I want to lovingly protect us from authoritarianism, a vulnerability to resolving the fear and tension of not knowing by clinging to the answers a so-called “higher authority”
The flaw here then is what 'authority' does your argument rest on?
You throw out an accusation of authoritarianism and there again we have someone resurrecting the old dichotomies (as if science wasn't authoritarian!) – and falling back on a Staw Man argument.
To be blunt, I'm no more in favour of authoritarianism than you, but I wouldn't fall back on a
fantasia in favour of a hierarchical reality.
I have often thought “You can’t get there from here; you can only get here from there.” That’s in line with the point I think you are making.
Not quite.
It all starts here. We get there from here. It's whether we can get
beyond the cosmos from here, that's the point.
It seems to me that everything you're saying as belonging to the cosmos, or perhaps this aion of this cosmos.
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I wonder if this adds anything:
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." (Genesis 1:1-3)
Scholars agree that "the beginning" is not meant as a temporal event. The Hebrew is רֵאשִׁית
rē'šîṯ, while the Septuagint Greek says ἐν ἀρχῇ
en arche and the Latin Vulgate is explicit 'in principio'. The text is referring to ontological rather than temporal events, temporality being subsequent and a condition of creation.
The heaven and the earth speaks of two orders, and not merely spiritual and physical, as (perhaps) neither have emerged yet...
Without form and void, darkness and deep – there is your unconditioned matter – the formless substrate, some Quantum whatever, prior to waves or particles, out of which all subsequent forms arise.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters is the emphasis of a category difference but also, perhaps, of a relational difference. There is God and there is this undifferentiated that God has called into existence ...
Let there be light is, of course, intelligibility ... but one might also argue before this that it means let that undifferentiated, anarchic, inchoate state nevertheless be(come) coherent, because albeit undifferentiated, anarchic, inchoate and so on, there is a value and a meaning and a purpose in it, as contradictory as that sounds.
But if we look at how cosmology says the Book of the Laws of Physics was there, entire and complete, right in the very first moment of physical existence, then that's saying much the same thing.
Somewhere in that journey from nothing to something, being emerges, and from being, mind. Whether it's mind first or being first is, I think, a chicken-and-egg kind of debate, but the point is there was It before there was aught else, and the difference between It and aught else is Absolute and Irrevocable ... except that by that Willing of light by It, there is a dimension of intelligibility and comprehension, even if that is a comprehension of that which lies beyond Mind, beyond the world of forms and the formless.
I believe and hope in the union of the two, but I take care to preserve from the promethean error of our primordial forebears to fall into the trap of assuming that as our by right and/or by nature.
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It depends whether one is humanist, pantheist, or panentheist.
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