satan. we simply follow god because he is more powerful. and following someone for fear of their power is not love, which is what we are supposed to feel for god.
—————— . . . ————————
Polemos | Posted 6/25/2008 4:31:07 PM
...
Also, while citing the list of names you've read, I noticed that you mentioned Plotinus. If you are familiar with (some of) the Neo-platonists, it seems to me reasonable that you'd understand at least one response to this strategy: "
if we say that they came from nowhere, that they simply always have been and always will be, then why do we even need a god to tell us what is right and what is wrong?" If the emanations proceeding from the Source take differentiation within them, such that separations become conceptual
as well as actual, the very combination of them into comparable binarisms (as in hot
with cold, as opposed to hot
with dark or hot
with round or hot
with discontinuous ...) requires the conceiving of Mind. Though whether this conceiving is placed as the activity of Demiurge, Mind, Spirit, whathaveyou, it is simply not enough that something
is for it to be recognizable as an
is, particularly with reference to the ensouled. If it is a soul which beholds the emanation, or if there is anything beholding at all, the conceiving must be done by that which conceives and transports form into the substance's further emanations. Without this, it is not simply meaningless but formally empty what proceeds. Yet,
that it proceeds indicates the activity and immediacy of Mind. And, importantly, the activity and bearing (as in, the bearing of a pregnancy) of Mind
is nothing but the activity of emanation itself from the Source, such that there is no dissociation of Source from the activity of Mind, as though the one is exclusive of the other, for what the one is in its shaping and bearing is of/from/through the same One from which any activity is.
Another response I'd give, a more contemporary phenomenological response, is that it is a structural feature of our consciousness that what is for-consciousness requires what makes it, as such, to-consciousness. Good and evil, whether social constructs or ineluctable features of the world, receive their meaningful definition through the prior logical act of defining them as such, and this structure of shaping the space of receiving such definitions is the place of a god. Just as there are no perceptions without a structural form for which the noiseless sensations become embedded within a field of sense and sound, moral determinations can only have relevance in the space set for them by the activity of a revelating, and this revealing takes place through the facilitation of a god.
And yet a third response, a nihilistic one, is that
we need a god to tell
us what is good and evil because there is no thing within
us to distinguish them, as there is no content in either to begin with, and thus there is no evolutionary mechanism for even approximating this content for the human, just as there are none for approximating any number of chimerical things. And while in your arguments you seem to reject this line, there isn't any argument provided for why this is to be rejected, unless the rhetorical force of your argument is just that we should abandon the notion of objectivity in morality in favor of their being constructed. But that's just window-dressing--the
force of claiming that morality is "objective" has always meant what is felt by the human being as a social animal caught up in paradoxical and differential, non-monotonic desires, that overriding way in which a moral question and its demand for a decision overdetermine what is immediately present for the human being. That we can say morality is constructed
and yet still feel the power of moral overdetermination demonstrates that the in-itself is not that from which morality derives its power. The problem with reusing the dilemma put to Euthyphro
as a problematic of objectivity versus subjectivity is precisely that it is outdated and incorrect. Moral force does not derive from a moral's being mind-independent or temporally non-local (
and it never did anyway), but rather morality as
symptomatic of desire shows that, just as desire is neither objective nor subjective, so too is a moral the result of the function of signifiers at work in the calculus of desire within the engines of biological machines.
Posted by charles
Proposal: To be clear
Method: To write more clearly
Objective: To write nothing more than what is immediately to be said
But isn't the end result of this precisely to be silent?
If nothing should be said or written which is not worth being said, what
is said or written? Even the words of God, presumably what are most worth saying, are never repeated but replaced with a silence hinting at them... But what about Jesus changes that fear? "Do this in remembrance of me," repeat what Jesus says and does, with no fear of the repercussion of repeating...
Resolution: Seeking clarity is the recourse of the fearful.
Posted by charles
Let me begin by first admitting that I haven't read any of the literature proposing or supporting the Fair Tax. I admit ignorance. All that I do know about it comes from what I have heard about it from supporters and detractors and read briefly on blogs and message boards. What I know is this:
1) The income tax will be eliminated.
2) There will be a federal sales tax, approximately 25% of the sale price.
3) Lower income people will receive a proactive rebate, a credit, to be applied towards paying the sales tax.
4) The sales tax will be applied towards all real goods and towards services, some of which are currently not being taxed.
My argument against the Fair Tax proceeds on the basis of these four assumptions, and some of my own. In short, I believe that the Fair Tax is an unwise policy.
Let me start with some general assumptions. The zeroth assumption is that competition exists amongst sellers and purchasers. First, the seller of some good or service incorporates the cost of producing or distributing these goods or services into the price of the good or service. Second, a principal motivation for the seller of some good or service is to maximize profit by finding a price that will be acceptable to a purchaser and will, in the long run, overcompensate for the cost of producing or distributing the good or service. Corollary to this second assumption is that a seller can act in such a manner as to undersell or oversell a product at any one point in time in order to manipulate the price of the product so that competitive sellers over time will be forced out of the competition. Third, the overall effect of these strategies is a fluctuation in prices based upon predictive powers. For the moment, we will not deal with investment, but simply the activity of selling and buying.
Now, some Fair Tax proponents recognize that, intuitively, it seems outrageous to pay a quarter of the cost of something . That's a lot of money!, they say and see that others might say. The response is generally two things. One, we actually are already paying these high taxes on these products, because the price we currently have incorporates the taxes and fees corporations have to pay now. Interestingly, Michael Moore makes a similar claim about health care in the United States, that we pay much higher "taxes" for health care than states with socialized medicine, because we purchase these products to where the costs of doing business in the face of regulatory schemes are incorporated into the price, but because these costs come to us in the form of the price, we do not recognize them as taxation. This is our first general assumption at work. Second, once the Fair Tax begins to work, prices will actually go down, since the level of taxation on corporations will permit them to lower their prices (they do not pay corporate income taxes anymore), and these prices go down precisely reflecting the reduction in the cost of doing business. Another first general assumption. The argument, then, is that as the cost of business decreases, prices will go down, and the total level of taxation for the consumer, the end purchaser, will decrease.
But, if the level of taxation decreases overall, how does the state generate the same level of income? There are two usual answers. On the one hand, since the overall economic activity will increase, since prices are going down it becomes much easier to make purchases, the increases in purchase exchanges will produce more taxation income for the state. And since the sale of more goods and services are being taxed than were not before, there is also some taxation income there. On the other hand, as another conservative or libertarian can argue, the state shouldn't be needing as much in the first place, and should do more with less, and this will force it to do so. Either way, the respondent notes that it initially appears that revenue from taxes decreases, but with time and with a growing economy, the revenues will increase--the two kinds of responses differ with respect to whether or not that revenue is owed to the state.
Okay, all that out of the way, here is the problem. Suppose the sales tax is 25%. Suppose I have a Seller A who has some raw material, currently selling it at $5 a unit. Purchaser A wishes to buy 1000 units, out of which she can make 30 ABCs, each ABC having sold for $183 (originally a profit of $490). For this transaction, Purchaser A needs to pay Seller A $5000 for the raw material and $1250 in sales taxes. Total cost to Purchaser A is now $6250. If Purchaser A sells all 30 ABCs for the same cost, she will only receive $5490 from the sale. In order to maintain the same (approximate, I'm ignoring cents) level of profit, she has to raise the price of one ABC to $225. Now, Purchaser B comes along and wishes to buy an ABC from Purchaser A, who is now Seller B. Seller B raises the cost of one ABC to $225 for Purchaser B. Purchaser B used to purchase 5 ABCs, at a cost of $183 each, for a total cost of $915. At the raised price, Seller B sells to Purchaser B all 5 ABCs for $1125; including the sales tax, the total cost for Purchaser B is $1407. With the 5 ABCs, Purchaser B used to make 250 BCDs, each of which sold for $4, for a total gross of $1000, making $85 in profit on the original cost (Purchase cost originally was $915, gross was $1000, so the net is $85.). For Purchaser B to make the same level of profit ($85 on top of the new cost, which is $1407), he has to raise the price of each BCD to $6. Note the dramatic jump in cost for Purchaser B, from an untaxed $915 to a Fair Tax cost of $1407.
Now, supposing just that corporate income was taxed at 35% (I don't know what the actual number is for corporate taxes, I admit), the government was taking in $1750 (Seller A: 35% of $5000 ) + $1922 (Seller B/Purchaser A: 35% of $5490) + $350 (Purchaser B: 35% of $1000) on their incomes, for a total of $4022. Under the Fair Tax, with a reduction in the amount taxed to 25%, the government takes in $1250 + $1689 + $375, totalling $3314. A lot less, but notice that there are 25 ABCs unsold in my example. Supposing those were also sold ($225 X 25), the government will take in an additional $1403, for a new Fair Tax total of $4720.
Where does this additional money come from? The answer is that it comes from the endpoint consumer. To the consumer, it appears that $2 is not a lot of a price increase in buying a BCD. But if all of the BCDs are sold at that price, the combined amount works upward to pay for the increase in taxation. Note that the increase in the price for a BCD is not 25% as one might intuitively think, but 50% of the original cost (and if you include the sales tax increase, it becomes nearly double the original $4 cost).
This is a simple example, and I'm sure a more thorough economic example will better model what will happen with the Fair Tax. For instance, more in line with what happens will be a reduction in purchasing, and this will be reflected in the costs of things as sellers work to predict how much less purchasing will occur. Sellers also use variable or preferred pricing to maintain a certain customer base. Also, there isn't just a simple transitive line of purchasing, but multiple purchases work into the production of goods and services where Purchaser B may buy directly from Seller A in addition. The transaction is less linear, more rhizomatic/networked. Also, even with this simple example, you can plug in different numbers and perhaps generate different results. I should try this shortly.
That sellers "pass on" their cost to purchasers means that prices rise for the purchaser. No doubt. And if the price rises for the purchaser, so have the costs for the next purchaser, and on and on, until all of the cost is distributed amongst the endpoint consumers. If the government is going to credit these endpoint consumers in order to offset this effect, what the government is essentially doing is funding its own revenue increase with money it has not accumulated yet through taxation.
Who does benefit, though, from this? The persons who most stand to benefit are initial producers, I believe.
Posted by charles
Beautiful girl, we love and miss you.
Posted by charles
Another excerpt from a gamefaqs post. The idea developed out of a thought about the significance of believing something "in spite of" evidence. I am not sure if this kind of idea has been developed by other thinkers, if I am "borrowing" it from them. It seems, to me, something one might develop alongside Lacan's formulations, and I think there is much about it influenced by that. This may be an idea I'll have to study and research to see if it can be made more rigorous and more refined.
The actual dialogue itself is, in the end, unimportant, as the person I am responding to probably will not continue the discussion in earnest about this particular issue. Probably, as the pattern is already there, the response will have more to do with the length and "style" of this than the argument I am constructing here.
[begin]
Of course there are many people who don't believe in a god: some of whom because they have evidence to indicate for them that there isn't one; some of whom because they were raised that way, some of whom because they lack the critical apparatus to decide one way or the other; some of whom because they have abandoned altogether the need for gods, and so on. The point I am making, and one which I take it you assert is in this discussion irrelevant and unimportant, is that:
If the structure of belief is such that one does not always need evidence for one's belief, then evidence for belief serves a role for believing different from justification or from foundation.
If this claim is true, then it naturally follows that mountains of evidence indicating one thing or another will not automatically entail belief in one thing or another. I take it this is the direction of your questions; namely, why does a god need our belief if the evidence is insufficient for belief, and particularly, why even demand belief when the evidence otherwise is insurmountable? Even so, a god could still choose to reveal itself as god, and yet that will not unequivocally force us to love him and worship him, since we already accept the existence of our loved ones and of our unloved ones, so why not present the evidence and still keep open the space for people to choose the next step of loving or rejecting this existing proven god? It seems more reasonable, therefore, to not believe in a god. Because, as I think is an implicit minor conclusion in your argument, this god has nothing to lose by revealing itself as existing, everything to gain by convincing a few more worshippers and adherents, and settling a vexing question that clearly wastes the time of so many people. Yet, it does none of these things. But what's more,
in spite of this, we still have people who do believe in this god. Why?
My suggestion, initially, was to propose to you that the people who do believe for the most part do so not because of any connection to evidence, but rather because they do not accept the logical structure of what is actually the middle section of your argument: you take it as granted--I am assuming from what you wrote--that who we love are already existing (so: a necessary condition of being a beloved is to exist), but what we have among believers is a love (or a hatred, as the case may be) for a thing without any regard for whether or not it exists (so, the locus of the proposition
shifts from the object to the subject, to: it is possible to love something which is not among the things in the world). We find this logical structure, actually, in economics, in psychoanalytics, in legal theory, in physics, as a formal structure of belief itself. From this perspective, evidence does not work to undercut or defeat belief in the existence of a thing; it does not, because the existence of the thing is irrelevant with respect to how the object shapes and structures the space in which the subject thinks and acts. This is similar to how the empty set, which does not exist in the sense that there is some positive content to it, nevertheless by its very
lack of positivity determines and founds the set which contains it.
But where evidence does matter is precisely in that shaping and contouring of the space of action within the subject (or, rather, what defines and directly is the subject itself). It is one thing to see evidence as a numerical element: build up enough of it and you have a heap, and enough of a heap signals a change in the belief structures of a person; it is another to see evidence as functions: the relationships between points within the space of action are constantly changing in light of changes in the subject's knowledge. In this sense, we can now explain how evidence for evidence--how the nature of justification is explicitly non-monotonic in that one man's fact is another man's lie relative to what the larger set of facts and lies are--operates: functions acting upon functions. Functions can be named, and grouped, and treated as elements, but we can also see how the relationships of the functions, particularly when they start to work upon each other and themselves in reflexive and transitive ways, together produce far more diverse results than if we merely saw evidence as cumulative, numerable. Justification for belief when treated as the accumulation of evidence is demonstrably non-modal, but we intuitively and immediately recognize that justification is always modal, because we make distinctions amongst kinds of belief (supposition, assumption, presumption, hypothesis, &tc) and kinds of knowledge (direct, perceptual, pure or mathematical, transmitted, procedural, &tc). But we must not forget that these functions operate in the space of thought and action, to the extent that they do not determine what one believes so much as what one thinks about the belief, what one thinks through the belief, what one does with the belief, what one cannot do with the belief, what one cannot do through the belief, what one cannot think through the belief, and so on.
This is the sense, then, in which I suggest that a belief in god can still operate even for the person who publicly states she does not believe in god. Namely in this situation, the evidence she presents for her un-belief operate in the space of her thoughts and actions as functions indistinguishable from those operating in the believer's space. While she recognizes that her lack of belief depends upon the evidences available to her--and she even supports this recognition through further evidences and claims--if the evidences operate in the exact same way as the believer's, the result is the production in her thought space of practices and thoughts conforming to those of the believer, conforming to belief. And since the logical structure of belief does not require that the object of the belief exist (for example, money does not require an actual value for it to influence behavior, only
that we act as if it does have value), she unwittingly ensnares her own thoughts and actions into the mode of the theological. The trick, because in one sense it is both magical and simply sleight of hand, is to restructure
the functions acting upon functions in the thought space so that the evidences do not operate in a manner indistinguishable from those of the believer.
They do not simply take on a different significance: they simply cease to operate in the theological mode. But, and this was my warning from earlier, because these functions are reflexive, what may be taken to be actually some other mode is gathered up from and indicated by what is taken to be "other" in the thought space of, unsurprisingly, other people, and, again without surprise, the evidences of
being-other are themselves subject to the same logical problem of functional indistinguishability--what she might think is being-other-than-theological is actually still caught up in the mode of the theological. Or, what can be considered the worse problem, is to miss that the production of thought of a certain, otherwise reprehensible activity or thought is itself occurring in one's own thought space, since the indistinguishability of the operations of these functions permits this level of confusion between what is internally generated and what is received from elsewhere. Still, the collective result of further and further exchanges between thought spaces, between the subjects themselves, is undecidable: there is no way of determining in advance whether intersubjectivity actually leads to mutually shared thoughts and actions or greater and greater antagonism amongst the subjects. But we have no other guide to correcting our beliefs than this, for all that it is open to internal dissimulation and error.
Thus, if the goal of the critic of religious belief is to defeat or undercut religious belief,
it will not be attained through the accumulation of evidence against it. If you prefer the ironic, this is precisely the subtext of
1984, that evidences are not in themselves what guarantee the decision to change one's mind, and even that they are not what maintain the supports of one's beliefs. Of course, in one sense, you already know this, so it comes to the question of what the purpose of your questions is. And, since you asked for an explanation of why you cannot bring yourself to believe in something and thus will perish for it (admittedly, I took advantage of the ambiguity in your request for an explanation, an advantage that comes with such a close reading, of course), this is my answer. It is because we/you do not believe with reference to evidence, we/you believe with reference to what the evidence produces according to the larger narratives and systems in place in y/our thought space that determine the productions of these evidences. And if the narrative operating in one's self is not structured so as to interpret the Gospel message, if it is not completely restructured by the insertion into it of a new thought about the old relationship of the individual and the community to the Law and to the Messiah, then the subjective response is a restructuring of the thought space further and further into the shape of the Law. The Law, seemingly now released from the threat of violence and turned into the lack of any prohibition, makes its return as the abolishment of any hope for enjoyment. That is the true sense of torture--not having one's face eaten by rats or burned away from fire, but rather subjectively appropriating the absence of the Law in such a way that there is no more room for enjoyment. Desire ceases to operate for the subject without any mechanisms or operations to produce it within themselves, without reference to the other, without any means to obscure it, conceal it, disguise it, treasure it, hold onto it, because it no longer even
persists.
[end post]
I have been arguing for some time that hell is not "literally" a place of direct and immediate torture. I tend to see the lake of fire in the apocalypse as, what I recently on gamefaqs called it, "undecidable." I think there is a reason why there isn't any actual description of what goes on in the lake of fire, of whether it is definitely indefinite in duration or not, and so on: there is no measure for translating what happens there into language that is meaningful here. The best we could have is poetical language, and even then it is unusually sparse. (I am, of course, taking for granted that most people are actually talking about hades when they talk about hell, since I accept there is a difference between them that is supported by the scriptural accounts.) I do think, though, that whatever the lake of fire is, it is something that the subject appropriates
as "hell" or "lake of fire." The punishment is not so much external as it is generated from within. Satan, the Adversary, operates in the scriptures as a function of the Law. He is the accuser, and the one who tempts. But accusation and temptation will only work if these things have meanings for the subject within the subject's own life or spirit. There is no accusation of an unknown person--someone has to step into the accusation and, being interpellated by it, takes the accusation upon himself and comes to recognize himself in the accusation. In this sense, Paul comes to recognize himself as Paul only when he gets "hit" by the charge of covetousness, and then the something in Paul that is more than Paul comes forth and begins to un-live through him,
and yet he recognizes this as himself as death. This last paragraph starts the combination of this with my toying with the idea of evidence as functions.
And a toying it is.
Posted by charles
"For He says,'AT THE ACCEPTABLE TIME I LISTENED TO YOU, AND ON THE DAY OF SALVATION I HELPED YOU.'
Behold, now is 'THE ACCEPTABLE TIME,' behold, now is 'THE DAY OF SALVATION'
Giving no cause for offense in anything, so that the ministry will not be discredited, but in everything commending ourselves as servants of God, in much endurance, in afflictions, in hardships, in distresses, in beatings, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in sleeplessness, in hunger, in purity, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in genuine love, in the word of truth, in the power of God, by the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and the left, by glory and dishonor, by evil report and good report;
regarded
as deceivers and yet true
as unknown yet well-known
as dying yet behold, we live
as punished yet not put to death
as sorrowful yet always rejoicing
as poor yet making many rich
as having nothing yet possessing all things.
Posted by charles
Another comment inspired by a gamefaqs exchange. The first 1 and 2 come from two posters, 1 a non-believer and 2, I take it, a believer. The second 1 and 2 are Jesus and Peter, from Matthew 18. The last part refers to when someone quoted Galatians 6:7 in response to the same question quicksilvver (the first 1) asked.
[begin]
1:
"Will the Almighty loving God not grant me forgiveness for being a human created in his own image?"
2:
"A truly repentant person does not ask for forgiveness and then go do what he did again."
2:
"Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?"
1
"I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven."
No doubt quicksilvveris being facetious, but the truth is that the formal structure of what he says is correct:
if you ask God for forgiveness,
he will give it. For, why would God demand for his people to imitate Jesus, and Jesus instruct us to be continually in forgiveness as we ourselves have been forgiven (and
are being forgiven), if God himself is not willing to be giving of such an amazing grace?
How does the Christian reconcile this, if the Christian is committed to a view that God is not inconsistent, that God demands obedience, and that God himself is the author of the life that forgives?
Or, does a Christian truly believe that there is no such thing as a true repentance in himself? For, if that Christian in any way continues to sin, then she is not truly repentant, in which case
God's forgiveness is not extended to her as gift nor as grace. She is then
never going to be forgiven,
never is forgiven, since at no point is her question of forgiveness free of the doubt of the truthfulness of her repentance. Particularly if her past shows her to have continued to sin even after having asked God, in a brief moment of clear faith, for forgiveness. And, since whatever is in doubt is of sin, then there is no asking of forgiveness available to the Christian, and so he remains
unforgiven.
That is the problematic associated with this idea that there is such a thing as a
true repentance and a false one. God is much more formulaic than that: Ask and you shall receive,
not Ask and you might receive, depending upon whether or not I like you, depending upon whether or not I'm in the mood, depending upon whether or not I think you're sincere, depending upon whether or not this is your first time asking, ...
The importance of grace is that
it makes no demands upon the sincerity of its recipient, or else
it is not grace.
...
Incidentally, the context of Paul's claim that God will not be mocked is, (un)surprisingly,
our actions in restoring others. Reaping and sowing, in that context, is not the sowing into our own flesh, since
that leads to corruption, but the shift in perspective to the community in the Spirit leads to a sowing that reaps eternal life. So, this verse's application to an individual's repeated asking of forgiveness is not straightforward. We shouldn't lose sight of the new life as a life
with others.
[end]
Posted by charles
From a
topic on gamefaqs, where the original question was about "Once Saved, Always Saved":
[text]
Polemos | Posted 4/9/2008 12:03:15 AM |
Crimson, you cite a textual analysis to conclude that 'thorn in the flesh' refers probably to masturbation, but do no such textual analysis on the many and various ways that 'saved' is used by Paul. It seems to me your argument just assumes that there is only one kind of salvation, and only one way of being saved, which presents problems for his entire soteriological claim about Messiah Jesus in relation to his other claim about a married believing wife being the salvation for the husband (ie., he is saved through her).
I don't think it is a flagrant error to think that salvation in the Messiah is something assured--Paul's strident defense of the importance and significance of the Resurrection as well as his tone in his criticism of the (re-)Judaizers together indicate how important, for him, it is that there is only one ground for being saved: the Resurrection. Certainly the dying that is taking place in the believer is not, itself, instantaneous, but there is definitely a singular event of a newness of life. In this context of the newness of life, there is complete and unequivocal assurance of salvation. In the context of the dying of the old things, there is a process of mortification that is constantly taking place. I can understand how people can overemphasize one without paying attention to the other, but Paul's argument should not be ignored in its dialectical nature, especially as it is most developed in his last great work in Romans.
---
It took a long time to become the thing I am to you.
And you won't tear it apart without a fight, without a heart.
———
Crimson Hellkite | Posted 4/9/2008 2:35:01 PM |
...
but do no such textual analysis on the many and various ways that 'saved' is used by Paul.
Yeah, I did. It's made very clear by the Pauline epistles that salvation is an on-going process.
which presents problems for his entire soteriological claim about Messiah Jesus in relation to his other claim about a married believing wife being the salvation for the husband (ie., he is saved through her).
Specify what you mean.
I don't think it is a flagrant error to think that salvation in the Messiah is something assured
Even though Paul says several times that he might be cut off from salvation, or that he is afraid that he won't be saved?
---
"The ways of the Lord are not comfortable, but we were not created for comfort, but for greatness, for good."
Pope Benedict XVI
———
Polemos | Posted 4/9/2008 6:36:31 PM |
Crimson, I don't follow. Citing five verses from Paul is not a textual analysis, unless you mean to say that you did the analysis away from the screen and here reproduced the verses that you analyzed. Otherwise, quoting a verse or referring to the verse is just not something I'm going to consider being a textual analysis; it's already a loose account on my part to say that your implicit argument concerning the construction of 'thorn in the flesh' from 'sins of the flesh' and 'thorn' constitutes a textual analysis.
I'm not denying that there is a process, a progression, or a timefulness to one's being-saved, but I think where your argument fails with respect to how Paul himself argues is that he is not using 'saved' always in the sense of "living after the death of the law." Here, let's try this. Give a rigorous definition of what you think Paul
does mean when he uses 'saved' or 'is saved' or 'saves' in his letters, just from the five verses you cited in your earlier post.
As for my reference to 1 Corinthians 7, my comment is meant to point out the link between how Paul relates both
sôzô, to save, and
hagiazô, to make holy. The unbelieving spouse
is sanctified (note the passive tense construction) by the believing spouse, and this is Paul's reason for not divorcing (but this is
not conversely a reason
for marrying). But then Paul goes on to introduce
knowledge into the dialectic by suggesting that a spouse does not know if the other spouse will be saved, and from this lack of knowledge the assurance of any salvation rests in the choice of God. First, that being-made-holy is linked by Paul to being-saved is crucially important here, since it shows how the two are related to one another intimately. Second, the significance of the choice of God is not meant so much in this instance as the usual Calvinist line of God choosing his elect; rather, the choice of God is
for the believer towards the unbeliever; that is, God chooses the believing individual to be the means of grace for the unbelieving one, and he makes his choices by
cutting through the conventional social relationships that typically have defined particular roles and then
reconstructing them according to his own, new creation. This is why Paul proceeds directly from this discussion of un/believing spouses to un/circumcised believers to the redefining of freedom and slavery in direct opposition to the unredeemed convention, to the rather amazing section of living in this world in the mode of the as-though. This section of the as-though at first appears so out of place in the midst of a discussion of marriage, but I think how I reconstruct his argument makes coherent the need for it in this context. Namely, Paul is moved from the question of what to do about being "yoked to unbelievers" to the radical answer of understanding the choice of God in election as a true
revolution in the values associated with being husband, being master, being father; revolution in the sense of
turning over the dynamics of power (
the constant theme, the very gospel, in Paul as the message and importance of living in the Messiah), so that we come to see salvific activity as unending. But unending not in the sense of a denial of the singularity of a person's own salvation, since there is only one resurrection, but unending in the sense of an affirmation about our involvement in the redemption and sanctification, making-holy,
of others. And that is the key point to the dialectic: it is not a sanctification of
myself for which I am saved by Jesus, but it is to be the passive instrument for the salvation
of others that I am sanctified. And since there is no
knowledge of the salvation of others--it is God's choice as Paul affirms repeatedly--there is only the Spirit's gift within me to act on behalf of others for their salvation. Thus, you live in the as-though so that you will act in the midst of a thing that is passing away--to live functionally in a dying world is to be at odds with its form
within its form (the slave as the Lord's freed man; the master as Messiah's bondslave...).
I think this language is lost entirely if we continue to think from an individualistic point of view and put salvation as the endpoint of a process of being made holy. Again, I am not denying that there is a process to the life of being-saved. Life after death is as much a process due to our finitude as to anything else, but the significance of this new life can only happen from a singular change in the perspective of the believer, a change that is permanent, total, and complete--it is the change that redefines everything within the subject so that the coordinates for understanding the world are completely remapped
without anything having to change in the world itself. And, because this remapping occurs within the subject, for that very reason, the whole world itself becomes changed: behold everything is new! And everything after that, after the resurrection, is the child's life of figuring it all out
in media res. Of
working out in fear and trembling what it means
to have been saved.
---
It took a long time to become the thing I am to you.
And you won't tear it apart without a fight, without a heart.
[end]
Posted by charles
then I am already too late.
Posted by charles
So, one afternoon in Fall I sat down to watch an episode of, I think it was,
Lost that Wendy had recorded for me. There was some dialogue that either I couldn't hear because it was muffled or because there was a loudness of noise outside, so I just absent-mindedly turned on the closed captioning without thinking that this was a tape and wasn't broadcast. But as soon as I had the realization that the captioning might not be there, there it was.
And that got me thinking.
If the captioning is there and recorded, then there must be a lot of information going on in the broadcast that I'm just not aware of, and even then why would the VCR record even that? Perhaps, and obvious now, people who are deaf might just want to watch shows, too, and might just want to know what's going on. Still, so there's this information that is not there, ready for your consciousness, but it is there, a part of the fabric of the medium of communication.
This reminded me of other times where some similar thought occurred in me. Take html. A webpage presents itself to you as a certain thing, but in order to structure it, there is all this information that also has to be conveyed to get it right. There is room for bad and inconsistent interpretation, but the information is there. You just have to turn on a switch and then you can see what that structuring information is. Then there's the information that even supports the exchange of that html code, such as the handshaking and checksums and so on that occur between servers ensuring that the right data was sent and received.
Then there's the brain and the eye. It's a conceit, isn't it?, that the eye is what sees, when it's the brain that puts all of the mess together into a symbolic universe, filling in spaces with educated guesses and hastily fixing broken lines or oddities with paradoxes. But what does the eye turn over to the brain, and what does the brain do with all that computational or inferential stuff that never rises up to the level of consciousness? Where does it all
go, if going is a metaphor that applies here?
My friends, a ways way back, had this game where you bent over, breathed really hard, and then sat up to hold your breath just as another person pressed onto your chest. You faint, within seconds. What was fun in this, for me, was that I could instantly slip into a dream when this happened, and the dreams were as insane and symbolic and mixed-up as my ordinary dreams. I felt, and kinda still do feel this way, as though all the time I was awake and talking and doing conscious things my dreams were there assembling and disassembling in the most amazing configurations. I still feel that way because it happens every so often when I doze off that I'll fall into a dream state.
This is something that's been there in my head for a few months now, pulling together observations and questions from around and trying to see what can be learned or thought in this. You see it in gossip, in paintings, in lover's quarrels, in law enforcement, in books of crazy fiction that you read for fun and amusement. A kind of information that doesn't parasitize on the conscious or face of the word, but rather rests and permeates throughout it, gives it a structure and a way of interpreting it, holds it together as a sharing of something by building that connection. It reminds me of the obscene supplement in Žižek, but it isn't that, except where they are both hidden, unaddressed, and yet motivation.
Eventually it becomes a question of ontology, doesn't it?, since you have to find the idea, or the form, or the space, or the symbol that makes the interpreted world. But, I don't know if I believe, myself, in a world of only perceptions and never-reached truths. I mean, I don't think there are things to reality that make it real who are themselves things we could never access. If there were ever a self-replicating idea, isn't this
the paradigm of one? Instead, I think of this as a communication of the subtext itself: you don't get one without the other. But there is, in some way, a switch that opens things up. Like, forgive me, taking a pill to first see that the world is really a machine's interpretation of human existence, and then mentally accepting this to see how the human interprets as code the machine's production of reality. Yeah, a bad analogy to the Matrix...
So, what does the brain do with all the fat and gristle?
