Sunday Sermon on Common Sense

Just some more free associations on the subject of common sense, beginning with an aphorism:

The liberal mentality is an angelic visitor impervious to earthly experiences.

As mentioned in the previous post, even God's Own Rules are subject to prudential judgment, AKA common sense. But the left can be defined as a devotion to ideology. It almost doesn't matter which ideology, as long as the ideology provides certitude, moral and intellectual superiority, and, most important, someone to hate.

For ultimately, The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas, and the dogma always involves an enemy. Always: class enemies, male chauvinists, holders of White Privilege, the patriarchy, the police, MAGA hats, whatever.

Take, for example, global warming. The average liberal isn't drawn to the theory because of the science -- after all, a model that fails to predict is simply false -- but because of how good it feels to hurl condemnation at the evil beings who are not persuaded by the theory.

Note that they often begin with the flat-out, easily disprovable lie that "97% of scientists believe in catastrophic manmade global warming." If the first words out of your mouth in support of a theory are a grandiose lie, it doesn't inspire confidence in the theory.

But the theory is one of those "angelic visitors impervious to earthly experiences." And earthly temperatures. Not one of their models predicted that global temperature would be flat for the last fourteen years.

Or, consider the first words out of Joe Biden's mouth upon launching his presidential campaign: an easily disprovable lie about President Trump's supposed endorsement of white supremacism.

Note that these enormous lies aren't so much angelic as demonic visitors, unless we stipulate the existence of naughty angels. Awhile back we did a few posts on the nature of the devil, and one thing we know about him is that he "was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

Now, unlike Petey, you needn't yet believe in a literal, extra-human devil in order to appreciate the deep archetypal truth of this biblical science. The Lie does not and cannot exist "before the beginning," because the Creator -- who is always before, beyond, and after the beginning -- is the essence of unalloyed truth.

However, it seems that the lie either co-arises with creation, or at least slithers its way into the cosmic drama with the appearance of man. Before man, there's no one to lie to except other fallen angels. It makes no sense to lie to an amoeba, a tree, or a dinosaur, only to a rational creature.

Here again, this is because the lie can only be parasitic on the truth, as irrationality can only be parasitic on reason. It isn't rational for my dog to bark at the UPS driver, but it's not irrational.

Which leads to another key point for humans, that reason itself becomes irrational the moment it imagines itself to be sufficient to explain the world. And every leftist ideology -- beginning with Marx -- does just this.

Yes, there's an aphorism for that, and if you fail to get it, the joke is most certainly on you:

“Irrationalist” is shouted at the reason that does not keep quiet about the vices of rationalism.

Yes, those angelic visitors impervious to earthly experience are beings of pure reason who shout at the rest of us for pointing out the vices of their pure reason. Or really, just say Gödel, for Gödel permanently liberates man from any prison of pure reason.

But the angelic visitors don't see it that way, and indeed, this touches directly on our primordial calamity, AKA the Fall. For what is the Fall but man's futile attempt to create and confine man to a counter-world superior to the created world which always transcends our manmade categories?

And Thank God -- literally! -- we are free from man's attempts to imprison man, for Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

No, that's not a rhetorical question, for first of all it would be a boring world, an endless Go-roundhog Day from which we could never escape. For in the end, What is not religious is not interesting. No, literally, for the domain of religion is precisely the much larger world that transcends reason because it is the source of reason. Thus,

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

Deeper, higher, more luminous. Conversely, The scientist lives persuaded that the latest theory will be the last. Science easily degrades into fools’ mythology.

Yes, the cosmos is a big place, I suppose, but I've never personally been impressed by its vastness, which is inconceivable anyway. For The distances of the physical universe are those of a prison, compared to the infinite distances between, say, truth and falsehood, or man and God, or man and animal.

In other words, if we couldn't routinely transcend into the metacosmos of love, truth, beauty, mystical unity, etc., this world would be an unbearably tedious place. Indeed, I think the average leftist activist is drawn to mundane politics out of sheer boredom.