Can you give me a description of God?
Pope John Paul 2 referred to God as the all-knowing absolute, but this seems contradictory to me, given an absolute would be a universal state, while knowledge is a process of discernment and judgement.
To me, it would seem a spiritual absolute, given it is our conscious awareness that is the real mystery, would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born babe, than the wise old man. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Knowledge then is up to us, to explore our world and learn from it. Reaching peaks of perception, then sliding back into the valleys of enormity.
The price we pay to think, is that much of it is confusion, much as the price we pay to feel, is that much of it is pain.
Monotheism has served a political function over the millennia, the father figure lawgiver has served to validate top down rule. The Romans adopted and co-opted gnostic Christianity as a state religion, apparently to validate the Empire and bury remnants of the Republic.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures and when the West went back to more broad based political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.
The problem with treating the ideal as absolute, is that ideals tend to differ, so an entire culture formulated around the assumption of them as absolute would seem to logically lead to multiple irreconcilable differences and conflicts. One's signal, is another's noise.
Many of the ideologies, from the more arcane, to the more mundane, that have sprung up in the shadow of monotheism, have tended to assume themselves to be universal and any competing ideals to be false. The debate between capitalism and communism would be only one example.
The reality seems to be more of a yin and yang, of feedback between the poles, creating this complex reality.
One idea I've been using is that synchronization is inherently centripetal, while harmonization is effectively centrifugal, so there are nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems.
The tendency of political movements, as well as corporations, is to synchronize the behavior of the participants into one larger organism. Which requires some central totem, around which to form, like the eye of a storm, or the grain of sand at the center of a pearl.
For example, capitalism has come to see the accounting device of money as a commodity to mine from the economy which it serves. While this siphoning process can be extended out to the entire society and its environs, it also hollows it out.
After awhile though, the centralizing positive feedback crests at its most intense, at which point the negative feedback of the downside of the wave starts to kick in and it comes apart....
Thoughts?
