Belief in God is rational. Everything has a cause. So unless there is a first cause, then you would have an infinite regress. And then nothing could exist. Therefore there must be a first cause. Therefore God, the first cause, exists. QED.
26.3.22
As you can see I am not coming up with a lot of new ideas. But I wanted to share one thought. That as you can see 20th century philosophy got into a whole bunch of messes. Half baked neurosis. Not just in pure philosophy but also in psychology and political thought.
So it is obvious why I elected not to go into any of it --being aware that I did not want to get brain washed.
But for some reason a whole bunch of brilliant philosophers has cropped up that see clearly the lunacy of 20th century philosophy, and show the way forwards. Kelley Ross, Robert Hanna, and Michael Huemer ae just the best examples but there are many more. Eg Michael Sugrue .
It is hard to know what to make out of this. It is as if philosophy has risen out of some sort of Dark Ages.
Myself I have no great ideas but I do see some sort of vertical thread that binds lower areas of value to higher levels. That is you have horizontal levels of value.[This is from Dr Kelley Ross]. All form, no content. [Formal logic]. And then jump to the next step Mathematics which is very close but there is a quantum leap since we know by Gödel that math can not be reduced to logic. Then the higher levels have more content like Physics but less formal structure. Galaxies are Homology complexes with the black hole being the kernel. Then the other natural sciences. Then human affairs. More numinous content like Justice, Ten art Music, etc. Then up to God,- total numinous content, no form.
But there is a vertical thread that unites it all. [note 1] I see this in Homology with the internal CW complex as opposed to the boundaries. Form and Content. Exactly parallels to the above
The parallels on every level of value are astonishing. All the levels are connected as per Plotinus and Hegel. They all flow from the Logos. But in quantum leaps. From pure space- a line or surface you get automatically numbers since one line has two boundary points, and we know from the Nullstelensatz that Geometry and Algebra are connected
note 1.
my mother. It seems to me that this might have been on her honeymoon with my father on a ship towards Europe (after WWII)
In my reading of the New Testament, Jesus was just a regular Jewish Tzadik along the lines of Chanina ben Dosa. [Hanina ben Dosa was very similar, but R. Shimon ben Yochai also might be thought to be along the same lines.] The legal aspects I have gone into before. Jesus held from the statement in Hulin perek 8 מים ראשונים מצווה מים אמצעים רשות מים אחרונים חובה the first waters-washing before the meals is a mitzvah a good deed. the middle waters are allowed, the later waters waters are the meal are an obligation." Thus the washing before the meals is not an obligation according to this--only a good deed.
To worship God alone was the exact point of Jesus when the Satan tempted him. And this point comes up in Revelations. Jesus held one should worship God, not him.
This is in sharp contrast to the modern way of thought in which self worships the main obligation. This is really from Heidegger where instead of God we have "Being", a secular version of God. And the sole obligation is to be yourself, authenticity. That is another word for self worship.
So it is ironic for people that worship themselves to be accusing Jesus of their own faults.
Jesus claims to be a son of man and never refers to himself as son of God. and even if he would have said that he is a son of God, so what? בנים אתם להשם אלוהיכם ''you are the sons if the Lord your God, therefore do not put a bald spot on your flesh for a dead person'' Deuteronomy
25.3.22
24.3.22
You can see something incongruous about a stogy German professor Herbert Marcuse in Disney Land and seeing that as late Capitalism that would lead directly into Nazism. California is the land "that hung the jerk that invented work. I am a native Californian, and a lot of that tolerance and laid back attitude certainly affected me, but I have that sort of seriousness and urgency of the feeling of finding the TRUTH to have made me seek and search in the great NY Litvak yeshivot. I think in high school this must have been apparent to my friends, Roland Hutchinson, Wendy Wilson. Paula (Lea) Finn and others. That was even before I was walking around with books that indicated as much. [Though I am not dismissing the insights of the Frankfurt School either. My point is there is much to e learned from these later thinkers, but one thing is lacking-faith with reason.]
But I never really came to a place where I could made sense of it all--the big picture. The best I could come up with was a lesson I learned almost at my first few days in Shar Yashuv--the importance of the Rishonim/Mediaeval thinkers. And that includes their synthesis of Faith with Reason.
So while I have great appreciation for later thinkers, I do not think they get anywhere near the depth of the Rishonim.
If this is any indication of the issue let me say as an example that even in Shar Yashuv I would spend most of my in depth learning time with achronim/ later thinkers --because they are the key to unlocking the Rishonim.
Thus in Philosophy also, while the later people, Kant, Hegel, Leonard Nelson certainly are important, still there is something that we need to dig out of the Middle Ages.
[Just as an example--Did Limited Constitutional Government, Parliament came from later people? Not at all. These all came from the English Middle Ages, Henry II, the English lords against King John, Edward I etc.
In the modern period it is the European philosophers tat get entangled with the internal world. Te Anglo American ones get the outer world, but lose the inner. The synthesis seems to be the Kant Friesian approach of Leonard Nelson that realizes there is a source of knowledge that is not reason nor sense perception. [Non intuitive immediate.]
n12 music file [midi format] from 2014. I just found this in old files. I can not tell if it needs editing or not. It might but I am not sure.
