The Divine Artist Is Always Creating

One is not defined by perfection. Nothing is in its ideal form. To reduce something to the ideal is to freeze it. However, when you arrest something in it's progress in this way, you kill it. The constant of reality is movement. 

In the beginning the world was formless and void. The creation story is about the Creator bringing form, and thus purpose to this void. To observe the follow on stories with any amount of honesty is to see this process of bringing order from chaos and meaning out of the void is continued in various and complex permutations. Thus no single instant can be reduced to anything other than the part it plays in the whole. 

This is not to say there is no right or wrong. There are in fact things that bring life and things that do not bring life, and to assume otherwise is to be as equally imperceptive as reading the scripture without recognizing the constancy of both change and the creative process of the Father. 

However, we come at this life giving impulse from a meta perspective, and in a transformational way especially when we forgive in the instant what transgressed us, as it too can be redeemed. This forgiveness must also be applied to the self. We can indeed by grace transcend that which once bound us. 

We choose to participate accepting that things are more than the sum of their parts. In faith I accept and choose to participate with the Creator because I believe the Divine Artist is still creating. 

The Opposite Of Political Correctness

For those of you who watched the recent fox news broadcast of the first ever debate between the Republican hopefuls for President of the United States, you may have noticed that Donald Trump, as expected, acted like himself.

I have limited patience for his positions, and do not intend to defend them here. However, it is noteworthy the extent to which he has, in a short time, generated considerable support simply because he is himself. The absurdity of his proposed positions does not seem to shake the majority of his supporters who I strongly believe do not support him so much for his proposed policy as for his seeming lack of ability to behave like a decent human being in front of an audience.

This signals confidence, decisiveness, and even clarity of thought. All these attributes are markedly lacking from postmodern society. They are also high human virtues that we are deeply attracted to, and for some of us this is regardless of content, as Mr. Trump has demonstrated.

We easily assume that Donald Trump is the opposite of political correctness from the opinions he shares regardless of if anyone asked for them or not, and it is easy to say he is as successful as he has been to this point because of his disregard for political correctness.

However, I challenge this position to ask who defines PC. It is often assumed that PC is a virtue of the left wing. It certainly is, but it is also of any point along the political spectrum that forgoes critical thought in favor of prepackaged platforms and rehearsed outrage at whatever is assumed to be destroying society. Outrage at the state of immigration, debt, foreign policy as apposed to income inequality, gender inequality, opportunity inequality, or anything held dear by the left wing is nothing more than what is PC for the point on the political spectrum from whence the position arises.

And increasingly, anyone who holds to any particular form of political correctness is causing flashes through my conscious of this character

and his supporters.

The actual non-PC path is to apply critical thought to the aspects of your own world view so that you have content worth raging for to begin with. Everyone may have an opinion. However, only those who understand theirs are entitled to one.

To take a your non-PC path into reality, you must exercise the above mentioned virtues of confidence, decisiveness, and clarity of thought, or to simplify, you must exercise both wisdom and courage, the true opposites of political correctness, and which I argue the majority of our problems stem from a lack of.

Postmodern society does not require more mass followers. It requires more individual leaders willing and capable of wisdom and courage. This does not require your candidate to win, or your position to be validated. It rather requires you to actually do something. Individuals remain the greatest potential black swans in existence.

Changing Seasons

It is nearing the end of the year. The season has shifted, and with it, life has made itself more scarce. Whether it be the trees barren of leaves, the grass dead in the frost, animals in hibernation, the birds flying over the horizon, or simply the sun lower in the sky in the interludes between long cold nights. The whole world dies to one degree or another and each element in it's own way. And then, it comes back to life more forcefully than before.

Eons of experience points to the seasons eventually changing, life returning, and the cycle continuing. It is the natural order of things, and a process we have long come to expect and take for granted. Those who went before from the majority of cultures found spiritual significance in the changing patterns. Some spoke of thin spaces as the seasons changed. The natural and the super natural getting closer as we were driven closer to each other to avoid the cold. Death always brings near the other. Some saw the need to placate the gods with blood sacrifices when they sensed them approaching in these times of shifts to darkness. 

Newer faiths capitalized on the older customs and adapted them to convey new messages. Whether Christianity, Islam, or consumerism, the innate urge to commune with the other is a powerful force, and one for which we still sacrifice greatly for the chance to turn what is into what be wish it could be. 

Some would see the rampant consumption and mass placating of social anxieties to be noise confusing us from the signal  for the "reason for the season". I see it as something coming from our deepest being. We wish more than anything else to be connected, and most of all to the Divine Other. Whether we recognize it or not, it is as fundamental as breath. Nearly as fundamental is our notion that to get something, you must give something. Thus the sacrifice.

As with everything though, there is a deeper pattern. Something over the horizon. A longer trajectory. 

All things die. However when death passes, life reemerges more forcefully than before, as surely as the grass after the thaw, and cherry blossoms in spring. It is such on more than the obvious level. We sense the thin spaces. Our traditions originated from fundamental ideas about the world. Even if the original meanings have long since been covered in noise, we still sense it. 

I commemorates this time in memory of when the Divine stepped through the thin space into the physical, soon to die, and then, to rise. And with this resurrection, the whole world will follow. The ultimate winter, and the ultimate spring to follow. Such is the sacrifice all our attempts only pointed to. Carried on the winds of ultimate compassion, there is a ship large enough to hold all the world. 

Death is still among us and overtakes all things. Belief in that not yet seen requires faith. We are creatures of faith regardless of its object. 

I chose to have faith in the notion that the true height of mastery is not to bring good from good, but to turn that which is broken and dying to even greater good. This is what I see as the nights are long and cold and life retreats. This is what I look forward to when spring comes again. 

What You Don't Know Can Kill You

Humans have a very hard time evaluating risk. We are not as rational as we may think and logic and reason are normally brought into our internal thought processes and external actions as a way to justify what were in truth emotional decisions. However, the degree to which we fail to logically account for risk, though it is linked to this, goes above and beyond.

There is actually sound biological reason to this. If we did evaluate risk "rationally", and thus made choices to avoid it, there would be a whole host of things we should rationally avoid. For nearly all of human history and in much of the world today the leading cause of death among women in the age range capable of baring children was and is child birth. This does not seem to have stopped the proliferation of humans to this day. In fact, lack of ability to rationalize and valuate risk has lead to much of the behavior that has allowed humans to become the current dominant species on this planet. It has also lead to our greatest atrocities.

Lack of food security risk valuation lead to the greatest mass killing in modern times.

What you don't know can indeed kill you.

However, it is also often what you do know, but do not accurately perceive that will do the same. In the modern world, near eradication of most short term risks has tremendously deteriorated our already low ability to valuate risk. This does not strictly mean that we do not under value how risky something is, but that we also have a tendency to over estimate it.

Just as we bring reason in to justify our emotional behavior, the same is done to assign disproportionate risk values to things that make us uncomfortable. This is why we see stories of kids being expelled from school for chewing their toast into the shape of a gun. This is also why we discuss euthanasia of unborn children because of genetic defects. Finally, this is why we have talk of laws against smoking in one's own house while at the same time no one seems to think it's a bad idea to get in a car and drive, an act that kills far more people every year than marginal exposure to second hand smoke ever has.

The modern world, as all worlds before it, is a complex system. It cannot be understood by simply looking at it's dissected parts, but rather requires an examination of the whole on its own terms. At the same time, all complex systems trend towards chaos, destruction, equilibrium and then back to chaos. This is as true for a sand hill piled by the wind to the point it collapses under its own weight and then is blown again as it is for a political system claiming power to the people only to be taken over by elites and then revolted against only to repeat the process again. For the time being, such absurd lack of ability to perceive reality is only an element of trending chaos. However, at the same time, it opens us to decisions and subsequent behaviors that are ultimately damaging to the human person. The world will go on regardless of what we do. However, it is our choice to what extent we contribute to that world being better and less chaotic than it was before.

Introductions.

The purpose of this space is to discuss that which is overlooked, and that which is lurking under the surface. This is as much because that which you don't know can indeed kill you, as it is because the stone that the builders refused will become the head corner stone. It is also for that which is too inconvenient to discuss in politically correct modern society. In fact, it will be made clear in successive conversations that the issues most talked about and most contended are far less important than what they are being used to cover for. 

This is because just as dysfunctional families triangulate away their greatest problems, so too do troubled societies substitute that which does not mater for that which does to ease the discomfort. That being said, do not assume there will be any Tea partying going on, and don’t expect to be welcomed if you preach conspiracy theories. 

The leaning here is not Right or Left. Neither is it Libertarian or Anarchist. Rather, what we will discus here is fear and courage, shame and wisdom, chaos and order, and how these influence and underpin all that we do or fail to do in the public world. Despite our claims to rational thinking and behavior, faith is as much a part of the modern secular world as ever it was in more religious times past. Logic is used post facto to rationalize what were always emotional decisions because all that we do is influenced thus. 

This does not mean though that there is not free will. There would be little point in debating what is best if we did not expect we could positively act on it. All action requires will to one extent or the other. The questions then will circulate around to what degree emotion will master us or if we will master them to be the horse we ride upon to a greater good.