Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, a book by British philosopher Owen Barfield, is concerned with physics, the evolution of consciousness, pre-history, ancient Greece, ancient Israel, the medieval period, the scientific revolution, Christianity, Romanticism, and much else.
Barfield argues that if, as physics suggests, ordinary appearances—including for example colors, sounds, and smells—are a kind of subjective response of the human organism to an unknown underlying base of reality, and if what underlies our phenomena and is real independently of us is only what is suggested by science's experimental hypotheses of a subatomic world; if, that is, we must conclude that there is no such thing as unseen color, unheard sound, or unfelt solidity, because physics tells us the only thing existing independently of us is a subsensible or supersensible base symbolized in some detail by particle theory—then in that case other sciences besides physics, in particular those sciences that deal with the pre-human past, must be profoundly reconceived.
For example, the evolutionary biologist and the archaeologist talk about the pre-human, and even pre-life distant past as if color, sound, solidity, and a phenomenal world rather like that of modern Western humanity were all present even before the advent of life and consciousness, though physics tells us that all that is present in the absence of human beings or life is what can be described quantitatively by the particle theories of physics. Barfield emphasizes that contradiction between physics on the one hand, and on the other, sciences that offer an account of the earth before life and consciousness evolved. Barfield draws out the implications and argues we must learn to conceive of an evolution of phenomena that first begins at the point where life and consciousness manifest. The evolution of phenomena is correlative to the evolution of consciousness. Prior to the point where consciousness, and in particular human consciousness, comes into existence, we should not naively speak as if phenomena similar to our own existed.
Pause here then with me on Christmas Eve.
Walking down Balmy alley we find an open garage and take a side step in. As if in a small chapel let imagination fill the space and grasp then the importance once to a small community of people, human born of human, celebrating the birth of Jesus as true myth. In the days of Dickens this original light of faith flickered fitfully among the faithful as technic’s steel rail road driving through all heads was like unto a Roman road conquering the land for Caesar. This steel driving through the heart as well. The mighty railroad to the Solar System is built on steel and blood of billions. The steel is not just manufacturing a synthetic nano world of life forms. Our Stalinism is the outcome of the collapse of living Christianity among the nations.
So we have the spectacle of the collapsed Christian creating the Transhuman future. A bizzare human and machine Brave New Cambrian explosion. 538.8 million years ago in the Cambrian Period of early Paleozoic there was a sudden radiation of complex life and well, you know, WEF BUILDS BETTER WITH TECHNICAL FAITH. The basic blue print after the Covid murders with due regard to elite interests is depopulation, deprivation, and destruction. The voice of Colossus. World control.
Berdyaev sees the Person as co-creators with God; we in our microcosm and He in his macrocosm. Creativity requires freedom; as does love, friendship and goodness. The word “ideology” should be reserved for any doctrine that demotes the Person and God to secondary importance. Thus, Christianity and Judaism, properly understood, are not ideologies. Buddhism, however, has no great truck with either concept – God or Person – and the fact that “Islam” means “submission” is worryingly suggestive of coercion rather than freedom. It is God’s will that we live in complete freedom and thus moral responsibility. It seems rather tortured to say that we “submit” to God’s will when God’s will is that we be not slaves. “Submitting” to non-slavery is a strange locution – though it is true that many people would like to throw off their freedom for the joys of an apparently clear conscience of the “I was only following orders” variety.If, perchance, the ideology recognizes the Person as a good, the Person is not of the greatest importance to its adherents and the Person will always be sacrificed for the higher ideal. Thus, all ideology is sacrificial.
In Godmanhood vs Mangodhood: An Eastern Orthodox Response to Transhumanism, Dr Brandon Gallaher, University of Exeter states bluntly: “Transhumanism is Satanic. When I write this I am not being provocative, let alone vaguely metaphorical. It is meant literally and with the strongest realism. Transhumanism, according to Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), is defined as (1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. (2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. This ideology, alternatively, new ‘religion’ or ‘religious philosophy’, of transhumanism, from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, is a systematic elaboration of what various Russian religious thinkers following Dostoevsky (drawing on Feuerbach) called the Luciferan ‘religion’ of ‘Mangodhood’ (chelovekobozhestvo and chelovekobozhie) which is characterized by self-worship or the self-deification of humanity. 3Mangodhood, it was held, with the man-god or superman as its climax, was Satanic in structure and inspiration. It is the mirror inverse of salvation, which is called in Patristic teaching theosis or theopoiesis (divinization/deification) made possible through the Godman, Jesus Christ, that is, in the famous term of Vladimir Solov’ev, ‘Godmanhood’ (Bogochelovechestvo). Nikolai Berdyaev weaves together this dialectic in a characteristic fashion: ‘Into the religion of God-manhood enters all the plenitude of humanness […] In man-godhood perishes not only God, but also man […] The problem of man, the problem of religious anthropology is transformed in the Russian consciousness into the problem about the God-man and the man-god, about Christ and the Anti-Christ.’ 6 In the Russian Silver Age, theosis as ‘Godmanhood’ was understood as the accomplishment by God of the mystery of His embodiment, perfectly realized in Christ, always and in all things.
Then in March 2023 -https://www.scribd.com/document/631746934/Achbishop-Vigano-MESSAGE-to-Russophiles-14-March-2023
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Both Christian-ism and Juda-ism are ideological power-and-control religions all-the-way-down, as is Islam-ism. Furthermore each of these three "great" world religions are essentially political/business corporations competing for market share in the now common whats-in-it-for-me market place of consumerist religiosity - no real discriminative intelligence is required.
They are now also competing on the world stage to establish their self-appointed "rulership" over all human beings.
This is especially the case with the "catholic" church which (unfortunately) is granted the status of an independent state with all the privileges that that entails, and the behind the scenes "authority" etc to interfere with and manipulate the religious and cultural aspirations of ALL human beings - pretending that it has a "great commission" so to do.
It, the "catholic" church even has various Concordats which is uses to trump the religious, cultural and political aspirations of the citizens of the states which (unfortunately) have signed up with these Concordats - CO as in con-man being a very appropriate word check out a truth-telling website titled Concordat Watch.
With very rare exceptions the entire edifice of Christian-ism was fabricated by mere human beings, none of whom ever met Jesus up close and personal in a living-breathing-feeling human form thereby participating in Jesus's teaching demonstration thus receiving his personal instructions and guidance as to how to live the universal non-christian, non-sectarian Spiritual Way that he (Jesus) taught and demonstrated.
How many Illuminated Christian Saints have appeared in the West for the last 500 years or so!
When I collect and use plants, that is my religion. Never could trust my Catholic upbringing, disgruntled nuns and power seeking priests. Funny, it was called St. Athanasius. Kind of like a cross between Anesthetic and Euthanasia? Happy Winter times....