Nowhere is this more important than what BASIS you use for thinking. The basic assumptions one begins with determine where you wind up. Unfortunately, most modern westerners simply start with certain beginning building blocks about life and how we view it, believing "this is just the way we do it." Anything else seems ridiculous. These are called "presuppositions" in that we "pre suppose" them.
In older, wiser times this was not so. Much time was spent examining and thinking through what we can "know" and what we can reasonably believe, with explanations and observations about how we get there and where it will take us. When I first read Calvin's INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, I was confused and befuddled on why he started out with this long stream of blabber about whether self knowledge or knowledge of God was the proper starting point in examining knowledge. Now I see the sheer genius of it, but then I was so mesmerized by the assumptions of modern westerners that I could not even see that I did not see. Someone said once that these "axioms" or starting points of thought are not something you see. Rather, you see THROUGH them or WITH them and almost never stop to examine the ideas themselves. You just use them to filter and sort the data you have.
That said, I absolutely love this article in "bombthrower.com." It is about bitcoin, and the main point is that money and valuation of it is, at its core, a statement of values about life. He goes from there to how one should expect a materialistic, humanistic, reductionisic neopaganism to morph into a statist totalitarian goo that seeks to absorb and govern everything. Atheistic materialism with its silly pretentions of being irreligious is simply an alt-religion and will always behave like one. It is why bitcoin is favored by most, if not all, thoughtful believers in a Christian world view. That is the summation of the article.
However, he does spend a little time laying out the STARTING POINT for why he rejects the reductionism of the west. He starts with the most "science" part of science itself, which is physics. This is an area which is the most immune to the silly flatheaded obtuse dogma of materialism in academia. The best thinkers in science are the physicists who refuse to simply recite an "orthodoxy" of reductionism and expel heretics who deviate. Physicists are about the only group left who do so.
We live in a world of radical material reductionism. Conventional canon holds that thought is simply a by-product of brain activity. At its most reductive level, thought, and consciousness itself are just accidents of innumerable material processes randomly iterating over billions of years until one day, some apes suddenly became aware of themselves. “The rest is history”, goes the logic.
Contrary to this, we have multiple streams of philosophy, mythology, certain currents of depth psychology and over the last hundred years even science, namely quantum mechanics, that takes a completely different position. The material world is a consequence of non-material reality, not the precursor to it, and that non-material reality is self-aware and conscious:
With that, we are suddenly past the pompous know nothings who assume "religion" is irrelevant superstitious nonsense, and are pushed back to Heraclitus (500 or so BC) who observed that all human thought is governed by RULES of thought. That is our logic is NOT something which springs from our heads, but rather conforms to patterns which all human reasoning conforms, and MUST conform. We simply cannot think, or reason, without these external "rules" or "laws" of thought. These "rules" of thought belong to the realm of THOUGHT, and are thus immaterial and not physical. Thought comes from a mind, thus the rules of inquiry into the physical word, observations of order, dispute, reason, logic and rationality must come from a PERSONALITY. Heraclitus wasn't sure WHAT that personality was, so he just called it a reasoning power, or an undefined entity in the universe. He called it the LOGOS, which is Greek for "WORD" and said this "WORD" was the key to order, reason, mental coherence, logic and rationality.
So, when you pick up the gospel of John, and you read the first 14 verses or so, it is not simply some obscure dilly dallying you see there. It is truly a bombshell of a challenge to something the Greeks understood, but had not "finished out" in their thought. Rationality itself, thought itself, in modern parlance, is based in "consciousness."
This is such a slap in the face to the pseudointellectual blabber of some twit who adopts an academic posture and sneers at the religious rubes because he took "Darwinism 101" in an intro biology course.
You will pardon my contempt for this kind of addle headed empty arrogance, but my contempt is not based in an assumption that I am "smarter" than these cretins (and they are truly cretins!). It is, in my better moments, based in wonder, awe, amazement and yes, even humility (if I can use that word about myself) before the presence of a superintellect. Reading the scriptures with an eye open to the history of human thought reveals an infinite and vast supermind whose expansiveness and detailed planning make it impossible to deny Him, unless one deliberately shuts down and remains appallingly ignorant about what road of thought they used to get there.
In my older age, I am more and more content to be a "little" person and take my proper place in the universe. In doing so, I have a deeper understanding of the verbal creativity in the Psalms seeking to reveal and illuminate the unspeakably vast and glorious creator, who has for some reason, chosen to be my redeemer.
"In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God." (John 1.1)
I kneel.
In older, wiser times this was not so. Much time was spent examining and thinking through what we can "know" and what we can reasonably believe, with explanations and observations about how we get there and where it will take us. When I first read Calvin's INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, I was confused and befuddled on why he started out with this long stream of blabber about whether self knowledge or knowledge of God was the proper starting point in examining knowledge. Now I see the sheer genius of it, but then I was so mesmerized by the assumptions of modern westerners that I could not even see that I did not see. Someone said once that these "axioms" or starting points of thought are not something you see. Rather, you see THROUGH them or WITH them and almost never stop to examine the ideas themselves. You just use them to filter and sort the data you have.
That said, I absolutely love this article in "bombthrower.com." It is about bitcoin, and the main point is that money and valuation of it is, at its core, a statement of values about life. He goes from there to how one should expect a materialistic, humanistic, reductionisic neopaganism to morph into a statist totalitarian goo that seeks to absorb and govern everything. Atheistic materialism with its silly pretentions of being irreligious is simply an alt-religion and will always behave like one. It is why bitcoin is favored by most, if not all, thoughtful believers in a Christian world view. That is the summation of the article.
However, he does spend a little time laying out the STARTING POINT for why he rejects the reductionism of the west. He starts with the most "science" part of science itself, which is physics. This is an area which is the most immune to the silly flatheaded obtuse dogma of materialism in academia. The best thinkers in science are the physicists who refuse to simply recite an "orthodoxy" of reductionism and expel heretics who deviate. Physicists are about the only group left who do so.
We live in a world of radical material reductionism. Conventional canon holds that thought is simply a by-product of brain activity. At its most reductive level, thought, and consciousness itself are just accidents of innumerable material processes randomly iterating over billions of years until one day, some apes suddenly became aware of themselves. “The rest is history”, goes the logic.
Contrary to this, we have multiple streams of philosophy, mythology, certain currents of depth psychology and over the last hundred years even science, namely quantum mechanics, that takes a completely different position. The material world is a consequence of non-material reality, not the precursor to it, and that non-material reality is self-aware and conscious:
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we talk about as existing, postulates consciousness.”
- Max Planck
With that, we are suddenly past the pompous know nothings who assume "religion" is irrelevant superstitious nonsense, and are pushed back to Heraclitus (500 or so BC) who observed that all human thought is governed by RULES of thought. That is our logic is NOT something which springs from our heads, but rather conforms to patterns which all human reasoning conforms, and MUST conform. We simply cannot think, or reason, without these external "rules" or "laws" of thought. These "rules" of thought belong to the realm of THOUGHT, and are thus immaterial and not physical. Thought comes from a mind, thus the rules of inquiry into the physical word, observations of order, dispute, reason, logic and rationality must come from a PERSONALITY. Heraclitus wasn't sure WHAT that personality was, so he just called it a reasoning power, or an undefined entity in the universe. He called it the LOGOS, which is Greek for "WORD" and said this "WORD" was the key to order, reason, mental coherence, logic and rationality.
So, when you pick up the gospel of John, and you read the first 14 verses or so, it is not simply some obscure dilly dallying you see there. It is truly a bombshell of a challenge to something the Greeks understood, but had not "finished out" in their thought. Rationality itself, thought itself, in modern parlance, is based in "consciousness."
This is such a slap in the face to the pseudointellectual blabber of some twit who adopts an academic posture and sneers at the religious rubes because he took "Darwinism 101" in an intro biology course.
You will pardon my contempt for this kind of addle headed empty arrogance, but my contempt is not based in an assumption that I am "smarter" than these cretins (and they are truly cretins!). It is, in my better moments, based in wonder, awe, amazement and yes, even humility (if I can use that word about myself) before the presence of a superintellect. Reading the scriptures with an eye open to the history of human thought reveals an infinite and vast supermind whose expansiveness and detailed planning make it impossible to deny Him, unless one deliberately shuts down and remains appallingly ignorant about what road of thought they used to get there.
In my older age, I am more and more content to be a "little" person and take my proper place in the universe. In doing so, I have a deeper understanding of the verbal creativity in the Psalms seeking to reveal and illuminate the unspeakably vast and glorious creator, who has for some reason, chosen to be my redeemer.
"In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God." (John 1.1)
I kneel.
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