####Please see this thread for the context of quoted segments: https://poal.co/s/Jokes/236116/6a78d0e4-14cc-4399-a380-0779d9ca2e14#cmnts ####The text below can also be found in the linked thread, but I felt the need to say these things to more people. ___ > So here I have just provided a sort of... atheistic account of miraculous prayer. I don't see that you have. You've offered an analogy between an Alexa with a skill downloaded called 'The Good', and whatever *actual ways* The Good could exist in the universe that would allow us to interact meaningfully with it. The Alexa is a machine that transmits your language to Amazon's headquarters where their language processing software can make sense of what you've said, and indicate to Alexa what the appropriate thing is to say in return. There may be analogies to perception involved in this process (on the part of Alexa), but there are no analogies to knowing or understanding. Alexa is a machine that is involved in a performance and a flourish that *mimics* understanding and human language. Either the Form of the Good (FoG) is a machine or it is not. Either it is capable of communicating with mankind or it isn't. (a) If FoG is a machine that can communicate with mankind, something built it, indicating it cannot be the highest Good. (b) If FoG is a machine that cannot communicate with mankind, there is a machine which *could*, therefore this one is not the highest Good. (c) If FoG is not a machine and can communicate with mankind, it will be a person. (d) If FoG is not a machine and cannot communicate with mankind, there will be a higher Good, because being capable of communicating with mankind is a Good. In other words, if communicating with mankind is a Good, we have only (a) and (c). If every machine has a builder, then in the case of (a), the builder would represent a higher Good because said builder would have transmitted the good quality to the machine. This leaves only (c), that the highest Good must be a person, and moreover by way of other arguments, a non-contingent person. This necessarily equates the highest Good to God itself, for the highest Good must also be non-contingent, indicating that it issues from the same non-partitive source. >How could I possibly know? The problem that you're having with the notion that knowledge could be coupled to your salvation has to do with your epistemology. Peace has been talking about gnosis for many weeks now, and I'm finally beginning to grasp what is meant by it. Try to contrast the Cartesian epistemology with the spiritual, internal Gnostic epistemology - both are the result of very different ontologies. The former says that you are a thinking thing which is fundamentally disconnected from the rest of the universe, except insofar as your senses connect you. Still, the products of these perceptual faculties never 'touch' the existing universe. They are represented in the *res cogitans* (or, Cartesian theater), leaving a chasm between ourselves and the *res extensa*. By the time we arrive at Kant, the gap remains, and is held open: Kant gives us the 'third thing' that is necessary for knowledge - the *noumena*. All they'd like, the physicalists can deny the Cartesian theater in the terms of res extensa (Dennett does this), but it's a fact that **the sciences rely on it**, as a point of fact. Even if you accept Dennett's rejection of the Cartesian theater, you can't possibly act as if you do, nor can he. There is either separation, or there is identification - either representation or direct accessbility. The Gnostic (in fairness: early Christians) ascribe to a different epistemology. Knowledge is not a set of facts that stand separately from subject and object. Knowledge *is the world itself*. What you know *is* the world you experience, which is delimited in its boundaries by the necessarily unknown, which in contradistinction to the known, bounds the world. This is phenomenological. There is not a world that presents itself to you for physical processes to capture and represent in the brain; rather, your perception is direct, and knowledge makes you one with something along a scale of degree, the perfection of which is *identity*. Perfect knowledge of something would just equate to an identity. Additionally, the 'thing which knows' is concealed within the world - the faculties, by and through which we know, cannot themselves exist within the system of apparent features of the world, it must transcend them - a knower cannot exist within what is known (herein lies the grand mistake of modern views of consciousness as self-awareness or self-knowledge...hardly, we are the extension of the knower into the system of what is being known). Videogames can help us make a clearer analogy. ARM, to 'know' a videogame requires that you exist separately from it. The very way that you know it is because you experience it, in one sense from *within* the game (with the aid of visual information and sound, you imaginatively *project* your mind into the game), but in one sense from *without*: it requires the mind-beyond-the-game which is capable of experience and understanding in order to know the game. You cannot be both player and game, or there is no game which plays itself - at least in no way that it can report the experience of, or in which it can *care* about the fate of the characters it is rendering with its code. I want to avoid the quality surrounding the term 'game' or 'videogame' that would suggest frivolousness. We understand games as being things we can take or leave, shut off, reset, begin again. To be sure, we can imagine God might have those contingencies available, but it isn't obvious that our universe is quite as simple as mere entertainment (although it cannot be ruled out by anything I've pointed to here). To make my point clearer, ARM, you are positing a trinitarian relationship. On this agnostic example you've given, you'd say that there was God, me, and some necessary information, X. Knowing is a matter of having the true representation of the facts about X in one's mind, and that is the way to salvation. Instead, try to see knowledge as a path toward identifying with something. Your knowledge of the world is necessarily imperfect: if you could know all facts that are possible to know, your world would disappear (perfect knowledge of a world is *no world*). Whereas you cannot become one in knowledge with the universe, it is possible, by grades to gain a knowledge of the source. Salvation, then, cannot rely on any partitive knowledge of the world, but on a final unifying knowledge, where what it is that must be known is the essence of God itself, which fundamentally dissolves difference and burns away all of the dualistic separation between the knower and the source. It is that very difference which the knower experiences as *the world*, ala Deleuze - this moment of identification is synonymous with the end of the world, or the Eschaton. In the same way that perfect knowledge of a world means *no world*, perfect knowledge of the source is, then, equivalent also to *no world*, i.e. death. What's important here is that these are knowledge of *different kinds*. Perfect knowledge of either world, or source, both terminate the world, but just one equates to salvation. I have before this made an analogy between God and an author, but I truly think the videogame analogy may be more apt. We must understand Christ within this videogame analogy. We've said that nothing *within* the system can either (a) completely know the system or (b) know the Mind which is 'the spirit' animating that system, bringing to it a necessary activity and life, without which all of the details of the game *would exist in potential*. We don't think an un-played videogame is nothing, but neither do we think that its world is *actual* without our, in fact, playing it. The game doesn't go on living, like a world to which we can come and go, while we are not playing it. (Of course, we must ignore the existence of MMOs at this point, because that would turn this into a substantially longer post.) Key to understanding this analogy is to admit that we love a character (or characters) within the game. We identify with them, and yet, they are simultaneously both *us* and *not-us*. Everything which animates and gives life to a character is us, without which the character is nothing but a bit of program and motion graphics. If we're honest, we give a life to these characters which we care a great deal about. Whether it be videogames or fiction books or even television series, there is an extent to which we care about so-called fictional beings to such a high degree that we often think it silly. Most of us never express to people in the 'real world' the extent to which we care about 'non-real' characters. Many times, we care about them and love them more than we love ourselves, and their mental life (sustained by us) contributes to the very way we interpret our own lives. We never quite tell anyone else, nor could we, just the extent to how real these things are inside of us - in fact, our only option for doing this is to **create more fictional worlds with them inside** (don't get me started on what *art* is), to write more stories, or games, permitting our loved personas to gain a new life in the minds of people with whom we'd like to share this immeasurable value of creating things we love. Now, in the case of God, this total set of characters *just are what is* - they *are Creation*. There is nothing beside God and pseudo-not-God, making God's love for these characters all that there is. In your case, we must also remember that the characters *are you*. The degree to which they pull you 'out of yourself and into them' is what we think of as the immersive quality of the story or the richness of the character. The extent to which we can do this with a character, that is, the extent to which we can achieve this identity-loss and projection is the same as the extent to which we love them. Returning to the videogame, we find ourselves in a predicament. For a moment, imagine that when you are playing the game, you are God. There is no real-world, which as the player you return to when the game shuts off. Properly, the game *is* the created world. You love a character to such a degree that you'd like for him/her to live forever, long after the game has turned off. In keeping with the analogy, Christ would be something like an additional block of code that you could insert into the game that would cause the characters to (a) become aware of you, and (b) act as a conduit through which a degree of knowledge is possible that would at its zenith cause pure identification, i.e. when the world of the game is ended, the character can realize that it is, in fact, you. It can exercise itself eternally in your mind, liberated from the game. At this point, you can appreciate that this just is what humans always do, for all characters that we love. It is the character of consciousness itself to do this. Your exposure to a character that you love, after playing a game just once, causes it to have a life within your mind (as both you, and not-you) which is equal in duration to your very life. But, not all characters share equally in their moral quality. The Good and the Bad are necessary, but not all shall be 'saved' in your mind. Ask yourself what causes your favorite character to gain a 'lasting heaven' in your mind, long after you've put the book down...that's what Christ *is*. Christ is the final possibility to achieve a knowing that is equivalent to identification with the source. In our analogy, the difference between the videogame player and God is that the human person must live with that which they both love and hate (with what attracts them, and what scares them). On the contrary, God can destroy absolutely. Christ is both what and how you might live, as both a conscious state and an actor within the world, which will facilitate your existence beyond the regular extermination of death. This is precisely why the gospel tells us that the gate leading to heaven is narrow - it is for the few. To complete this analogy, imagine playing a game. You love a character. That character can have an eternal life in your mind (at least this possibility exists in potential). How might you communicate with that character so as to cause a change within him/her which would permit this? You could program a videogame Bible (VGB), on account of the fact that you know this character must achieve some minimum level of gnosis about its source - reflected in the *behaviors and qualities* which will permit it to live in your (the player's) mind forever. When the character reads the VGB, the character changes, gaining access to the code by which it begins self-structuring its internal and external situation to live forever when the game is turned off. Of course, to see that this is necessary would breakdown the videogame analogy, because you'd have to envision a game in which the character itself had free will. I would very much like for people to use this analogy to help them understand the nature of God's love, because I often think we confuse it with notions of romance, or even of familial kinds of love. I'd rather people think of God's love in the same way that they experience their PRIVATE care about a cherished fictional character. Again, we almost never tell people close to us (family and friends) just how much we think about these characters, or how much a lyric in a song actually *impacted us* and continues to, that this lyric leveled us inside and we cannot reveal that, or just how much we mobilize things in our minds to keep the lives of our favorite characters going inside of us. Why? Because it seems *SILLY*! It isn't the real-world! We're mature adults, God dammit! Only children have the blessed closeness to *sense* that their imaginary friends are something far realer than the jaded adult can credit them. The way that you cannot allow your mental characters to die, that you care about what happens to them, that they are truly YOU interacting with YOURSELF as not-you...this is the mirror of both God's love of man and also - by extension - God's self-love and constant self-reference: because if you were to admit to yourself just what it is you're doing when you explore these fictional worlds, and keeping alive fictional characters in your mind, it IS a forgetful self-reference, and yet, having all of the power to keep entire universes in existence...a fountainhead of power so simple, and yet so universal, that you're not even aware of it while you're using it. At no point does it cease to just be YOU, but at any instant it can be an infinitude of newness which surprises you, as though it were not what it is. This peculiar relationship you have to characters, or songs, or stories in your mind (whether they be from a book, an anime, a film, etc.) is ineffable. This power and life these things have in your inner world, which you're often ashamed to reveal, is also, in principle, impossible to reveal to people around you. We try all of the time. We get together to watch films, for example. And yet, when we walk away from these things, that power is supposed to stop. Those characters are supposed to go back to being nothing, merely escapes from reality. And our secret is that they so often do not. But the only thing we can do, in principle, to express this love the most fully that we can is to....create. Create more worlds with the things we love in them....'in the Beginning there was the Word'. (John 1:1) The only outcome of this inward we experience which can possibly come close to satisfying our urge to get it out is further creation.