The Cashier Who Isn't There

One of my favorite Charles Fort quotes is "The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property." 

Another wag says "if you're not paying for something, you aren't the customer - you're the product."  The context is internet services like Facebook.  But he could be talking about the situation humanity finds itself in vis-a-vis life.

You say, but we are life's customers; we pay for the privilege of life by growing old and dying. Thanks to entropy we can pay on the installment plan.

Philip K. Dick imagined a "Zebra" - a deity who hides in plain site.  What better hiding place for the supernatural than in the implacable, ubiquitous laws of nature?

Another Reason Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Sola Scriptura

What are we to make of Mathew 12:22-37:

22Then they brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see. 23All the people were astonished and said, “Could this be the Son of David?”

24But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “It is only by Beelzebub,^d the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.”

25Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. 26If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? 27And if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. 28But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

29“Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house.

30“He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. 31And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 

 We know from other NT passages that demons, once cast out, can always return to their host later.  So Satan, by temporarily giving up possession of the blind-mute, secures the allegiance of Jesus' followers.  In chess, we call this a "sacrifice;" giving up one piece to secure something of greater value.  If the Pharisees are right, Jesus' "miracle," by tricking believers, would give to Satan all those who call themselves "Christians."  If I were Satan (and I'm not!), I'd take that deal.


Experienced Criminologists would also blanch as Jesus' response.  A skilled interrogator expects an innocent person, falsely accused, to say "I didn't do it." Instead, Jesus responds with the spurious "house divided" argument, then engages in what looks like psychological projection: "31And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. "

Of course traditional Christianity has a quite different interpretation, one that focuses on the unforgivable sin, blaspheming the Holy Spirit.  It's not clear exactly what this mean, but the orthodox generally interpret it as a permanent hardening of the heart that prevents one from accepting grace.

If the Bible alone is our sole source of truth, there will be as many Christianities as there are readers.  Tradition and Authority are there to help.

Francis E. Dec, meet Descartes' Demon

The topics I cover are probably familiar to experienced Gnostic Forteans; this is a site for novices, an intro-level "101" course, if you will.


In that spirit we present Long Island lawyer France E. Dec, "your only hope for a future."  He featured in Donna Kossey's book "Kooks" (as well as her online "Kooks Museum") as well as in works by Psychic TV and others.  Dec was  apparantly a paranoid schizophrenic, but one with a powerfully metaphysical imagination and a Burroughsian gift for words. This rant is typical:

Gangster Computer God worldwide SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICY, made possible SOLY by worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls, especially LIFELONG CONSTANT THRESHOLD BRAIN WASH RADIO ( quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it; repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets ). FOUR BILLION worldwide population ALL living have a Computer God CONTAINMENT POLICY BRAIN BANK BRAIN, A REAL BRAIN, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the Moon, we never see. Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein radio controls, especially, your eyesight T.V. (sight, and sound) recorded by your brain. YOUR Moon BRAIN of the Computer God, activates your Frankenstein Threshold Brain Wash Radio LIFELONG, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you-up and the USUAL, "DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT." for your set backs, mistakes even when you receive deadly injuries. THIS IS THE WORLDWIDE COMPUTER GOD SECRET CONTAINMENT POLICY

Dec is describing Descartes' Demon.  It's a thought experiment that asks "if a malevolent entity controlled my every perception - sight, sound, taste, touch, smell - then how could I know what is real?"  Of course for Dec, it wasn't a thought-experiment.,it was real life.  Hence the poignancy.


So, what if we do live in The Matrix? 

Descartes tries to prove that reality is basically trustworthy.  First, he finds a limit to doubt: we can doubt everything, except our own existence.  This seems solid enough - how can I doubt I exist, when I'm the one that's doing the doubting?

Frankly, I've never been convinced by this; a truly powerful demon should be able to create the illusion of a self-conscious being contemplating its own consciousness.  True - I can't imagine how that could work, but saying something is inconceivable just because I can't conceive of it seems like it's setting the bar awfully low.

But let's give Descartes the benefit of the cogito, and assume we ourselves do, in fact, exist.  Well, for Descartes, it's then an easy leap to prove God exists, and that he is perfectly good.  Descartes argues God must exist because:

a) Everything has a creator - except for the uncreated creator, of course.
b) One can imagine perfection; therefore perfection - God - must exist.  Otherwise, where would the idea of perfection come from?
c) God is perfect, therefor he must exist.  For if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be perfect, would he?

The problems with Descartes' arguments are mani-fold.  For one, a perfect God must be omnipotent; but if God is only benevolent he's not really omnipotent; i.e, true omnipotence includes the power to act against one's nature.

As noted previously, in the 20th century logical "system-building" like Descartes' fell out of favor.  Logic, being a symbol-system complex enough to contain number theory, is subject to Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.  Human consciousness, being a linguistic construct, has the "the map is not the territory" issues linguistics are heir to.  In physics, the Copenhagen Interpretation  suggests that there is no "underlying" reality behind sub-atomic phenomena, rather quantum physics "deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta."

Where does this leave poor Francis E. Dec?  Hunter S. Thompson famously observed that "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

I, the Reverend Les Crowley, Certified Hypnotherapist, PhD in 'Pataphysics, suggest an alteration:  When the going gets weird, the smart quit.

Bugs In The Pornoverse?

Rule 34 is an internet law which states "If it exists, there is porn of it."  As the parent of an innocent, impressionable, soon to be teen-ager, I will not encourage you to verify this law for yourself. 

Besides, it turns out, Rule 34 is wrong!  And wrong in ways that strike very close to home.  Recently - for strictly scientific purposes - I googled the phrase: "Fortean porn."  Guess what?  NOTHING.  Well, nothing that was both pornographic and Fortean, anyway.

It gets weirder: googling "naked Gnostic girls" does not find pictures of any such thing!  At least not on the first page of search results. (I don't always google, but when I do, I pretty much demand instant gratification.)

You ask what results I expected from the phrase "Fortean porn."  I'm not sure: that's why I googled.  Perhaps a nice crop circle orgy.  Oops - just googled that, and guess what?  NO pictures of people having orgies in crop circles!  You'd think there'd be tons of them.

Something is very wrong with this picture.  Or rather, lack of pictures.  I had an English professor who liked to say "What's missing is more important than what's present."  Many Gnostic schools are ascetic - if the material world is the product of a flawed creator, it should be shunned.  This is mirrored in mainstream western thought through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et al.

Other Gnostics have embraced libertineage as a method of spiritual liberation: Aleister Crowley is the most famous modern exponent of this tradition.  Given his popularity among the young and hip, with their rock 'n' roll music and their "reefers," you'd expect to find millions of pictures of "naked gnostic girls."

But you don't.  This is a topic we intend to follow-up on.  Stay tuned.

Puting the Physics In Meta-physics

The strangest non-fiction book every written is "The Physics of Immortality" by Frank Tipler.  Tipler is a brilliant physicist, who, among other things, invented a time machine that would actually work, if we could build it.  (It would be rather large)

Wikipedia summarizes Tipler's argument thusly:

According to Tipler's Omega Point cosmology, for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent it is required that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force the collapse of the universe. During that collapse the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for infinite duration as the universe goes into a solitary-point cosmological singularity (with life eventually using elementary particles to directly compute on, due to the temperature's diverging to infinity), which singularity Tipler terms the Omega Point.^[6] With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that the far-future society will be able to resurrect the dead by perfectly emulating the entire multiverse from its start at the Big Bang.^[7] Tipler identifies the Omega Point final singularity as God since in his view the Omega Point has all the properties claimed for God by most of the traditional religions.[7

The article doesn't capture the flavor of Tipler's writing; go the Amazon link.  You really have to be a high-level physics student to understand the arguments - and I'm not.  Alas, those who are real physicists tend to regard Tipler as a crackpot.

But he answers a question 20th century philosophy ignored: how can you do Meta-physics if you don't know Physics?  The answer - obviously - is that you can't.  Existentialists aside, twentieth century philosophy was narrow, parochial.  Tipler may be the last Great System Builder.  If so it's a hollow victory, won by forfeit.

Saturday SIlliness, Part II

I promise no more Situationist jokes after this one, which I like because it is more subversive than the original cover(s) for the book or movie of the same name:

On what basis do we assume "commodification" is unique to humans? We now know monkeys understand the concept of "money."  And Dolphins are are horny, raping, thrill-killers.

This is what you'd expect from a universe created by the Gnostic Demiurge.  There'll be no salvation in nature - the animals suck as much as we do.

Silly Saturday, Part I

This blog is not here to amuse you; it's here to advance the cause of Gnostic Forteanism.  But how could I not post this wonderful graphic?

To quote Wikipedia on Guy Debord:

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation."^[1] Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."^[2] This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."^[3]

 Debord describes correctly, but concludes wrongly; he thinks this is bad thing!  Paddy Cheyevsky's film "Network" has a much more optimistic and hopeful conclusion:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk

You'd be amazed at how many people think "Network" is satire.  Fools!

How Do You Measure Success?

King Tut's is the only Egyptian dynastic tomb found intact; i.e., not looted by grave robbers.  Or is it?  After all, the goal of mummification was a successful afterlife.  If the process worked, we would expect to find the mummies long gone, wouldn't we?

Christ's disciples found his tomb empty and started a religion.  Egyptologists have found ALL the tombs empty, save Tuts'.  Something is wrong with this picture.

The Rise of The Machines and the Twilight of the Gods

A hundred fifty years ago almost everyone knew - and had memorized big chunks of - the Bible.  Raised in a Fundy household, I was encouraged to do the same.  Our Sunday school gave prizes to those who could recite the most scripture.

Me?  I was a goof-off who preferred reading Hardy Boys mysteries. 

Fundamentalism is hard work.  You can't do what you want; you must always do what you should.  That's not a problem in a society where 90% of the population does backbreaking manual labor just to grow enough food.  Laziness can't exist in such conditions.  

Science, technology, and industrialization gave us the gift of leisure.  We read about the horrible working conditions in 19th century textile mills, but  grueling mill-work was still better than subsistence farming.

Secularism can exist in pre-industrial societies.  But it's a totalitarian secularism: Stalinism, Maoism, or North Korea's Juche.  As Russia and China modernize, the "isms" loose their power.  The Chinese aren't lazy, yet; give them time.

Fundamentalism does one thing well: it charges ordinary life with meaning.  "Mundane" things - eating, dressing, grooming - are not just chores.   Doing these things in a certain way is carrying out the Divine Will.  It is a sort of transubstantiation.

"What will make me happy?" is the most dangerous question of all.  One way to avoid it is to avoid having the personal space that permits such questions to flower.  This is the Totalitarian paradox: freedom - from existential dread - can come from slavery.

Paradoxes that Aren't

Probability Theory can be very non-intuitive.  The "Monty Hall Problem" is one famous example.  Even stranger is the "Two Envelope Problem:"

'Let us say you are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each of which contains a positive sum of money. One envelope contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep whatever amount it contains. You pick one envelope at random but before you open it you are offered the possibility to take the other envelope instead'.
It is possible to give arguments that show that it will be to your advantage to swap envelopes by showing that your expected return on swapping exceeds the sum in your envelope. This leads to the logical absurdity that it is beneficial to continue to swap envelopes indefinitely.

 What's the solution?  Read the Wikipedia article if you're curious.  (Hint: it's all in how you frame it.)

Language is messy.  Words are representations of things, not the things themselves.  "The cake is a lie."  Natural language is a super-set of mathematical language, and thus subject to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, among other issues.

Natural language allows us to formulate the "Omnipotence Paradox:" can God make a rock so heavy God can't lift it?

I was raised by Christian Fundamentalists, in a Church which taught the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  But these were smart Fundies.  Once, our Sunday School teacher put a map of the world on the wall.  A Mercator projection, it made Greenland, and Antarctica, absolutely huge.

Inevitably distortion results from representing three dimensions - the globe - in two dimensions. Distortion also results from using finite human language to represent the workings-out of a Transcendent God.  IOW, "the map is not the territory."  How then can The Bible be inerrant?

Did I mention that there are other types of maps - equal area projections - that don't show Greenland being larger than America?  But they have a different problem.  Whereas the Mercator projection gets sizes wrong, it shows the contours of Greenland's coastline correctly.  Equal area maps get the sizes right, but don't accurately show the coastline.

In short, you need to choose the right map for the right job; if you're planning to sail around the coastline of Greenland, the Mercator projection is the map for you; the apparent size distortion won't be a problem.  And so we see how Scripture, composed of finite language as it is, is still inerrant.  The Christian Life is a raised nail.  The Bible is our hammer!

A Modest Prediction

This blog isn't about politics, per se, but one way a commentator can prove his/her bonafides is by making outlandish predictions that come true.  Also, we can engage in some 'pataphysics.

Case: The US - and the rest of the developed world - faces economic crisis because of declining birth rates.  The only way to pay for Social Security, the only way for the housing crisis to end, is for there to be another baby boom.

That seems unlikely, because raising children is expensive.  This must change.  Children will become profit-centers, not cost-centers.  We must bring back child labor! 

There are other ways out.  Science could develop a cure for aging, leaving us hale and hearty until, at the age of 110, our cells stop dividing and we die.  Or we could abolish social security - this would create incentives for people to have more children, who would take care of them in old-age.  But that's risky; how many people currently save enough for retirement?  So I think child labor is the way to go.

Honestly, who can look at pictures from the turn of the last century, and not feel yesteryear's children were stronger, more disciplined, less frivolous, less... childish - then the children of today? As a fringe benefit, putting more children to work means less money wasted on education, too!

"All Creatures Are Words of God" - Meister Eckhart

Is the universe a created thing?  We Gnostics say 'yes.'  But how is creation implemented?  One theory is that the universe is a hologram.  Scientists are now running an experiment to see if this is true:

Is reality a 3D hologram of a 2D universe? This is a question that the researchers are asking almost a hundred years after physicist Max Planck came up with the idea of a finite measurement of distance, leading to the concept of Planck distance and Planck time. Stephen Hawking built on this concept to suggest that there is a discrete fidelity or resolution to the universe – sort of like pixels in a picture. Further credence was given to the idea when German scientists working on the GEO600 project noticed distortions in their observations while studying the gravitational waves created by black holes. The cause of this distortion is thought to be because the team were approaching the lower limit of the universe's resolution. They might have been the first to see the fabric of reality!

 Western science assumes we can study reality and learn something meaningful from it because reality reflects an "ideal" world - whether conceived as Platonic forms, the omnipotent, omniscient god of Christendom, or the perfection of mathematics.  What if that's wrong?

If our Creator is flawed, we would expect to find mistakes in the very fabric of creation - bugs, if you will.  Bugs like this one:

Physicists describe gravitation with Newton's Law of Gravitation, which incorporates the Gravitational Constant G. Here's where the embarrassment arises. Many other constants of nature, such as the charge on the electron, are known to eight significant figures. We only know G to three. What's worse, modern attempts to refine the measurement of G come up with wildly different answers. Torsion-pendulum experiments in the U.S., Germany, and New Zealand are far apart in their G-measurements. And physicists are perplexed -- to put it mildly.

 We'll have more to say as this blog progresses....