Monday, June 25, 2018

The Secret of Existence is Just Under the...

Continuing with our discussion of the Prerogatives of the Human State, I should say first of all that I am decades past the point of wondering whether there are any such prerogatives.

Rather, humanness entails certain rights and privileges, and that's all there is to it. Moreover, once you acknowledge these, then God is their necessary corollary: in short, no God, no conceivable privileges (except those man usurps for himself by the exercise of superior strength).

The Founders clearly recognized this entailment, for which reason they explicitly anchored our rights in Nature (i.e., in the nature of things, not in mere physics or biology) and Nature's God. For as the blind squirrel Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then there is no human nature. And if there is no human nature, then there are no conceivable prerogatives.

Which -- you will have noticed -- is the main reason why the left ceaselessly attacks God, because God is the biggest impediment to their tyrannical follies. Eliminate Nature's God and they can do whatever they want to us, from mere theft and oppression to genocide. God is the barrier between the roiling id of the left and civilization.

Exaggeration? Again, once you have determined that someone is a Nazi, then it becomes a question of how to stop him. If he won't stop his Nazi-ing, then he has to be stopped by force. Call Maxine Waters what you want, but she is logical enough to make the correct deduction. Yes, the premise is insane, but this only reveals the limits of logic, since there is no logical operation to ensure true premises.

Prerogative: an exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially a hereditary or official right.

In this case it is held by a group, or better, a nature, i.e., human nature. These prerogatives inhere in human nature, flowing from there to the individual. Note that for the materialist, there is no vocabulary to even describe this reality. He doesn't have to account for it, because he makes it disappear via linguistic deception or auto-woolpullery.

But as we have said on many occasions, you can split off and deny a portion of reality, but it always returns, usually with a vengeance. This has so much practical application that it could easily send us down a rabbit hole of a sidepost, but suffice it to say that human nature will have the last word(s) -- including those prerogatives alluded to above.

How so? Okay, this is an obvious example: if you are a strict Darwinian, then there is no reason to take seriously the radically contingent thoughts of a randomly evolved primate. And yet, you affirm the theory just as if truth exists and man can know it -- in other words, as if truth about his origins is one of the prerogatives of the human state!

Which it is. On that we agree. Only my metaphysic explains how this is possible, whereas yours renders it strictly impossible, in principle and in fact. Notice how you denied this principle up front, but how it snuck up from behind and bit you right in your assumption.

Now, having said all this, "the effects of the 'the Fall' weaken the prerogatives of human nature, but they cannot abolish them without abolishing man himself" (Schuon).

And this "Fall" is whatnow? Well, unfortunately, part of being fallen involves a degree of obscurity and ambiguity surrounding this question. As it so happens, just last night I was reading the very book Thomas Aquinas was working on when he left this world, Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. Yes, he died in mid-sentence, or mid-thought anyway:

"Secondly, an evident example shows that attainment of the kingdom is possible."

D'oh! "The treasure is buried right under the..."

Anyway, he sheds some interesting light on the question of the Fall. I'll paraphrase, but he essentially says it is a consequence of a kind of breaking of the vertical link that unifies all of creation.

Imagine an organismic hierarchy, say, the human person. You can sever something at the "bottom" or periphery, say, a kidney or toe, without affecting the hierarchy or damaging the essence. But perform a lobotomy or sever the spinal cord, and everything below is affected.

It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?

Prior to the Fall, man "referred all things to God as to his last end, and in this his justice and innocence consisted." The resultant harmony "came from a higher power, the power of God." Reason was subservient to God -- which goes to the question raised above about one's premises holding water (or Waters, as the case may be). Remove God, and one can prove anything. Put another way, if you are credulous enough to believe God doesn't exist, then what won't you believe?

So, "The state enjoyed by man" -- that of primordial slack -- "depended on the submission of the human will to God." Yes, Adam had one job. Now we have Ten Commandments, but once upin a timeless there was only one. The precise opposite of this one commandment is: Ye shall be as gods. The rest is history, over and over and over again until you want to vomit.

The harmonious integrity of the original state depended entirely on the submission of man's will to God. Consequently, as soon as the human will threw off the yoke of subjection to God, the perfect subjection of the lower powers to reason and of the body to the soul likewise disintegrated.

As in dis-integrated. And we've been searching for the missing integration ever since. Every ideology is nothing more than a faux integration, from Marxism to feminism to environmentalism to queer theory to scientism and on and on. In each case, you can't get there from here, for "when a cause is removed, the effect cannot follow." God is both first and last cause. Remove him and there is no beginning, no source, no ground; and no end, i.e., no meaning, no purpose, no reason for existence.

That's the bad news. The good news ("gospel") is that there is a way to re-integrate, to reconnect with the source. Yes, attainment of the kingdom is possible...

To be continued. Unlike Aquinas.

20 comments:

julie said...

You can sever something at the "bottom" or periphery, say, a kidney or toe,

I can get you a toe...

julie said...

It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?

Apropos, my husband had a few pithy thoughts over the weekend (focusing on paganism because of a project he's been researching):

1. Paganism is the default state of mankind
2. The essence of pagan thought is like a man who boasts that he has read and comprehended _War and Peace_ in its entirety, when in actuality all he's read is the first ten pages.
3. If coffee is for closers, pagans drink nothing but hot water
4. An atheist is someone who is too lazy to be a pagan
5. Gnosticism is high-brow paganism for people who believe they're too smart to be pagans
6. Having a pagan god as your deity is like having Frank Reynolds as your AA sponsor

Unknown said...


It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?”

It becomes a hole that is filled with fear and hate.

straightener said...

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عزيزي العميل اذا كنت تريد ان تقوم بعملية تنظيف شاملة دون اللجوء إلى عاملات تنظيف بالساعه يستهلكون وقت وجهد ومبالغ طائلة فيجب عليك الاستعانة بأفضل شركة تنظيف بالمنطقة الشرقية بصفة عامة وبالجبيل بالاخص ..
نحن نعمل جاهدن سعيا وراء ان نكون اقوى شركة في مجال التنظيف فنحن لدينا فروع كثير في كل انحاء المنطقة الشرقية وخاصة القطيف والخبر والاحساء والدمام والجبيل .
فاا كنت تعانى من الاوساخ بصفة مستمرة كل ماعليك هو الاتصال بشركة شاهه المثالية للتنظيف بالدمام الأقوى في مجال التنظيف الجاف والبخار ومكافحة جميع انواع الحشرات اتصل الآن ولا تتتردد على الرقم التالي :
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Gagdad Bob said...

Even in the original Arabic, Justice Sotomayor's dissent on the travel ban is absurd.

julie said...

lol

Gagdad Bob said...

Blogging to resume tomorrow...

Yesterday a thought occurred to me about the left's immigrant hysteria. It explains a lot, but it's almost too easy: that unconsciously they feel like abused, abandoned, and neglected children because of mean daddy Trump, projecting this distress into the illegals. It's the kind of meta-explanation I wouldn't have hesitated to give a couple of decades ago, but it's just too easy to abuse. You can explain anything with psychology, but you can predict almost nothing...

julie said...

That, but also projection and distraction from what is really happening. In a sane world, the things coming out about the IG report would be dominating headlines for weeks. Instead, whenever it seems something interesting is about to happen, suddenly there's a new moral panic and a call for violent uprising against anyone even vaguely to the right.

How is it that suddenly, within the span of a week, conservatives are being singled out in public places and followed by hostile mobs? What are the odds you'd even recognize a political figure having a normal evening, out of context and out of makeup, much less have a crowd handy to start protest on the spur of the moment?

There is more going on here than meets the eye. Whatever it is they are screaming about, either assume they are guilty themselves, or they are distracting the world from something far more important (and harmful to their own cause).

With each passing week, there is more good news coming out of the Trump administration. How much of it do we actually hear over all the shrieking?

Gagdad Bob said...

I think you have to draw a distinction between the knowing 1% of cynics, opportunists, and manipulators at the top, and the unknowing 99% who are manipulated but nevertheless sincere. I don't know where that line is. For example, when Rachel Maddow cries on camera, is she the manipulator or manipulated? In contrast, with a Clinton or Obama, you know that they are always manipulators.

Gagdad Bob said...

And then there are those who are manipulators but convince themselves that the manipulation is true.

Gagdad Bob said...

In a way, the manipulated are more problematic, because they are the ones with the sincere faux-religious mob passion that gets people killed. The 1% are calculating but not passionate in the same way. More reptilian than mammalian.

Gagdad Bob said...

Like that idiot 28 year old socialist that won yesterday. She's scary. I would bet that her sincerity will prevent her from ever learning a thing for the rest of her life.

Gagdad Bob said...

What I mean is that she's one of the 99% of manipulated who now joins the 1% -- like a Maxine Waters. Even the 1% are made uncomfortable by those people!

julie said...

True enough. Most of the people I know who respond to every leftist talking point do sincerely and honestly believe that they are on the side of goodness.

Gagdad Bob said...

The Devil and his minions. I think I'm more frightened by the minions. They do all of his heavy lifting.

Leslie Godwin said...

Exactly!

Leslie Godwin said...

True believers. I think that's Maddow .

julie said...

Not to mention the owner and staff of the Red Hen. I'm sure they really, truly, honestly believe that Trump is a terrible, evil man bent on unleashing horrors upon all the poor defenseless victims of the world. The news told them so, and just think of the poor crying babies!

Have you ever read any of the comments in Trump's Twitter feed? Horrible and eye-opening. When he talked about all the slings and arrows he takes, that was no joke.

julie said...

Wow - in other news, Justice Kennedy is stepping down.

So much winning, but still not tired...

Van Harvey said...

"...Yes, the premise is insane, but this only reveals the limits of logic, since there is no logical operation to ensure true premises."

And that is the secret source of their power to manipulate. Loudly logical on the implications of their premises, and defending their premises - as brutally as need be - against anything less than unquestioning acceptance of them.

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