Your recommendation for Earth healing it’s also true for the human body. We prefer to go to doctors and to eat handfuls of pills to living healthfully and allowing our own body, arguably our best physician, to heal us and maintain our health. It's the same mentality.
After all, even the rocks cried out. I think Jesus was a lot closer to Gaia than the Pharisees. I love reading Jesus' talk with the Pharisees in Matthew; one of the best condemning talks ever. Then again, it got him killed. Jesus had 2 Commandments: Love God and Love One Another As I have Loved You (note: that means unconditionally).
I'm re-reading my favorite novel, Les Miserables (Victor Hugo), and he has a masterful way of expressing great truths in his touching story. Little Cosette (8 yrs. old, and an orphan) doesn't know she needs to be saved from the grips of the Thenardiers; she's never known any other world than the one she's experienced, as the servant-girl, treated like the dog. She sees others being treated better than herself, but because of her cruel taskmaster, had no direct knowledge of the finer side of life. She also had no knowledge that Jean Valjean had promised her dying mother (Fantine) that he would take care of Cosette, which would begin by "rescuing" her from her current plight. He is good to his word and, as soon as possible, removes her from the Thenardier's grip, and for the rest of her life shows her the finer side of life she'd never known. The criminal Thenardier's continue to dog them, as does the legalistic Javert, who can't let previous wrongs be righted due to his strict legal philosophy. Life still has its trials.
I guess my point is that until we catch a glimpse of what we're missing out on, we're clueless to the fact that we need to be saved from anything. And we also are clueless to what "higher beings", as Jean Valjean seemed like to little Cosette, are arranging behind the scenes to do us good, to see that we're taken care of, and offered a better life. I can only say that it'll change your life for the better when one of those higher beings comes alongside you when you're at a point of despair, and grabs your heavy load and carries it for you, which is what happened when Jean met Cosette for the first time. Life becomes so joyous that you forget all about your previous, miserable life. If that's not salvation, I don't know what is.
It was not long before Bacon and Descartes that others listened to more than just their thinking, that being to the inner connections of insights, intuitions, and heart knowings. Reading up on Descartes just recently, it was stated that he, attesting to the fact that scientists can have certain sensings about things, these not all the same or happening at the same time, he declared only "thinking" could be relied upon to come to proofs of what is real. Hence the Scientific Method.
Yes, we should let Nature heal what's been done, but we also are a part of nature, and have been given intelligences to help us make healing decisions. It was said, "You shall create also, you made in my/God's image, and shall do more than I", this a paraphrase on my part, you realize.
Inner heart and other receptive abilities, like intuitions, insights and ah ha's inform us, as one person writing described it as conscience, but inner intelligences looking for broader, expanded perceptions of how ecosystems work, for instance, this knowledge afforded us by the humility not to "think" we know everything, but to observe life and sense deeply into ways, and notice basic needs and truths that are quite obvious, for truth and the real are simple to see, as the children saw the Emperor wore no clothes.
We know what all people need: food, water, shelter, safety, belonging, meaning and trust of a higher purpose, forgiveness, compassion and love.
As just one example in more recent times, what happened to the two or three men who used to drive the trucks to collect our discarded things. Soon, as those trucks were automated with the lift arm, one or two people were put out of jobs important to their lives, that the day it became evident to me, we were rapidly going forward with dehumanizing steps, automating life into purposelessness, thinking only thought would bring humanity fulfillment, as the adults were all in illusions when the children could really see the Emperor.
Agreed, we need to save nature because nature will in turn save us. I live in Austin, TX. (Yes, hate the political heads.) During the Summer it feels like HELL. As more trees are destroyed for homes the hotter the area will get. We need common sense solutions as our climate temperatures rise. However, Fox Non-News debunks any real science so it’s hard to get environmental preservation on the agenda.
Agree with much of the sentiment here but from a philosophy standpoint, its unusual to associate the scientific method, or modern views about science, with Descartes. As noted below, it has long been understood that... "The fact that Descartes offered mechanistic explanations for many features of nature does not mean that his explanations were successful."
Much of what the article delves into actually involves concepts of mankind and its relation to the world, as addressed by philosophers from Aristotle to Neitzche to Sartre and the existentialists.
The modern scientific method is usually associated with the methods and achievements of Galileo rather than Descartes. Descartes is only mentioned as an "Also see...." in the (7 chapters long) entry on the "Scientific Method" in Stamford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The way in which Descartes' views failed to hold sway in the era that succeeded him is explained further in the Descartes section of the Encyclopedia:
"The fact that Descartes offered mechanistic explanations for many features of nature does not mean that his explanations were successful. Indeed, his followers and detractors debated the success of his various proposals for nearly a century after his death. His accounts of magnetism and gravity were challenged. Leibniz challenged the coherence of Descartes' laws of motion and impact. Newton offered his own laws of motion and an inverse square law of gravitational attraction. His account of orbital planetary motions replaced Descartes' vortexes. Others struggled to make Descartes' physiology work. There were also deeper challenges. Some wondered whether Descartes could actually explain how his infinitely divisible matter could coalesce into solid bodies. Why shouldn't collections of particles act like whiffs of smoke, that separate upon contact with large particles? Indeed, how do particles themselves cohere?
Such problems were real, and Descartes' physics was abandoned over the course of the eighteenth century."
To the best of my recollection, I either dropped out of the only philosophy class I ever took in college or it was the only one I flunked out of with an “F”. I’m quite sure it was the latter. I have read a little since about Descartes but know very little about his writing or the details involved in his ideas. What I do recall is that he believed that all knowledge comes from god as he defined “him”.
So, while Descartes apparently believed that man can fix things using science, he must have also stood for the proposition that the god of his Christian religion was the puppeteer behind the curtain and the arbiter of all things. If I have that right, there isn’t so much a collision between salvationist religions, in which the Second Coming or “Judgment Day” or “end times” remove the righteous believers from the earth, and the view of man as his own savior through discovery or science, as there is a merging of those things.
In any case, those two “core cultural assumptions” identified are two of several which all feed significantly into the impending disaster. A third is “original sin”. A fourth is the “strict father” myth or metaphor (leading to patriarchy and various other evils). The fifth is that knowledge is disembodied, i.e., derived from an external omniscient authority, which for Descartes was his god in the sky guy.
The first four erroneous assumptions are, in my humble estimation, perpetuated principally by the fifth. The idea that knowledge emanates from and exists anywhere outside of the human mind is bonkers and dangerous. If mental telepathy is a real phenomenon, it does not transmit much in the way of knowledge.
Data, symbols, information, language, etc., fill books and other media. Those things are inert and lifeless until they are processed by a sentient human being (which processing should not ever be compared to computer processing). Cognition is the creation of knowledge, and when the person who engaged in thinking, organizing, acting, feeling, remembering, imagining, creating, etc., etc., dies, that exclusive and mostly private and personal knowledge no longer exists in the same form or architecture. Cognition occurs in the human body/mind and cognition equals knowledge, right or wrong, true or false.
Every day in nearly every school in the US, the fallacious conception of knowledge as delivered from external sources, i. e., authorities, teachers, experts, textbooks, media, etc., is being imprinted indelibly on the perceptions and thinking of millions of students. They have no clue about the fact that they have the ability, the need, and the obligation to utilize information from wherever they find it to create and recreate knowledge with which to change the world. Inestimable opportunities are lost. Confusion reigns. People with minimal legitimacy or capability are in positions of power and influence. And then, coercion is used via the attendance law to add insult to injury and to undermine confidence, initiative, and autonomy.
We have the empirical science to point the way. We could start by fixing these things. When will those who are in positions of leadership ever stop pretending that schools will fix themselves?
I have lived in the Arctic and on Greenland; Mr. Hartman's suggestion that we ought to be concerned about the possibility of the huge Gulf Ocean Stream that pivots just south of Greenland stopping, and turning is, scientifically, an increasing possibility. It will, literally, in super quick time change the climate in Europe and North America.
At my house in Alaska I watched January temperatures increase circa 50 F. degrees in less than 30 years.
Technology is a seductive, and increasingly dangerous system to rely on for both short-term and long-term survival of Humanity. At 8 Billion, amassing another 4 billion before 2100, the Planet, and Gaia, may simply wear down with all our short-term solutions. Our Green Energy Bet looks, for example, to be promising to cause as many mining extraction incidents as our Oil & Gas operations, and the traffic by 12 billion users will make Bombay and China's urban centers look tame. Our 5G experiment, with microwave towers on every corner, may end up becoming a cancer vector of unimaginable proportions. Millions of health care users are slowly watching the emerging data showing that the completely experimental use of the Covid solutions mRNA technology may, long-term, end up being equal in to what we experienced with the thalidomide experiment 50 years ago. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15536544
After reading The Moonpool https://www.amazon.com/Moonpool-Novel-P-T-Deutermann/dp/0312371594 I am not sure that we can control the operating systems and the metallurgical decay inherent in the design - and I simply do not trust our economic or moral ability to keep all the contaminated materials safe for 1000 years.
As usual, Mr. Hartman raises more questions than he proposes, and it is questionable whether enough people will have the daily, yearly and decade long will to change their own life styles and work toward a low energy system. He claims a Christian Faith, and yet, as many Baby Boomers, have little Grace to believe that our Faith alone will save us. But, unless we all choose to give up, do drugs or become mean, perhaps beginning with faith, compassion and a little more concerns for what our actions are doing to neighbors and the next seven generations, religions may be our bridge. One thing is definitive, our civilization cannot survive as long as we allow corporations to function without a charter mandate requiring that their prime, core, financial focus must be to serve the Commons Long term.
Dr. Hartman citations:
This isn’t to say that we don’t need technological solutions to the crises we’ve created by continuing to rely on our 19th century fossil fuel technologies. Technology is absolutely essential if we’re to continue having an advanced society; we most urgently need to start making use, for example, of the nuclear power available to us in almost infinite quantities from that massive fusion reactor 93 million miles away that we call the Sun.
But to avoid the worst of the the crisis we’ve brought upon ourselves, before the Great Conveyor Belt (Gulf Stream) collapses and the Jet Stream goes from “drunk” to “dead” and renders much of Europe and eastern North America uninhabitable for humans, we must reimagine and reexamine our core cultural assumptions.
Like the dog of my earlier example, we can’t “fix” the planet with simplistic technological patches.
Gaia does have the ability to heal, but it often requires us to step back in radical ways, from stopping the use of fossil fuels to changing the way we feed ourselves to reducing our population worldwide over the next generation or two.
I have always thought that there are rational thinkers and irrational thinkers. Irrational thinkers or people with little virtue cannot teach their children to be rational thinkers or have a lot of virtue.
Rational thinkers plan ahead and care about whether they are right or wrong, morale or immoral godly or satanic negative or positive... In order to be intelligent one must be right so one has to care whether one is right or wrong. In my discoveries only having a healthy conscience can determine the intelligence of a human. The irrational thinkers have less of a conscience if any at all and I consider them to think like animals. So we have human thinking and animal thinking in my opinion. The only way we can raise all the children to be conscientious is to make sure all their needs are met with no stress or anxiety in neutral tribal growing centers. Only then can we end religious hatred, racism, child abuse, drug babies, criminals, obesity, stupidity. Nobody can teach what they don't know, that is why and how the family unit has stopped the evolution of the human race along with phony religions. Only the truth that can be proven is worthy of being a religion. To believe anything as the absolute tuth that cannot be proven is just morally wrong. Religious faith is evil in my opinion. Most atheist I've met have been raised in religious families and they have just rebelled, but they still have faith that there is no God.
For the first time in 21 years I need to disagree with Thom. We must “...leave large parts of Nature alone,” Thom says, “trusting that she knows best how to appropriately regenerate.”
That, it seems to me, is a restatement of another misplaced cultural certainty, the “man/nature dichotomy.” It was powerfully introduced in 1865 by George Perkins Marsh in his epochal book, Man and Nature. “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,” Marsh wrote. “ Wherever he plants his foot the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.”
Professor Henry Vaux at Berkeley was a forest economist (attuned to man things). Professor Arnold Schultz was a forest ecologist (attuned to nature things). But both were classic scholars, attuned also to something larger: a quest for truth. So they sat down and talked about the apparent separation of man and nature and found it was false. The social system and the ecosystem are not separate and distinct; instead they are interactive, interadaptive, inseparable and INTERDEPENDENT, forming a single “biosocial” system. Vaux and Schultz made great sense to me in my career as a forestry prof.
The biosocial system, it turns out, is just a pedantic reformulation of Lovelock’s Gaia or indigenous cultures’ theme of Mother Earth. But all three reject Marsh’s splitting of man from nature.
So no, we don’t need to “...leave large parts of Nature alone.” We need to follow indigenous cultures’ treatment of Mother Earth: we need to use her to survive, but we must use her with respect, with gratitude, and with the wisdom to use her only for need, not greed.
All of which Thom also said, insisting we must recognize the fire in all of creation, and rearrange things to care for and nurture, not control and crush.
So Thom didn’t really err. He just slipped up. One offhand statement was inconsistent with everything else in his piece. And all that was just first rate, spot-on stuff. Pure Hartmann. (Ah, but he did split an infinitive.)
Thank you Thom, that explains a lot. Conservatives, in what ever manifestation, from moderate to QAnon, apparently come from very rigid, hierarchical families. mostly, but not necessarily, male led
Am I wrong in thinking conservatives find salvation in a father figure, whereas liberals find salvation in ideas and concepts.
If so the father figure is winning. While conservatives find the ultimate father figure in the form of their god. The liberal salvation is ethereal, The god of the conservatives is ethereal, but they have embodied "him" in their minds, and i stands an avatar, the ultimate authority, which is the same purpose that Constantine, Charlemagne and other despots had for god or Allah or Thor. An avatar which they then use as a ventriloquist dummy, to justify their rule and the submission of its subjects.
Even the Bolsheviks needed a god or a demigod, and thus they sacralized, a proto libertarian (Marx) as a demigod
The internet and now the cell phone has created an alternate society.one in which the collective conscious (in the form of up votes, likes and views) are the authority.
Conservatives will continue to rally around an avatar, a person who epitomizes their fears, needs, beliefs. Liberals have their won tool, the collective consciousness, should they take the time to stop planning marches, and gather together and think how to use. the tool.Instead of wasting time on Tik Tok challenges and posting narcissistic photos and rants about oneself, they have a a chance to use the new mass communication for social change.
This is the best piece of yours I've read yet, Thom, and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. This is really the big issue of our time. Reading the comments below, I saw that some people chose to argue the validity of Descartes as founder of the scientific method. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason was the human superpower by which the Mind of God could be fathomed, and the scientific method is the product of many of these people's efforts to become like God. Descartes's simple axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" can be seen as battle cry of rationalism itself, more than the foundation of the scientific method per se. It was certainly among the most revolutionary statements of history.
There is much I could say about what Thom says here. I will read his book that several of you mentioned: "The Prophet's Way." At the moment, I'm wondering if it's autobiographical, because he often speaks with the clarity and authority of a prophet.
Since others have opened the door to it, I'm going to use a Biblical reference to make a point. The Pharisees asked Jesus to give them a sign. He responded, "No sign will be given to this faithless generation except the sign of Jonah." Usually this is taken to refer to Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish as an allusion to Christ's three days in the tomb before resurrection.
However, there's more to the story. The reason Jonah was cast overboard from the ship during the storm and thus exposed to the creature in the first place was that God had commanded him to go and preach destruction and judgment to the Ninevens for their sins, but he refused. The fish was his punishment. When he repented and was spared after three days, he went on to carry out his mission, and gave the warning to the people of Nineveh. Then he went up on a hillside, built a tent, and waited to watch the destruction. Nothing happened. He cried out to God in protest, after having gone through so much to deliver the message. The Lord answers, "Why should I destroy a city with so many righteous people?" (Like other commenters, I'm paraphrasing from memory). You see, upon hearing the words of judgment, the Ninevens had repented in ashes and sack cloth in the streets of the city, crying out for forgiveness and mercy. This was a reversal of the destructive course they had been on, and so they were forgiven and spared.
In giving the Sign of Jonah, I believe Jesus was saying, "If you turn away from evil and stop obstructing me and live according to God's will, the annihilation that's about to befall you will be diverted, and you will be able to establish the Kingdom of Heaven that you've been praying and suffering for. However, because you don't know the time of your visitation, there will not be one stone left upon another within you." And indeed, within 70 years of his crucifixion, Jerusalem was sacked, and the Israelites were dispersed throughout the world to endure great persecution down into our times.
All of that is to say, the times are the same today, only much more intense. The warnings are being given, and they are not being spoken of among elite initiates behind closed doors in the inner sanctum of some temple, but every night, in front of everyone, in plain language, on the evening news. So where are our ashes and sack cloth? Where are the elders of the people leading us to repentance and to change our ways? Who is ever going to be able to plead ignorance?
In the lyrics Tim Rice wrote for "Jesus Christ, Superstar," Judas chides Jesus, saying, "... Why'd you pick such a backward time, in such a strange land? If you'd have come today, you could have moved the whole nation. Back in 4 BC they had no mass communication!" And today we do have global mass communication, and as such the need for individual prophets has greatly diminished. EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE is hearing the message 24 hours out of every day. No one with access to television, the internet, or even just a radio, can claim ignorance.
One perversion, especially among so-called "Christian Nationalists," is to limit God's Will to certain moral proscriptions in the Old Testament or pulled from the asses of medieval popes and councils. They scream that God will condemn us because we suffer gays and lesbians to live, or let women have autonomy over their bodies. We allow the mixing of the races and cultures, but we don't want to allow religious bigots (they consider themselves "the righteous") to dictate the lives of the rest of us.
Rigid "Christian" Nationalists actually defy one of the greatest principles of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition by stubbornly standing against repentance and contrition. When someone tries to recognize the atrocities that this nation committed against Native Americans and people kidnapped and dragged here in chains from Africa, instead of acknowledging the sins and seeking in grief and humility to make amends, the "Christians" of today become boastful, arrogant and self-righteous. They call those who cry out against social injustice and the destruction of our planet and ecosystem through corporate greed, communists and Marxists, or use their favorite catch-all phrase, "Woke." And of course, "Woke" means you support drinking babies' blood and call for naked, drunken orgies in "The hallowed halls of our great institutions."
But there are no ashes and sack cloth. You'd think that by now, in this capitalist nightmare we live in, at least one entrepreneur would have picked up on a trend and started trying to corner the ash-and-sackcloth market, or tried to copyright or patent it or something, but so far, it hasn't popped up in my Facebook ad feed.
I maintain that there are dimensions, what Jesus called "principalities and powers," that exist beyond this three-dimensional world of illusion and ceaseless impermanence, and there are already things in place in those realms that we can't perceive as yet where we are, here in this densest and most illusory realm of existence. And these things will be manifested.
So back to Jonah, and I'll finish. I have a sense that the only way this world can be set on a better track - salvation, if you will - is for the system we've built to collapse. That's what it has taken historically. The messages are given, but the people harden their hearts until there is no other recourse. We seem collectively incapable of hearing the voice of our own Higher Wisdom. That's what happened in the 1860s when our Union was being ripped apart. In 1929, we had a world-wide economic collapse, followed by the bloodiest war in history. In both cases, in the aftermath, we managed to cobble together a marginally better, more just world.
The earth and every single part of her infinitely complex being is alive and conscious, and in the same way the myriad systems in our bodies can work together to kick off disease, the thinking, aware and sentient Cosmos is fully capable of healing itself from the cancer that we have become. We are already undergoing increasingly severe purges or '"judgments" (to use the Biblical term), until we either find our ashes and sack cloth, or the Earth is cast back to pre-industrial levels and we are compelled to live in peace, respect and harmony with our Father/Mother God, with the forces of Nature in which we have our entire existence and on which we are completely dependent, and with the rest of life, with which we are equal (not above) and One..
During Covid..the Quarantines ACTUALLY proved this theory..The planet was just beginning to regenerate itself.. STOPPING ..WORKS👍☮️🌅
Your recommendation for Earth healing it’s also true for the human body. We prefer to go to doctors and to eat handfuls of pills to living healthfully and allowing our own body, arguably our best physician, to heal us and maintain our health. It's the same mentality.
After all, even the rocks cried out. I think Jesus was a lot closer to Gaia than the Pharisees. I love reading Jesus' talk with the Pharisees in Matthew; one of the best condemning talks ever. Then again, it got him killed. Jesus had 2 Commandments: Love God and Love One Another As I have Loved You (note: that means unconditionally).
I'm re-reading my favorite novel, Les Miserables (Victor Hugo), and he has a masterful way of expressing great truths in his touching story. Little Cosette (8 yrs. old, and an orphan) doesn't know she needs to be saved from the grips of the Thenardiers; she's never known any other world than the one she's experienced, as the servant-girl, treated like the dog. She sees others being treated better than herself, but because of her cruel taskmaster, had no direct knowledge of the finer side of life. She also had no knowledge that Jean Valjean had promised her dying mother (Fantine) that he would take care of Cosette, which would begin by "rescuing" her from her current plight. He is good to his word and, as soon as possible, removes her from the Thenardier's grip, and for the rest of her life shows her the finer side of life she'd never known. The criminal Thenardier's continue to dog them, as does the legalistic Javert, who can't let previous wrongs be righted due to his strict legal philosophy. Life still has its trials.
I guess my point is that until we catch a glimpse of what we're missing out on, we're clueless to the fact that we need to be saved from anything. And we also are clueless to what "higher beings", as Jean Valjean seemed like to little Cosette, are arranging behind the scenes to do us good, to see that we're taken care of, and offered a better life. I can only say that it'll change your life for the better when one of those higher beings comes alongside you when you're at a point of despair, and grabs your heavy load and carries it for you, which is what happened when Jean met Cosette for the first time. Life becomes so joyous that you forget all about your previous, miserable life. If that's not salvation, I don't know what is.
It was not long before Bacon and Descartes that others listened to more than just their thinking, that being to the inner connections of insights, intuitions, and heart knowings. Reading up on Descartes just recently, it was stated that he, attesting to the fact that scientists can have certain sensings about things, these not all the same or happening at the same time, he declared only "thinking" could be relied upon to come to proofs of what is real. Hence the Scientific Method.
Yes, we should let Nature heal what's been done, but we also are a part of nature, and have been given intelligences to help us make healing decisions. It was said, "You shall create also, you made in my/God's image, and shall do more than I", this a paraphrase on my part, you realize.
Inner heart and other receptive abilities, like intuitions, insights and ah ha's inform us, as one person writing described it as conscience, but inner intelligences looking for broader, expanded perceptions of how ecosystems work, for instance, this knowledge afforded us by the humility not to "think" we know everything, but to observe life and sense deeply into ways, and notice basic needs and truths that are quite obvious, for truth and the real are simple to see, as the children saw the Emperor wore no clothes.
We know what all people need: food, water, shelter, safety, belonging, meaning and trust of a higher purpose, forgiveness, compassion and love.
As just one example in more recent times, what happened to the two or three men who used to drive the trucks to collect our discarded things. Soon, as those trucks were automated with the lift arm, one or two people were put out of jobs important to their lives, that the day it became evident to me, we were rapidly going forward with dehumanizing steps, automating life into purposelessness, thinking only thought would bring humanity fulfillment, as the adults were all in illusions when the children could really see the Emperor.
Agreed, we need to save nature because nature will in turn save us. I live in Austin, TX. (Yes, hate the political heads.) During the Summer it feels like HELL. As more trees are destroyed for homes the hotter the area will get. We need common sense solutions as our climate temperatures rise. However, Fox Non-News debunks any real science so it’s hard to get environmental preservation on the agenda.
I consider myself a Christian in the tradition of Thomas Merton and Gottfried Mueller…
After reading this, I was stunned that said you are a Christian. How?
Agree with much of the sentiment here but from a philosophy standpoint, its unusual to associate the scientific method, or modern views about science, with Descartes. As noted below, it has long been understood that... "The fact that Descartes offered mechanistic explanations for many features of nature does not mean that his explanations were successful."
Much of what the article delves into actually involves concepts of mankind and its relation to the world, as addressed by philosophers from Aristotle to Neitzche to Sartre and the existentialists.
The modern scientific method is usually associated with the methods and achievements of Galileo rather than Descartes. Descartes is only mentioned as an "Also see...." in the (7 chapters long) entry on the "Scientific Method" in Stamford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The way in which Descartes' views failed to hold sway in the era that succeeded him is explained further in the Descartes section of the Encyclopedia:
"The fact that Descartes offered mechanistic explanations for many features of nature does not mean that his explanations were successful. Indeed, his followers and detractors debated the success of his various proposals for nearly a century after his death. His accounts of magnetism and gravity were challenged. Leibniz challenged the coherence of Descartes' laws of motion and impact. Newton offered his own laws of motion and an inverse square law of gravitational attraction. His account of orbital planetary motions replaced Descartes' vortexes. Others struggled to make Descartes' physiology work. There were also deeper challenges. Some wondered whether Descartes could actually explain how his infinitely divisible matter could coalesce into solid bodies. Why shouldn't collections of particles act like whiffs of smoke, that separate upon contact with large particles? Indeed, how do particles themselves cohere?
Such problems were real, and Descartes' physics was abandoned over the course of the eighteenth century."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/
To the best of my recollection, I either dropped out of the only philosophy class I ever took in college or it was the only one I flunked out of with an “F”. I’m quite sure it was the latter. I have read a little since about Descartes but know very little about his writing or the details involved in his ideas. What I do recall is that he believed that all knowledge comes from god as he defined “him”.
So, while Descartes apparently believed that man can fix things using science, he must have also stood for the proposition that the god of his Christian religion was the puppeteer behind the curtain and the arbiter of all things. If I have that right, there isn’t so much a collision between salvationist religions, in which the Second Coming or “Judgment Day” or “end times” remove the righteous believers from the earth, and the view of man as his own savior through discovery or science, as there is a merging of those things.
In any case, those two “core cultural assumptions” identified are two of several which all feed significantly into the impending disaster. A third is “original sin”. A fourth is the “strict father” myth or metaphor (leading to patriarchy and various other evils). The fifth is that knowledge is disembodied, i.e., derived from an external omniscient authority, which for Descartes was his god in the sky guy.
The first four erroneous assumptions are, in my humble estimation, perpetuated principally by the fifth. The idea that knowledge emanates from and exists anywhere outside of the human mind is bonkers and dangerous. If mental telepathy is a real phenomenon, it does not transmit much in the way of knowledge.
Data, symbols, information, language, etc., fill books and other media. Those things are inert and lifeless until they are processed by a sentient human being (which processing should not ever be compared to computer processing). Cognition is the creation of knowledge, and when the person who engaged in thinking, organizing, acting, feeling, remembering, imagining, creating, etc., etc., dies, that exclusive and mostly private and personal knowledge no longer exists in the same form or architecture. Cognition occurs in the human body/mind and cognition equals knowledge, right or wrong, true or false.
Every day in nearly every school in the US, the fallacious conception of knowledge as delivered from external sources, i. e., authorities, teachers, experts, textbooks, media, etc., is being imprinted indelibly on the perceptions and thinking of millions of students. They have no clue about the fact that they have the ability, the need, and the obligation to utilize information from wherever they find it to create and recreate knowledge with which to change the world. Inestimable opportunities are lost. Confusion reigns. People with minimal legitimacy or capability are in positions of power and influence. And then, coercion is used via the attendance law to add insult to injury and to undermine confidence, initiative, and autonomy.
We have the empirical science to point the way. We could start by fixing these things. When will those who are in positions of leadership ever stop pretending that schools will fix themselves?
I have lived in the Arctic and on Greenland; Mr. Hartman's suggestion that we ought to be concerned about the possibility of the huge Gulf Ocean Stream that pivots just south of Greenland stopping, and turning is, scientifically, an increasing possibility. It will, literally, in super quick time change the climate in Europe and North America.
At my house in Alaska I watched January temperatures increase circa 50 F. degrees in less than 30 years.
Technology is a seductive, and increasingly dangerous system to rely on for both short-term and long-term survival of Humanity. At 8 Billion, amassing another 4 billion before 2100, the Planet, and Gaia, may simply wear down with all our short-term solutions. Our Green Energy Bet looks, for example, to be promising to cause as many mining extraction incidents as our Oil & Gas operations, and the traffic by 12 billion users will make Bombay and China's urban centers look tame. Our 5G experiment, with microwave towers on every corner, may end up becoming a cancer vector of unimaginable proportions. Millions of health care users are slowly watching the emerging data showing that the completely experimental use of the Covid solutions mRNA technology may, long-term, end up being equal in to what we experienced with the thalidomide experiment 50 years ago. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15536544
After reading The Moonpool https://www.amazon.com/Moonpool-Novel-P-T-Deutermann/dp/0312371594 I am not sure that we can control the operating systems and the metallurgical decay inherent in the design - and I simply do not trust our economic or moral ability to keep all the contaminated materials safe for 1000 years.
As usual, Mr. Hartman raises more questions than he proposes, and it is questionable whether enough people will have the daily, yearly and decade long will to change their own life styles and work toward a low energy system. He claims a Christian Faith, and yet, as many Baby Boomers, have little Grace to believe that our Faith alone will save us. But, unless we all choose to give up, do drugs or become mean, perhaps beginning with faith, compassion and a little more concerns for what our actions are doing to neighbors and the next seven generations, religions may be our bridge. One thing is definitive, our civilization cannot survive as long as we allow corporations to function without a charter mandate requiring that their prime, core, financial focus must be to serve the Commons Long term.
Dr. Hartman citations:
This isn’t to say that we don’t need technological solutions to the crises we’ve created by continuing to rely on our 19th century fossil fuel technologies. Technology is absolutely essential if we’re to continue having an advanced society; we most urgently need to start making use, for example, of the nuclear power available to us in almost infinite quantities from that massive fusion reactor 93 million miles away that we call the Sun.
But to avoid the worst of the the crisis we’ve brought upon ourselves, before the Great Conveyor Belt (Gulf Stream) collapses and the Jet Stream goes from “drunk” to “dead” and renders much of Europe and eastern North America uninhabitable for humans, we must reimagine and reexamine our core cultural assumptions.
Like the dog of my earlier example, we can’t “fix” the planet with simplistic technological patches.
Gaia does have the ability to heal, but it often requires us to step back in radical ways, from stopping the use of fossil fuels to changing the way we feed ourselves to reducing our population worldwide over the next generation or two.
I have always thought that there are rational thinkers and irrational thinkers. Irrational thinkers or people with little virtue cannot teach their children to be rational thinkers or have a lot of virtue.
Rational thinkers plan ahead and care about whether they are right or wrong, morale or immoral godly or satanic negative or positive... In order to be intelligent one must be right so one has to care whether one is right or wrong. In my discoveries only having a healthy conscience can determine the intelligence of a human. The irrational thinkers have less of a conscience if any at all and I consider them to think like animals. So we have human thinking and animal thinking in my opinion. The only way we can raise all the children to be conscientious is to make sure all their needs are met with no stress or anxiety in neutral tribal growing centers. Only then can we end religious hatred, racism, child abuse, drug babies, criminals, obesity, stupidity. Nobody can teach what they don't know, that is why and how the family unit has stopped the evolution of the human race along with phony religions. Only the truth that can be proven is worthy of being a religion. To believe anything as the absolute tuth that cannot be proven is just morally wrong. Religious faith is evil in my opinion. Most atheist I've met have been raised in religious families and they have just rebelled, but they still have faith that there is no God.
For the first time in 21 years I need to disagree with Thom. We must “...leave large parts of Nature alone,” Thom says, “trusting that she knows best how to appropriately regenerate.”
That, it seems to me, is a restatement of another misplaced cultural certainty, the “man/nature dichotomy.” It was powerfully introduced in 1865 by George Perkins Marsh in his epochal book, Man and Nature. “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,” Marsh wrote. “ Wherever he plants his foot the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.”
Professor Henry Vaux at Berkeley was a forest economist (attuned to man things). Professor Arnold Schultz was a forest ecologist (attuned to nature things). But both were classic scholars, attuned also to something larger: a quest for truth. So they sat down and talked about the apparent separation of man and nature and found it was false. The social system and the ecosystem are not separate and distinct; instead they are interactive, interadaptive, inseparable and INTERDEPENDENT, forming a single “biosocial” system. Vaux and Schultz made great sense to me in my career as a forestry prof.
The biosocial system, it turns out, is just a pedantic reformulation of Lovelock’s Gaia or indigenous cultures’ theme of Mother Earth. But all three reject Marsh’s splitting of man from nature.
So no, we don’t need to “...leave large parts of Nature alone.” We need to follow indigenous cultures’ treatment of Mother Earth: we need to use her to survive, but we must use her with respect, with gratitude, and with the wisdom to use her only for need, not greed.
All of which Thom also said, insisting we must recognize the fire in all of creation, and rearrange things to care for and nurture, not control and crush.
So Thom didn’t really err. He just slipped up. One offhand statement was inconsistent with everything else in his piece. And all that was just first rate, spot-on stuff. Pure Hartmann. (Ah, but he did split an infinitive.)
Thank you Thom, that explains a lot. Conservatives, in what ever manifestation, from moderate to QAnon, apparently come from very rigid, hierarchical families. mostly, but not necessarily, male led
Am I wrong in thinking conservatives find salvation in a father figure, whereas liberals find salvation in ideas and concepts.
If so the father figure is winning. While conservatives find the ultimate father figure in the form of their god. The liberal salvation is ethereal, The god of the conservatives is ethereal, but they have embodied "him" in their minds, and i stands an avatar, the ultimate authority, which is the same purpose that Constantine, Charlemagne and other despots had for god or Allah or Thor. An avatar which they then use as a ventriloquist dummy, to justify their rule and the submission of its subjects.
Even the Bolsheviks needed a god or a demigod, and thus they sacralized, a proto libertarian (Marx) as a demigod
The internet and now the cell phone has created an alternate society.one in which the collective conscious (in the form of up votes, likes and views) are the authority.
Conservatives will continue to rally around an avatar, a person who epitomizes their fears, needs, beliefs. Liberals have their won tool, the collective consciousness, should they take the time to stop planning marches, and gather together and think how to use. the tool.Instead of wasting time on Tik Tok challenges and posting narcissistic photos and rants about oneself, they have a a chance to use the new mass communication for social change.
is this not PROPHESY?!
also, scripture STATES
good deeds will not bring one
salvation.
This is the best piece of yours I've read yet, Thom, and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. This is really the big issue of our time. Reading the comments below, I saw that some people chose to argue the validity of Descartes as founder of the scientific method. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason was the human superpower by which the Mind of God could be fathomed, and the scientific method is the product of many of these people's efforts to become like God. Descartes's simple axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" can be seen as battle cry of rationalism itself, more than the foundation of the scientific method per se. It was certainly among the most revolutionary statements of history.
There is much I could say about what Thom says here. I will read his book that several of you mentioned: "The Prophet's Way." At the moment, I'm wondering if it's autobiographical, because he often speaks with the clarity and authority of a prophet.
Since others have opened the door to it, I'm going to use a Biblical reference to make a point. The Pharisees asked Jesus to give them a sign. He responded, "No sign will be given to this faithless generation except the sign of Jonah." Usually this is taken to refer to Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish as an allusion to Christ's three days in the tomb before resurrection.
However, there's more to the story. The reason Jonah was cast overboard from the ship during the storm and thus exposed to the creature in the first place was that God had commanded him to go and preach destruction and judgment to the Ninevens for their sins, but he refused. The fish was his punishment. When he repented and was spared after three days, he went on to carry out his mission, and gave the warning to the people of Nineveh. Then he went up on a hillside, built a tent, and waited to watch the destruction. Nothing happened. He cried out to God in protest, after having gone through so much to deliver the message. The Lord answers, "Why should I destroy a city with so many righteous people?" (Like other commenters, I'm paraphrasing from memory). You see, upon hearing the words of judgment, the Ninevens had repented in ashes and sack cloth in the streets of the city, crying out for forgiveness and mercy. This was a reversal of the destructive course they had been on, and so they were forgiven and spared.
In giving the Sign of Jonah, I believe Jesus was saying, "If you turn away from evil and stop obstructing me and live according to God's will, the annihilation that's about to befall you will be diverted, and you will be able to establish the Kingdom of Heaven that you've been praying and suffering for. However, because you don't know the time of your visitation, there will not be one stone left upon another within you." And indeed, within 70 years of his crucifixion, Jerusalem was sacked, and the Israelites were dispersed throughout the world to endure great persecution down into our times.
All of that is to say, the times are the same today, only much more intense. The warnings are being given, and they are not being spoken of among elite initiates behind closed doors in the inner sanctum of some temple, but every night, in front of everyone, in plain language, on the evening news. So where are our ashes and sack cloth? Where are the elders of the people leading us to repentance and to change our ways? Who is ever going to be able to plead ignorance?
In the lyrics Tim Rice wrote for "Jesus Christ, Superstar," Judas chides Jesus, saying, "... Why'd you pick such a backward time, in such a strange land? If you'd have come today, you could have moved the whole nation. Back in 4 BC they had no mass communication!" And today we do have global mass communication, and as such the need for individual prophets has greatly diminished. EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE is hearing the message 24 hours out of every day. No one with access to television, the internet, or even just a radio, can claim ignorance.
One perversion, especially among so-called "Christian Nationalists," is to limit God's Will to certain moral proscriptions in the Old Testament or pulled from the asses of medieval popes and councils. They scream that God will condemn us because we suffer gays and lesbians to live, or let women have autonomy over their bodies. We allow the mixing of the races and cultures, but we don't want to allow religious bigots (they consider themselves "the righteous") to dictate the lives of the rest of us.
Rigid "Christian" Nationalists actually defy one of the greatest principles of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition by stubbornly standing against repentance and contrition. When someone tries to recognize the atrocities that this nation committed against Native Americans and people kidnapped and dragged here in chains from Africa, instead of acknowledging the sins and seeking in grief and humility to make amends, the "Christians" of today become boastful, arrogant and self-righteous. They call those who cry out against social injustice and the destruction of our planet and ecosystem through corporate greed, communists and Marxists, or use their favorite catch-all phrase, "Woke." And of course, "Woke" means you support drinking babies' blood and call for naked, drunken orgies in "The hallowed halls of our great institutions."
But there are no ashes and sack cloth. You'd think that by now, in this capitalist nightmare we live in, at least one entrepreneur would have picked up on a trend and started trying to corner the ash-and-sackcloth market, or tried to copyright or patent it or something, but so far, it hasn't popped up in my Facebook ad feed.
I maintain that there are dimensions, what Jesus called "principalities and powers," that exist beyond this three-dimensional world of illusion and ceaseless impermanence, and there are already things in place in those realms that we can't perceive as yet where we are, here in this densest and most illusory realm of existence. And these things will be manifested.
So back to Jonah, and I'll finish. I have a sense that the only way this world can be set on a better track - salvation, if you will - is for the system we've built to collapse. That's what it has taken historically. The messages are given, but the people harden their hearts until there is no other recourse. We seem collectively incapable of hearing the voice of our own Higher Wisdom. That's what happened in the 1860s when our Union was being ripped apart. In 1929, we had a world-wide economic collapse, followed by the bloodiest war in history. In both cases, in the aftermath, we managed to cobble together a marginally better, more just world.
The earth and every single part of her infinitely complex being is alive and conscious, and in the same way the myriad systems in our bodies can work together to kick off disease, the thinking, aware and sentient Cosmos is fully capable of healing itself from the cancer that we have become. We are already undergoing increasingly severe purges or '"judgments" (to use the Biblical term), until we either find our ashes and sack cloth, or the Earth is cast back to pre-industrial levels and we are compelled to live in peace, respect and harmony with our Father/Mother God, with the forces of Nature in which we have our entire existence and on which we are completely dependent, and with the rest of life, with which we are equal (not above) and One..