Memo to God: It's Not You I Want, I'm Just Lookin' For My Mind

One of the great ironies of the Darwinist argument is the insistence that materialists have a monopoly on truth and therefore intelligence. Now, I don't have to remind the reader that materialism is just as much a religion as any other; or, to be exact, it is just like a religion, only smaller. For to think that one could ever replace a real religion with a manmade one is to not know what religion is, and to therefore make oneself stupid, precisely.

Any form of materialism -- including reductionistic Darwinism -- is just a manifestation of "intelligent stupidity." Obviously, academia is pervaded by varieties of intelligent stupidity. So too are LGF, dailykos, huffpo, or any other beachhead of bovinity, whether "right" or "left." For the former ultimately reduces to the the latter, being that the first principle of true conservatism is awareness of the transcendent order to which man owes his primary allegiance and which is his reason for being, while the first principle of leftism is that there is no transcendent order, and that matter is All.

I apparently have to remind some readers that our dispute can never be with science per se, nor any banal "scientific finding" either. Rather, it is precisely with this covert transformation of science into a pseudo-religion, which then has the effect of rendering the person who believes in it stupid.

For this is the descent from intellect to mere intellectualism, the latter of which is rooted in pride rather than conformity to truth. One cannot really simultaneously be proud and a lover of truth. Truly, science is one of the glories of man -- a claim that no mere scientist could ever make, being that glory is a transcendent category irreducible to any material explanation. In other words, scientific truth glorifies the Divine Mind, not the mind of the scientist who denigrates mind to begin with. This should be obvious to all.

Speaking of which, this reminds me that a few months back, I was tagged in one of those internet meme games, but never responded. The question was, "why do you love Jesus?" My case may be a peculiar one, but it is because he saved my mind.

I don't want to get to sidetracked here, but bear in mind that I am speaking not just of Jesus per se, but of "the mind of Christ," i.e., the eternal Word in all its diverse and saving manifestations. In this regard, I may be using the word more lucely than a traditional Christian may be comforterble with, but I am referring to that celestial light which illuminates both mind and world, neither of which can comprehended on their own level. Which also goes to the issue of why it would be absurd to suggest that I could be some sort of guru or such, a charge that trolls inevitably throw out from time to time. For if I were to do that, I would be no better than the confused materialist who claims truth for himself.

Put it this way: a Raccoon is a lover of truth and a seeker after wisdom. I am so grateful to the light-filled teachers who helped to lift my mind out of the bog of materialism and other errors, that I can never repay them -- except perhaps by freely passing along what they freely passed into me. I love them and I always will. This is not any kind of mere fideism or sentimentalism, but is rather a sort of "continuous miracle" that takes place in my head, of all places. I am reminded of the Merle Haggard song, I'm Looking For My Mind:

'Cause I lost my mind the day I lost your love
I'm not crazy, but sometimes I wish I was
If you turn around and find me crawling close behind
It's not you I want, I'm lookin' for my mind

Sometimes I wonder if the trolls who can't stay away from this blog might unconsciously feel the same way. It's not me you want, you're just looking for your Mind!

Along these lines, last week Dennis Prager had a program in which he asked listeners if their life had turned out as they had planned or envisioned it when they were, say, 18 years old. Or, to put it another way, if someone had told you at 18 how your life would turn out, would you have been surprised?

In my case, "surprise" would be an understatement. The discontinuity between what I was and who I am is so radical, that it is analogous to "creation from nothing" -- which, when you think about it, is not a metaphor, for it is the essence of metanoia. So when I say that my mind was "saved," I literally mean that I was saved from nothing, AKA, a living death in some manmode misosophy. And how could a feller not be grateful for that?

Because there's really no middle ground here. It's either nothing or everything; meaninglessness or a kind of hyper-meaningfulness; existentialism or essentialism; nihilism or God. Intelligent stupidity -- whereby a man conforms his mind to the great material sea of nothing -- results in intelligence never discovering its sufficient reason and man falling far beneath himself. It is to never discover Intelligence as such, which is of the same substance as the Absolute, or the "word" that passes between it and the relative. As I mentioned in the Coonifesto, religion does indeed have a bridge to sell you -- the bridge between the One and the many, the Absolute and the relative, Eternity and time, Creator and creature, Word and intellect.

As Schuon points out, the scientist (and I'm just going to use this word as shorthand, bearing in mind that I am again referring to the reductionistic and materialistic thinker) elevates knowledge of physical things -- i.e., the relative -- to the absolute. In so doing, he substitutes "exactness" for intelligence, and "it is indeed this very 'exactness' which excludes the decisive operations of pure intelligence, since a meticulous and often arbitrary cataloguing of facts which are possibly insignificant -- or are rendered such thanks to the point of view adopted -- replaces the intellectual perception of the nature of things."

In turn, this is why science can make so many preposterous claims about the human condition, since they do not admit an irreducible "human condition" to begin with. And this is the wedge where all the inexhaustible stupidity rushes into the scientistic mind -- this wedge between the material and archetypal planes, to put it succinctly.

Now. Now. I like saying that when I'm trying to get back on track, but pretending that I was never off it.

Now, here is perhaps the biggest conceit of science, although there are many. But I notice that this is a notion that the hopelessly naive lizards tend to regurgitate, that is, the idea that science simply deals with a world of unproblematic "facts" as we find them, untainted by any subjective biases, metaphysical assumptions, or preconceptions. To this silliness it is difficult to respond with anything other than a robust "Ho!" It's as if they've never even heard of the philosophy of science, much less metaphysics.

Scientists -- although they can account neither for free will nor freedom of inquiry (i.e., a fully open and receptive mind, free of all preconceptions) -- have this barmy idea that they are engaged in "a complete liberty of investigation." However, "this is an illusion since modern science, like every other science, cannot avoid starting out in its turn from an idea: it is the dogma concerning the exclusively rational and more or less 'democratic' nature of intelligence."

Here again, this is where intelligence dies by its own hand and becomes stupidity when detached from religious metaphysics, for it is assumed that intelligence is simply a sort of quantity that everyone possesses and which can know scientific truth (which is the only "real" truth). In fact, the conclusion does at least follow the premise, since virtually any idiot can "understand" a scientific truth once it has been discovered by someone a little brighter.

It takes no great intelligence to understand Darwinism, for what is there to understand? Random mutation + environmental selection. Got it. Where's my BA in biology? The idea that it will "endanger our children's scientific education" to suggest that the integral truth is a little more complicated than this, is pure kooky talk.

Raccoon Truth is not nearly as simplistic as scientistic truth, as many readers can attest, some of whom weren't entirely sure that I wasn't "crazy" when they first stumbled upon this blog. Think about that for a moment, for it is the same thing I was alluding to above, with respect to how my mind was "saved" by Divine Intellect in all its manifestations.

Anyway, as Schuon points out -- and surely this is true -- "There are truths that can be attained only by intuitive intellection, and this in fact does not lie within the capacity of every man of sound mind." Furthermore, just as logic requires materials on which to operate, the Intellect itself requires a Revelation "in order to actualize its own light in more than a fragmentary manner," for again, revelation is intellect objectified, and like knows like.

Running out of time here.... I guess we'll have to pick this up tomorrow....