myth

What is the Word of God?

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También en español In my recent post What is the Name of God? I explained that one must recognize two concepts of deity. One is the absolutely perfect omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity (the omni-cubed god), whose acts in infinite space and eternal time are necessarily uniform and invisible, who putatively makes possible and upholds everything that is or can ever be. We recognize that Love is the best descriptive name we have for this deity. Though no physical image can embody all this represents, an image of Aphrodite/Venus, the classical god of Love, provides a convenient symbol.

Aphrodite, god of Love

The second deity is the agency of both cause and necessity in an evolving universe of space and time. This is the god that creates and shapes the development of finite reality. This is the ongoing expression of the fully integrated deity that in some Transhumanist visions of destiny (Frank Tipler‘s Omega Point or Martine Rothblatt‘s Terasem or the Supreme Being of The Urantia Book) stands at the end of time as a fully integrated mind encompassing all prior consciousnesses of supreme value in the universe, and reaching back through time to assure its own emergence. From the viewpoints of origin rather than destiny, this is the ongoing expression of the creative power that gives rise to all events and occasions that come into being and develop their destinies towards a final supreme culmination in evolved perfection.

John Zebedee was the youngest of Jesus’ inner circle of male disciples (the 12 apostles of Christian legend). He called himself “the disciple Jesus loved best” and much has been made over the exact meaning of this statement, especially in view of Jesus’ other close male associations (John the Baptist, Lazarus, and the youth John Mark, who came to play a major role in the spread of Jesus’ vision in both Rome and Egypt). In any case, of the four authors of the “canonical” legends of Jesus’ life, John Zebedee seems to have most fully grasped the transcendent nature of the divine power he believed incarnate in the human Jesus, as reflected in this opening of his biography of the Jesus he knew and recalled.:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (KJV John 1:1-3)

And that pretty well sums up the nature of the finite deity I have identified with the descriptive name Truth. Love is the desire to do good to others. Truth is the power of effective action that takes the inspiration of Love and accomplishes Good and makes Beauty. John identifies the Word as the aspect of total deity represented to earthborn humanity by the person of Jesus as he writes:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, … full of grace and truth. (KJV John 1:14)

Though no physical image can embody all this represents, I have suggested that the meme of Hermaphroditus, the classical divine two-sexed child of Aphrodite/Venus and Hermes/Mercury, may provide another convenient symbol for the reality of cosmic Truth as the supreme finite deity, the coordinator of Goodness for the creation of Beauty. I submit that such an image more fairly symbolizes the physical cosmic Truth, the genuine Word of god than any conventional image of a cruelly murdered divine avatar.

Hermaphroditus, god of Truth

Most assume that Truth knows no gender. Nothing could be further from the truth, for Truth must encompass all genders, all sexes, and all possible actions, manifestations, and phenomena that are Good manifestations of Love, even objects of Beauty.

The classical deity Hermes/Mercury is the god of action. In Hermaphroditus, the powers of the god of Love are united with the god of action to embody an objectively androgyne deity able to shape action through will, through Word, to the service of Good. And this same Hermaphroditus is naturally portrayed as androgyne. I have explained in my rather long paper, Why We Are All Transgender, why the cosmic forces that govern our planet and commune with our persons are perceptible as intergender, transgender, or pan gender influences—that is, having the nature we recognize as androgyny—the combining of masculine and feminine forms of conventional gender expression.

Thus the meme of Hermaphroditus serves as an image of Truth, reminding us of the need to acknowledge the unification of all dual things, to transcend meaningless dichotomy, and to function both as a receiver and giver of True Love in all its forms. Furthermore, this meme represents a genuine cosmic reality that, even today, breaks out in the intergender impulses of people most sensitive to the intuitive appreciation of the full character of Truth and its potentials for expression in human lives. And that sensitivity is the great liberator that has always given us the true leaders of society, the Lesbian, the Gay, the Bisexual, and the Transgender, who seek to incarnate the nature of Truth.

Though Truth is a deity of action, finding expression of the desires of Love in doing Good and making Beauty, Truth is also the True Will of Love. Truth is the singular expression of the True Will, the Word, of God to our universe. Thus, Truth is the best descriptive name for the deity of finite time and space, and this deity is the Word of Love to our universe, the expression in time and space of the will of Love.

 

What is the Name of God?

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También en español In his 1953 sci-fi story, The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke imagined a Tibetan monastery where monks labored ceaselessly to list every permutation of letters in their alphabet and thus to list every possible name of god, fulfilling their destiny and bringing about the end of the universe. With the help of a computer (in 1953!) they finish the job in three months instead of 15,000 years, after which…

Ten emanations of deity

Humanity has long been preoccupied with knowing the name of god. Priests, magicians, and other charlatans tell the gullible that knowledge of the name gives power. For priests, it gives the power to tell the faithful to believe the priests are uniquely able to speak to god on their behalf, both to solicit the boons of providence and atone for past transgressions. For magicians, it gives the power to summon and direct divine forces and influences, as if, by knowing the name, one could forge god’s signature on an order to a company of angels. And, just to make sure the rubes don’t figure out the scam, the unholy are forever barred from ever uttering the name on penalty of eternal damnation. Isn’t it odd that so many people have blindly accepted this kind of bulshyte?

The ancient cultures of the levant had many gods with many names—El Shaddai, El Elyon, Yahweh, Elohim, El, and more—all of which finally collapsed into the tetragrammaton, YHVH, in Romanized Hebrew. With no vowels, like most written semitic languages, the letters merely indicate a spoken word already known to the reader. More to the point, with so many possible vowel substitutions, nobody has any idea (unless informed by an oral tradition) of how to correctly pronounce the word. And, of course, be it prayer or magic, everybody knows that god won’t pay attention if you don’t get the inflection of his name exactly right. Of course, YHVH is pretty much the way you’d write Yahweh if you left out the vowels, except it’s an improved form and you can’t be sure the old vowels really work to get the old guy’s attention anymore. In the meantime, the variant Jehovah or Jehovih has been accepted widely in fundamentalist, evangelical, pentecostal, and some other really batshit crazy cults.

Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, features a singular omni-cubed deity presiding over a legendary cosmic horde that somehow takes care of whatever happens on earth (and maybe elsewhere if there is an elsewhere). Although this idea is usually called God, that is a presumptive description, not a personal name. Cults that have a Christian origin frequently use the term Father, which derives from Jesus’ use of the term during his ministry, as recorded in the Christian gospels, as well as the prior beliefs of the Jews. And Christians further identify Jesus with the Father, since Jesus is said to be the Son of God. And he was called Yehshweh or Joshua, written as YHShVH. And of course mystical significance is attributed to the appearance of the Sh, symbolic of the spirit, in descent at the precise midpoint of the YHVH. Wow!

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury

To name God, we must define God. Unless we know who or what we are talking about, have identified him or it, there’s no point in asking for a name. Around 1070, Anselm of Canterbury framed the idea of God as “that than which a greater cannot be thought” in his famous Ontological Proof of the existence of God. While most philosophers today accept the validity of the proof, with some qualifications, it clearly does not prove the existence of God, unless you accept Anselm’s definition, which is basically that of an omni-cubed deity that is totally all-pervasive and totally involved in the dynamic upholding of everything we perceive as finite reality as well as (probably) a great deal more. Thus, if this presumptive deity is to treat all creation equally, we will not find this God personally intervening in the affairs of individuals, except by providence. In effect, although one may choose to believe in the existence and power of the omni-cubed deity, one is forced to admit that there is no objective way to directly and unambiguously observe that God’s existence in Real Life.

Suppose we clarify Anselm’s term “greatest” to be “perfectest.”Ahhh, we are not allowed to compare perfections (at least not in conventional English language). Rather, we say things are imperfect, partially perfected, or completely perfect as a first approximation to the relativity of perfection. So we might say God is “that which is absolutely perfect in all respects.” But Anselm’s simple logic doesn’t make sense here, because our ability to imagine such a thing is questionable and perfection is an absolute reality outside space and time towards which the finite universe is evolving. We can only utter a sound offered as a name, but we cannot properly describe or conceive of such perfection. The absolute deity is, from the viewpoint of time and space, irrevocably committed to upholding the causal consistency and realizing the inevitable destiny of the finite universe as it evolves towards final perfection.

Venus, god of Love

So, in reality, we see the possibility of two concepts of complete deity. First is the absolute deity outside the finite universe who is committed completely to keeping the framework of finite reality intact and ongoing, along with a lot of other universe activities. Second is the supreme force of destiny manifested by its influence over space-time affairs and its interactions with volitional beings of its own creation and evolution.

The first, absolute deity, is thus the existential foundation of all that can be and is. Uniform in power throughout space and time, this first deity gives all that there is to the realization and support of a universe populated with potentially deified identities. If we seek to name such a power, a stable form that gives meaning and consistency to our universe experience, we would have to call it “Love.” And if you stop thinking “God” with all the craziness your culture has attached to that word, and think “Love” instead, you will soon be developing a healthier viewpoint and attitude. In the final analysis, Love is the desire to do good to others, and Love is the best name for God that we have.

Hermaphroditus

The second, finite deity, is thus the source of the evolution-driving force of destiny that bends finite sequential linear factual causation to the arc of destiny’s fulfillment. Love inspires action, but action cannot be satisfied unless good is actually being done. It is necessarily the work of this second, finite deity to arrange orderly evolution of the universe towards a goal of finite perfection, akin to the absolute perfection of Love, but evolved in time from initial existence to final perfection. If we name such a power, a dynamic influence that shapes our Love-inspired actions to maximize the accomplishment of good, we would call it “Truth.” And, if you stop thinking “what do I do now” with all the confusion of everyday life and act in the spirit of “Truth” instead, you will soon be developing an easier, more orderly, and much more effective approach to life. We have called this god “Truth,” the guidance of will in the application of action to the doing of good and the realization of beauty. We will explore this concept more fully in our next post, “What is the Word of God?”

When you think about what kind of God might mean something to yourself, remember that the omni-cubed existential absolute and perfect deity is unnoticeable unless one seeks to find a cause to explain the existence of the universe. We affirm that such a God is known to us through recognition of Love as the upholding structure of reality. On the other hand, the active, evolving, self-perfecting deity manifest as the force of destiny acting in time and space we can observe as we draw on Truth to direct our actions of will in the doing of good. Truth is the name of the active, saving deity that saves us from the uncertainties of right and loving action in seeking to do good and make beauty.

 

Time to Make Corporations into People? Give me a Break!

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We want to continue an earlier discussion of the fallacies of the decision of the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United case from a viewpoint of pure logic and how it is a subject with which the legal profession as a whole seems quite unfamiliar.

The essential error in the decision in that case stems from the assumption that a corporate person is functionally equivalent in society to an individual. The patent falsity of this concept is well known to political scientists of the rationalist school since the 1940s; however, rationality is not a feature of today’s US political discourse.

It is quite common for societies to enact laws that are completely contrary to physical, social, and motivational reality. Indiana once legislated that the value of pi should be 4. Such misconceived law is always destructive. In fact, if our society were to ever enact sane, rational legislation it would be a cause of great celebration. The pillars of society—religion, government, and commerce—were never intended to function for the benefit of the public, rather they were developed by men to dominate and enslave people in service to a small conspiracy of worthless bullies.

Our liberation from enslavement is the recognition that these pillars rest upon the unsound foundation created by the violent suppression of erotic freedom, and our collective and unquestionable destiny is to undermine these foundations and demolish the false channels of support they offer to the delusions of a failed legacy social order. Anarchism (not anarchy) is the process by which we systematically replace old, worn, and coercive systems now enforced by the religion, government, and commerce with new, adaptive, voluntary systems that care for each human in equal measure.

Today we are witness to the initial quivering, the aura, the sense of deja vu of the American body politic as its collective psyche ramps up to the quadrennial grand mal seizure known as a “Presidential election.” Once again we test whether an irrational convulsion of uninformed public opinion can be exploited by the media to herd the ignorant, and everyone else caught up in the stampede, into the slaughterhouse. It makes no difference which slaughterhouse you choose—all provide equivalent service and none exist to foster the best interest of yourself or the converging mob of marching morons. And today, leading one of the marching moron contingents, is a descendant of George Romney, who was once the leading right-wing candidate for the presidency, with none other than “the movie actor who once played George Gipp” as his vice. What a load of vice that would have been!

Just yesterday little Romney, the spitting image of the man who once drove American Motors and a good part of Michigan into the toilet, spoke up with great faux-intellectual profundity to inform his audience that “corporations are people, my friend.” It is hard to imagine how any sane person would expect people to believe this or to vote for anyone who did. The parasites that perpetually inhabit the judicial chambers of the Supreme Court may be beyond the reach of common sense, but candidates are not so immune. Both people and politicians well understand the differences between individual decision making and that of groups. Our most skilled legislators have been expert at the manipulation of these differences to their advantage, while anyone who has personally faced corporate anonymity has experienced the difference first hand.

Groups of people, no matter how organized, whether as corporations, governments, or religions, are not in any way equivalent to individuals. Most critically, they are fundamentally incapable of prioritizing their desires or agendas in a way that fairly and equally addresses the needs of all their members. As an individual, you are free to consider your alternatives and choose what seems to best meet your perceived needs. If you are a very thoughtful person, you may make a brief cortico-thalamic pause before taking condign action. And you may, of course, be undecided until you are able to collect additional information.

While a group or team may make its best effort to simulate such a personal and individual process, the model being followed is inevitably deficient. It is easy to see how this deficiency develops. A rational individual follows a four-step process in taking action, which has been conveniently summarized in the acronym “OODA.” OODA stands for “orient, observe, decide, act.” OODA is executed in a loop, and the loop is executed as rapidly as practically possible to be maximally responsive to a shifting situation. When a committee tries to follow this process it is necessary to divide the labor or require synchronization of activities. In either case the behavior and capabilities of each team member combine with those of every other to diffuse personal responsibility for the decision or the outcome of the action.

In such a case, when no one bears personal responsibility, there is no possibility of accountability and thus no way to recursively improve the quality of decisions. A rational individual learns from mistakes. Groups will repeat mistakes unless solutions (which may themselves be mistaken) are dictated by a single individual. Let’s examine one case in which the diffusion of responsibility comes home to roost and unarguably shows the foolishness of imagining collectives to be individual persons.

On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide Corporation pesticide plant in Bhopal, India leaked around 32 tons of toxic gases, including methyl isocyanate gas which led to the worst industrial disaster to date. The official death toll was initially recorded around 5,000. Many figures suggest that 18,000 died within two weeks, and it is estimated that around 8,000 have died since then of gas-poisoning-related diseases.

This disaster was caused by incompetent design, operation, and maintenance of a hazardous industrial facility. The largely anonymous parties who could have prevented it through greater technical competence and more attention to detail caused the deaths of 26,000 people. If this were a single, simple case of manslaughter, someone would be charged and punished, if only to discourage others from following their example. But how is any enforcement to be levied against the responsible firm? If the firm is a person, then there must be a way to make enforcement take on personal significance. But there is no personality in a company, no potential for collective accountability. Rather, the structure of most companies encourages the guilty to scapegoat the innocent and suffer no consequences at all for evil actions.

Financial judgment, the vehicle by which the judicial system imposes penalties on companies, is clearly inadequate. If a company can avoid responsibility for its crimes by a cash payment, why is not the same generosity extended to individuals? If an individual can be executed for premeditated murder, what comparable judgment applies to a company? Shall the entirety of its assets be seized? Should the corporate structure be dissolved? Should the company be forced to cease all operation?

There is no equitable answer to this challenge. There is no congruence or even similarity between persons and companies. Anyone who asserts such is non-rational and thus non-sane. It should be no surprise that an ignorant, thoughtless, and bigoted politician holds such views. It is truly tragic when delusional beliefs are held by the persons who seek responsibility for giving true meaning and value to our system of government.

—Dan Massey

The Newseum—Vainglorious Journalism Leads to Triumphalist History

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The Newseum sits on Pennsylvania Ave. in the District of Columbia next door to the Canadian embassy about halfway from the White House to the Capitol. A magnificent architectural accomplishment in glass and some white metal (aluminum?), it contains a vast 7-story atrium. Everything that can be transparent is transparent. The parable for the news media seems rather obvious. And you can enjoy this Disneyesque production for a mere $21.95, for two days’ admission. If this seems a bad value, it’s probably because all the Smithsonian museums are free and have nicer gift shops.

Inside, arranged like the Stations of the Cross, are the tiers of exhibits, interactive playgrounds, working studios, more exhibits, a gift shop, and a food court. Unlike Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré or Guadalupe, the faithful are taken to the top of the mountain by an all-glass joy of an elevator. And then descend by ramps and steps to worship at each Station of the Press. Make no mistake. This is not a rational or logical endeavor. This is a monument to one of the religious cults of our nation–the so-called “Free Press.” As such, its pretentions are not limited by either fact or truth, but go to serve the great myth that is American “constitutional” government by the People. A basically good idea executed rather haphazardly, compared to what it promised.

A casual viewer may think that every major event in the last 200 years was initiated and orchestrated by the press. Further reflection shows that, even when events occurred unexpectedly, the initial and follow-up press coverage defined the public memory and archival record of the events, including multi-generational effects (e.g., future history). As an example:

We are shown how the rogue bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover, could infiltrate the highest levels of our government through corruption, criminal conspiracy, and blackmail, even as a feckless press elevated him as a national icon of progressive law enforcement and public safety. Nowhere in this paean to Hoover and the press of the day, heavily sponsored it appears by the FBI, did I note reflection or self-criticism or even comprehension of the possibility that the press had been gullible co-conspirators in Hoover’s aggrandizement, which so distorted the realization of our national values throughout most of the 20th century and linger with us today.

There are many exhibits presenting a collective, synthetic record of events assembled from selected press reports. Where a death blow was dealt to all human freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution in the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, the Newseum is silent. On as issue of grave importance and representing serious injury to the press, the press is silent, not only in reaction, but in acknowledgment of the destructive reality. They might as well be dead.

And so the press, with its collective ignorance and cultural biases, records the events of time. The stories and, finally, myths that arise from this shallow sloppiness become fixed in the minds of people and define what is considered to have been true, even it, as often happens, the press record bears no meaningful or logical relationship to the reality of the event.

The serious question raised by this subtle distortion of reality in the mainstream media is how it affects the development and interpretation of history, our national myth. For historians will draw on recorded data, and the mainstream media produce more data and content than any other private agency. So it is easy to see that the slant of the historical record is shaped by prevailing media assumptions of the period being analyzed. While a historian may find arguments and events advantaging one side or another in some dispute, his analysis may not penetrate to the underlying errors of thinking that distort the positions on both sides of a dispute. So when the media focus on a particular event uncritically, this naive approach tends to define the simplistic story of a complex issue. History is largely written by the winners of any dispute. Triumphalism is a great failing of the human spirit. And from this emerges bulshyte, not history.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

When we examine the so-called historical narratives of our own or other cultures, we quickly find much that is commonly believed that has no basis in reality at all. One need only consider the legends of the founding of our nation and the roles of George Washington to know that this is not the Native American view, not the French-Canadian view, and certainly not the Primitive Mormon view of what the United States is and what it stands for in terms of “freedom.” Our own national myth, enshrined in endless hours of fantasy contemplating and analyzing such delusions as “manifest destiny” and “states’ rights,” begins to resemble Horatio Greenough’s half-naked statue of George, a fitting symbol for the founder of a nation that glories in empire rather than service to humanity, no matter how little it relates to the man himself.

 

—Dan Massey

 

Why the United States Government is Damaged Goods (Part 2 of 2)

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On January 21, 2010, the 235-year lifetime of the first North American federal republic, which once called itself the United States of America, came to an abrupt end. On this date the Supreme Court of the nation issued an irrational and false ruling, in the so-called “Citizens United” case, born of a lack of any valid national visionary focus that effectively recognized and bestowed on every organized collective entity the full rights and privileges of a singular citizen. Our national constitution was designed to provide a process for managing collectives and overarching rights to limit their operation against the individual and personal choice. By according individual citizen rights to collectives, the court destroyed this balance. The result was the creation of an irremediable failure within the foundation of balanced decision making in the Constitution, resulting in the final destruction of any voice from the people at the ballot box.

Kenneth Arrow

Collectives are not and can never be functionally equivalent to individuals. The critical difference is in the quality of decision making. Individuals make choices based on their own sense of truth and their will to act upon it (or not). Collectives aggregate the opinions, true and untrue, fantastic and incomplete, of their members by various means, but never as an individual. The essential unfairness of this was conclusively demonstrated in the 40’s by Kenneth Arrow, in a PhD thesis that foreshadowed a lifetime of work for which he later received the Nobel Prize in Economics. In brief, Arrow showed that, given a group of three or more people, all expressing preferences according to their own desires, there was no possible way to combine their individual judgments to achieve a collective decision that would be non-dictatorial, representative, decisive, and fair, among necessary qualities. The main difference is that the individual decides, but the group decision making process, even conducted with perfect transparency, necessarily diffuses the inevitably illogical and irrational way the conclusion was reached, protecting the guilty within the group by spreading moral responsibility across the whole body of participants, both innocent and guilty. Of course, Arrow’s Paradox may also be taken as a proof of the inevitable inadequacy of any collective form of government to achieve all the ideals one might reasonably expect of it.

Today we already see our dead nation rotting away as a direct result of the single decision in Citizens United; however, a great many of the foundations of our nationhood had already been undermined or had never been implemented at all, as I noted yesterday in comparing the colonial treatment of the black man, who could be enslaved, to the treatment of the red man, who lost both life and society to avoid enslavement. Equality of opportunity and social redress for the injustices of slavery seem to have slowly, painfully advanced. The survivors of the great North American Genocide for the most part languish in poverty without social services or infrastructure, though some have won the proverbial jackpot by having control of petroleum sources or legalized gambling. The privilege gap between the Mashantucket Peqod, a tiny tribe that operates the vast Foxwoods Casino complex in Connecticut, and the Hopi inhabitants of Third Mesa in dry, red rocky, desolate, Arizona is now as vast as the income inequality of our nation as a whole, if not more so.

The Constitution elaborates a mechanical government and gives it force, while the Bill of Rights offers a set of vague and unenforceable promises to protect the individual from the depredations of government and the mob or horde. What can we possibly do to rescue our communities from the global plan of legalized slavery that is now sliding into place with the surety born of an alien invasion of overwhelming might? Old-style humans increasingly organize to own and control all property and, since property is essential to life, all living things as well. They have conspired to take control of all aspects of government, including the ability to define what government is and is to be. They have announced loudly their intention to make our presently oppressive government a refined instrument of total social and economic control, to accelerate the attrition of the weak by deliberately increasing the death rate through destruction of social and medical services and infrastructure, and to trap a planet in their incredible solipsistic delusions of personal grandeur. Such is the legacy of our pastfathers.

For over two centuries the worst of such bullies progressively gained greater control over the Federal government, the US military, and the know-nothing cults displaying their self-generated delusions and ignorance under false-flag Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which, as “religions of the book,” are peculiarly susceptible to such spiritual derailment when subjected to ignorant literal reading of their largely irrelevant and obsolete texts.

And what has all this social terrorism of the meek and powerless achieved for our nation? I refer you to the table “American Shame” from the New York Times, where you will find the US has the poorest performance among all “advanced economies” in income inequality, food insecurity, prison population, and mathematics education. At the same time, US life expectancy at birth is significantly worse than all advanced nations except Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Our unemployment rate is higher than every country but Slovenia, Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

Monday, July 4, we celebrate our nation’s birthday and honor the vision of what our nation might have been had we been a truer and wiser people, less inclined to reliance on imagined history and other myths of the past, and more willing to replace fear with love. Now that we have witnessed the cycle of our old nation, like Greece, Rome, and other false social constructs, cycling to an ignominious end in a convulsion of greed, bullying, and imperialism, we know better for the future. It is now our task to build new ways of living on the remaining working parts and reusable structures of that which we now transcend.

Our own transhuman destiny calls those of us who understand and have experienced the full dimensions of complete freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity to accept our role as teachers and leaders in the founding of a new social order. From this day we shall move forward in time with the future, at last to build that great and fabulous society of which we have always dreamed.

Our own celebration this year might be viewed as a “Launch Party” for the “New Age,” which we eagerly look forward to helping to create. There’s mighty work afoot. Let us begin to prepare for the second great North American federal republic—the nation that is to be, that will realize the ambitions of humanity to be safe and at peace, where all can grow into the fullness of their abilities.

Hail, Columbia!

—Dan Massey

 

Why the United States Government is Damaged Goods (Part 1 of 2)

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When I was growing up in Chattanooga in the 50s, I somehow acquired the belief that the United States of America was the best country in which to be born and live. I gave thanks to my god of the day I had been born an American, and wondered at the miracle of such privilege in a world torn by war, famine, disease, and poverty, in which it seemed no group of national cults could exist in peace.

Before Kent State was the Boston Massacre

When I went to college in the Boston area at the start of the 60s I was abruptly exposed to a very different view, no less idolatrous, but couched in historical ideals and events that supported two related viewpoints on which our republic was founded—a desire for intense socialization of agrarian freedoms on the one hand, simultaneously opposed and supported by mercantilist and capitalist interests where commercial advantage could be found. In Boston, we thought all the unrighteous capitalists were slave owners in the slave states.

In the 90s I moved with my family to the National Capital Region of Virginia and, in the 00s to the District of Columbia. Virginia (and Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania) really evoke the terrible realities in the birth of a new cult of nationhood. It is impossible to visit Manassas, Antietam, or Gettysburg without recalling the thousands of lives sacrificed to fear, disunity, and greed, where the soil is soaked with yet more thousands of liters of blood. And, having grown up in Chattanooga, I already knew the horrors of Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and Chickamauga. I remembered the words of that hideously false, yet weirdly inspiring line from The Battle Hymn of the Republic which says “…as he died to make men holy, we shall die to make men free.” Can mass emotional insanity built on ignorance reliably serve the cause of love and truth? We now know it cannot, does not, and never has. Today we are heir to the results of living with such foolish ideas.

Once we moved to the District, I saw how Jefferson’s forced decision to have the national capital at its present location initially captured, within one city-to-be, the national vision of union based on unity without uniformity, avoiding New York in favor of a fresh start where Georgetown and Alexandria competed for economic favor, based on different social models. I contemplated the Rosicrucian geomancy that L’Enfant drew on in planning the city, as well as the artistic ideals inspired by Paris and other great cities of Europe in that day. I understood how the desires for balanced and fair peace had inspired this most occult design, as if the greatness to be of the city and the republic for which it stands could be invoked and established within an urban architecture designed to be a subliminal parable of truth.

The National Mall, designed by the McMillan Commission at the start of the 20th century, ripped the ramshackle and decrepit commercial heart out of the original, unplanned collection of businesses, services, and residences that occupied the swampy flats west of Capitol Hill, moved the city plan closer to its Masonic origins, yet made me feel I had entered a Federal Disneyland recreation of the Roman Forum on a much grander scale, where everything was brand new classical revival and beaux-arts architecture, a gleaming alabaster city “undimmed by human tears.” Unfortunately, to me the brilliance of this parklike setting for our Federal buildings and monuments was drenched in the human blood spilled to achieve the triumphalist vision of a newborn world empire. This especially came home to me when the World War II memorial was completed. Emperor Trajan, the prolific builder of second-century Rome, would have been proud.

Those who walk the streets of this city patrol the paths of destiny. When we marched for equality in October 2009, the light of truth on which this city was founded and designed broke through the ocean of clotted blood and stinking death wrought by foolish greed, showing us the glorious rainbow of a better age, unconquerable and soon to be all there is.

Can the future learn from the past? Or must the future be imprisoned by the limited wisdom of the past? How can our nation escape the prison of literalistic and untruthful government and triumphalist imperial ambitions in which it seems trapped? Today, Lincoln’s words continue to apply, “…a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation…can long endure…” Now as we realize and expose how cruelly our nation continues to fail to build on the ideals for which so much life was sacrificed to the worship of greed, from the Revolution through the Civil War, we more clearly see the roots of oppression that prevent human freedom and social progress. In answer to the implied question, we now know this new nation has not endured, and has finally been destroyed by a bunch of ignorant humans flying a false flag of Supreme authority. Will yet another war be needed to achieve liberty, freedom, justice, and equality for all?

See how far we have lost our way as a national cult of freedom. Colonial sentiment was strongly anti-slavery, but the political power of slaveholders could not be denied, even as the extraction and financial industries cannot be denied today. Jefferson wrote of the King, in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to drestrain this execrable commerce.”

General Jeffrey Amherst

Does our nation live up to this standard today? Or have we actually become suborners of true freedom to serve delusions of historical and religious mythology? Or were we ever willing to put the interests of the powerless who depend on us for survival behind our personal greed and national desire for empire. For example, our national myth ignores the intentional genocide against the American aboriginal peoples (the “indians” that fought the “cowboys”), which began with the policies of British Commander Jeffrey Amherst, who conducted biological warfare against the Indian population of Ohio, among other things, directing his troops to deliberately infect gift blankets with smallpox. It is likely these actions by British troops caused a major smallpox epidemic among the native population.

Such mass social cruelty to an entire people has continued unabated to this day. After personally starting the French and Indian War (out of abyssal ignorance) George Washington led forces that ferociously destroyed the villages and societies of the Iroquois Confederation across New York state. He was known to the Indians as Caunotaucarius, which means “devourer of villages.” Many years later, when Washington was President and the settled Seneca were suffering under the continual abuse and cruelty practiced on them by American frontier rogues, they sent a delegation, headed by Cornplanter, their great spiritual leader of the time, who had encouraged them to adopt agrarian ways compatible with European frontier development. This delegation was to beg the great white man for mercy from his government and to require the frontier citizens to obey treaties and the law. After Cornplanter made his appeal, the delegation was given gifts and promises and sent home. On the way back they were robbed several times and, of course, nothing changed on the frontier. In retrospect it is easy to see that, in those days, the President and Federal government were powerless to control the frontier. It seems there has been no time when our nation was willing to live up to its grand promises for its aboriginal peoples.

This discussion continues tomorrow.

—Dan Massey

 

Where Did All This F*cking Evil Sh%t Come From?

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También en español It is undeniable that there is often a lot of pain and suffering in a human lifetime. While individual experiences vary widely, over the course of a lifetime most people will experience instances when they are confronted with the reality of an apparently genuine evil. And this inevitably starts the discussion, “Why me? What did I do to deserve this? If God loves me, why is he doing this to me? How can we love a God that would let something like this happen to anybody (not just me)? I refuse to accept the religious proposition that there is a God because I see only evidence of universal randomness, filled with constant strife between good and evil partisans! And even if there were one single personal God of the universe, he’d be way too busy to pay attention to the crap going on down here.”

But there are fundamental assumptions in this line of questioning that often go unappreciated. First and foremost are the implied assumptions about the nature of God. If one assumes that the God referenced is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent throughout time and space, then why isn’t the universe perfect? Surely a universe under the total control of a God of Love would never tolerate the amount of human misery and grief that surrounds us on all sides. Therefore, since the observed world does not match my prediction of what the world would be like if there were an omni-cube God, either such a God does not exist or my predictive method about what the world should be like is wrong. Sounds bad for my predictive methods—what man dare attempt to compass the purpose of God? Well, men have minds that, if you are God-oriented, are surely gifts of God. And my mind tells me that simplistic faith contrary to reason is most definitely NOT what any God I could personally respect would ever require of me. Therefore, if I believe the workings in my mind are True, I must perforce reject the concept of the omni-cube God. There simply is no such deity active anywhere I’ve been in the universe because his existence is refuted by the reality of my own experience.

And from this line of reasoning flows the faith of many devout atheists. It’s not so much that they reject the general idea of some sort of Supreme Being, but they can’t figure out what it would be good for because it doesn’t seem to even try to put things right in the world around us. If it’s out there, we obviously mean nothing more to it than an ant does to the automobile that ran over it in the road. Let’s try looking at this situation from a very different and more hopeful viewpoint.

Suppose that the universe is destined to be a perfect place of light and life—a universe of continuous unbridled joy in loving service, living truth, doing good, and making beauty. By our actions, our relationships, we are building small parts of this great universe of constructed perfection. But the perfect universe is not here today. Only portions are in evidence—the areas where love predominates over the primal emptiness of original space-time—where evil is merely the region into which love has yet to penetrate. Evil is not itself a reality. Rather, it is the absence of meaningful reality.

So evil is not something inflicted on us by an angry God, who abandons us to the vacuum of space-time devoid of Love. Rather, evil is the state of being where there is a weakened or nonexistent presence of Love. Since we are the creatures in the universe who are equipped with the ability to sense the presence or absence of Love, and with the tools of Truth guided reason that enable our will to effectively direct our loving actions, it is necessarily our responsibility to fill the gaps in finite reality where Love does not adequately penetrate.

The response of the finite universe to the force of destiny, the necessity of evolution towards a perfect state of light and life, requires the participation of many beings working together and dedicated to the ideals of Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

If you see evil in the world and have sufficient resources of Love, you can make the repair yourself. Our planet seems to have been shortchanged on loving service in the past, so we have a lot of gaps in our Love coverage. Many of these will require the cooperation of many people of goodwill, even entire communities and nations, to bridge vast gaps of lost communication and long misunderstanding.

So let’s get with it. Is there evil in the world? Then let’s work together in Unity to Love it out of existence. It’s our job to do this and this is how destiny is realized. Fear not to act. With Love and Truth you can only do Good and make Beauty.

—Dan Massey

 

Can I Transition to be a Transhuman?

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También en español Of course you can. On a normal world, with decent human lifetimes, it would happen naturally as your personality developed; however, the social structures of present-day human society are intentionally organized and maintained to inhibit such personal growth, assuring a docile attitude to the social bullies who manipulate unearned privilege to enslave the masses through religion, government, and business. But these are easy to override if you are serious about realizing your destiny.

But would you really want to be a Transhuman? Becoming Transhuman carries with it the personal assumption of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It implies that you love and serve every person as you are loved and served by others. It implies that you are committed to the realization of a supremely perfected society throughout the universe by vigorous development and ethical exploitation of human technical and artifactual ingenuity on all levels of literal reality—physical, mental, and motivational.

Transhumans serve humanity in this way because their reasons for being and acting are completely removed from typical human concerns. The characteristic difference between a human and a Transhuman viewpoint is that, in contrast to the human, whose behavior is based on mythic memes imparted by family and society, the Transhuman sets aside all such myth in favor of direct engagement with reality guided by personal dedication to the realization of love.

It is hard for a human to understand how Transhuman behavior is controlled and directed. Without hard and fast rules of response to each social situation, how can anyone expect to have a coherent social experience, without the markers of privilege and dominance so beloved by the apes? The answer is quite simple. The Transhuman abandons all mythic systems in favor of a solid belief in and behavior towards a transcendent ethical system constructed from Transhuman actions in support of the finalization of destiny.

The guide to such living action, as well as the test of the validity of experience, is summarized in each Transhuman’s personal attitude towards the four supreme realities of existence in service to destiny. Love is the desire to do good to others. We Transhumans express the supreme values of reality when we demonstrate Love by living Truth, doing Good, and making Beauty. We reject all acts that do not contribute positively to the expression of one or more of these supreme values.

Humans transitioning to become Transhumans often experience conflict between the fixed attitudes of their old beast and their cosmic vision of personal destiny. For example, they may easily abandon religious myth, while adhering strongly to equally silly beliefs in philosophy or science. The challenge before humanity today is not to meet endlessly around a table to hammer out some foolish patch on a failed social model, but to abandon the cause of the confusion—the myths of our pastfathers, which never really had any value for us, no matter how we tried to breathe energy into their dead patterns. We may take inspiration from the motivation they displayed in their service to Love without being bound by the limitations of their acts and vision.

Humans who increasingly dedicate themselves to the honest demonstration of loyalty to supreme values in their lives are transitioning to a Transhuman state, and this is the fundamental connection that allows the human mind to interface with the cosmos and become part of the emerging collective consciousness of a joyful universe.

–Dan Massey

Transhumans Have Pastfathers

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Human language attempts to encapsulate how and what we think about a subject and assign a word symbol to that specific encapsulation. Often, however, the more or less random choice of an exact word symbol, either in naming or translation, will change the implicit attitude of the reader to the subject being referenced.

We address such a challenge when contemplating the persons who have lived before us under the generic name forefathers. The meaning is, of course, those who have come before us in time.

As Transhumans, however, our lives are motivated and controlled by our commitment to ever respond to the force of destiny, to be guided by future opportunity. We see time as a dimension stretching into the indefinite future, which gives us time enough to experience love while perfecting ourselves and our universe. We are leading the way for our generation on this planet, while those who came before us, lie in our past not our future.

But if we Transhumans are to truly take the promise of the future as our guide, we must transcend the mythic elements of our heritage from the past. In doing so we recognize that these people, dead symbols of ideas frozen in time, could at best be called our pastfathers.

FM-2030

By this change of term we do not mean to diminish or disrespect the valid contributions of the past to human welfare today. On the other hand, we emphasize that our actions today look forward to imaginative visions of the future, rather than being constrained by the foolish myths of the past. And this is in fact how the living bridge of a true collective human motivational bridge is achieved through joyful experience.

What actually is happening? The past is powerless to control the future except within the physical realms of material causation. Myths laid down in human consciousness across the millennia may have sustained an uncivilized society for a time, but are now seen to be valueless. Humans have ever erred by dreaming of the past. Though Transhumans may be physically constrained by the past, their ideas and ideals, their thoughts and visions, their dreams are the myths of the future—ways in which destiny might be realized.

True stories of the future are the proper replacement for mythic reality. The past can only disclose specific facts, whereas truth must be lived in the moment.

Join me in embracing a joyous and fabulous collective future as the Transhuman fellowship of affinity and obligation builds a better world.

–Dan Massey

 

Do You Believe in Fate? I Believe in Destiny!

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También en Español You may have noted that we never speak of “fate” and are constantly speaking of “destiny.” This is a very important distinction in our understanding of how the world actually works. As you become more familiar with the concept of destiny, as we use the word here at VenusPlusX.org, you will see how it assists understanding of the nature of progressive change, as well as providing a positive vision of the future.

The Three Fates of Antiquity

Many people hold a viewpoint they consider “rational” or “causal.” They say that what happens next is directly determined by what was just happening and what’s going on right now, so that effects follow from causes in a linear positive direction in time. They claim that, although the future is not accurately predictable, it is nonetheless causally determined. Although they understand and admit the impossibility of accurately determining the state of the present with sufficient precision to accurately predict the future, they still cling to the irrational belief that, if they could do so, they would be able to predict the future accurately.

From this viewpoint, human life has no purpose other than the fulfillment of causation, causation in which human beings are able to participate to some degree to obtain desired physical results. People who adopt this viewpoint see the achievement of a desired result as the culmination of a series of actions, which, taken together, collectively cause the result. Thus, to achieve a desired result, we decompose the result into elements for which an achievable cause can be found. Such an approach is called “analytic” because it depends on the analysis of the structure of the desired outcome and the network of causes that (hopefully) will produce it. Such thinking is also called “reductionist.”

There is another, fully rational way of understanding how things will work. This approach considers the destined end state to be linked to current events by a “force of destiny,” a force that appears to carry pattern backwards through time, imposing it on the past, in order that destiny may be fulfilled. In effect, destiny is a future universe state and the force of destiny is causation expressed outside the range of knowable causes for the observer embedded in time. The necessity of a terminal event shapes unmeasured parameters to obligate all possibilities to a stable outcome, regardless of the factual event. Such force does not override time-forward causation. Rather it shapes and limits the actual active form of the experienced causation. The force of destiny obligates operative causes that are intrinsically unknowable because they are literally (relativistically) unobservable, lying beyond the range of immediately available information.

Most people who are aware of the rigor of so-called “mathematical logic” think of formal geometric proofs, analytic geometric proofs, and simple if-then-else inference logic. Otherwise apparently informed people seem quite unaware of the entire domain of “modal logic,” which provides mechanisms for formal reasoning about possibility vs. necessity and other complementary qualities of being. Such logic provides rigor to certain absolute concepts extending far beyond classical “truth values” of logical statements.

Destined Emergence of Universe Structure

Just as the concept of fate is well modeled by the logical pressure of sequential material implication, the concept of destiny is well modeled by teleological tension within a chain of necessities, which can require the totality of space and time (including domains beyond any possibility of immediate observation) to bring into existence possibilities unpredictable and unknowable from the historic record, no matter how complete. And it is the unification of two patterns in the present that defines us. One pattern flows forward in time from the past, changing to incorporate caused events. The other pattern flows backwards in time from the future, requiring certain qualities to be present in the temporal present.

The manner in which destiny emerges is “synthesis,” a complementary term to analysis. Observable present is the intersection of the possibilities emerging from causation with the necessities that synthesize the force of destiny. In time the universe progresses from an initial state to a final state, attaining destiny through the accumulation of causes. The causes that matter are the ones that recognize free will decisions by individual personalities. And the domain and range of such decisive causes necessarily link up to achieve the fulfillment of destiny.

This means that human free will is a reality with at least one bit of information content—either to do the right thing or to do anything else. But this also means that, no matter what the decisions of any collection of actors, nevertheless, destiny will be attained; therefore, since causation is preserved, the timelines of the universe appear continuous viewed from either direction.

To summarize:

  • Destiny is as real as history and gives purpose to existence
  • Destiny is more important, flexible, and significant than history because it is achieved through personal choice
  • Aggregated personal free will cannot violate either causation or inevitability

Humanity progresses by reaping the results of its actions; however, the productivity and value of those results is assured by adherence to the force of destiny.

–Dan Massey