Fake news, fake education, fake women, fake marriage, fake medicine, fake vaccines, fake science, fake statistics, fake democracy, fake art, fake judicial system, fake intellectuals, fake comedians, fake victims, fake borders, fake president... Have I left anything out?
As we know, Satan is the arch-counterfeiter. If nothing else, he stands for the principle that unifies all the diverse snd seemingly unconnected fakery that surrounds us. Each can only exist because it is parasitic on the real thing -- just as funny money can only exist if there is the serious kind.
The question is, why the increase in counterfeiters and counterfeiting in our time?
On a related note, it seems that the average IQ of college students has plunged to a paltry 102, down from a respectable 119 in 1939.
Obviously, many more people attend college today than then, but that doesn't increase the pool of raw intelligence: there are no more geniuses or dullards today than there were a century ago, but there are exponentially more credentialed idiots with fake degrees in "Fuzzy Studies" or Intersectional Grievances.
In 2017, Education Testing Service experts estimated that physics (133), math (130), philosophy (129), and materials science (129) majors have the highest IQs.
Now, they say that Satan himself is a bit of a genius -- being that he has an angelic intelligence that greatly surpasses that of man. So, why is he sponsoring all this fakery? Or rather, why the Peter pandemic of juvenile fakery?
We left off yesterday's post with the question of what kind of being man must be in order for God to incarnate as man. Which leads to the question of what kind of being he must be in order for Satan to -- we won't say incarnate, but to so easily "in-spirate," co-opt, hijack, infiltrate, or otherwise influence him. Preacher Powell, what say you?
Again: "if God became man, man must be the kind of being it was possible for God to become." There must already be something special about man in order for him to play host to the absolute principle of creation.
Hmm. Must have something to do with our infinitude, which is related to what we said yesterday about our necessary incompleteness. Other animals are in fact "complete" and know nothing of infinitude. But man is the forever restless being who
possesses an infinite horizon. The horizon which we see with our eyes is finite, we share it with animals. The horizon which we know with our intellect is infinite. It is the horizon of being (Coreth, in Mascall).
Although God and man are both infinite, the word is equivocal, in that it implies something different for man than it does God. For us it just means not constrained by finitude, while for God it means transcending finitude altogether -- more like transfinite, which is beyond our (finite) antithesis of finite-infinite.
Conversely, man transcends his limits, but not every limit. He is not THE unlimited. Unless. Unless Incarnation, which would well and truly surpass the limits, or perhaps reestablish relations with the Unlimited. Just as the Son (on earth) is God's I-Ambassy in a limited form, the Father is our I-Ambassy in the Unlimited.
I'm just spiritballin' here, but I don't see how man escapes the great In Between -- between the poles of immanence and transcendence -- absent the principle of Incarnation. It reminds me of Moses, who never reaches the promised land, and we are all Moses wondering in the desert bewilderness absent a messiah or something.
Jews invented -- or discovered, rather -- the Messiah Principle, but then again, this is a principle that is hinted at in virtually every religion worth the name. For example, I recently read a book called The Christ Connection: How the World Religions Prepared for the Phenomenon of Jesus, and it has many examples of these anticipations. For example, in India
The original sacrifice in the Vedas is that of a divine person called Purusha Prajapathi, who sacrificed himself so as to bring into being the cosmos.... He is both sacrifice and the one to whom the sacrifice is offered.
The author cites various passages from the Vedas, for example,
His hands and legs are to be bound to a yoopa [a wooden pole] causing blood shed.... The sacrificial victim is to be crowned with a crown made of thorny vines.... None of His bones must be broken.... Before death he should be given a drink of somarasa [sour wine made of an herb called somalatha].
Now, that's either an uncannily good guess, or the intuition of a universal archetype woven into the fabric of being or something.
There's a lot more along these lines, both within the Vedas and in the religions of ancient Persia, China, Greece, Africa, etc. Something is going on here besides mere coincidence.
What would be the opposite of this Messiah Principle, or something like it? I suppose we would say any form of Kantianism that pretends to enclose us in our phenomenal limits with no way out. I don't want to rag on Kant, because his anti-philosophy has taken many forms over the millennia, beginning, I suppose, with Genesis 3. But if these folkers are correct, then you
are launched on the endless process of trying ineffectually to escape from the prison of your own subjectivity.... you are involved in ever more complicated gymnastics in your attempts not to saw off the branch on which you are sitting (Mascall).
This is nothing less than the great cosmic nul-de-slack from which we are forever trying in vain to lift ourselves via our own buddhastraps.
Kant has the reputation of being the greatest of modern philosophers, but to my mind he was a mere misfortune.
Not just a bump in the road but a dead end street; for Idealism
means the view that the objects which we perceive are simply ideas inside our heads, while 'realism' means the view that we perceive real beings outside them.
Back to the question of what kind of being man must be in order to play host to the Absolute Principle, he must, at the very least, be a philosophical Realist. And according to Gilson,
The first step on the path of realism is to recognise that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognise that, however much one tries to think differently, one will never succeed; the third is to note that those who claim that they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part.
So, we can pretend we are confined to immanence, but
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