A blessed St. John's Day!

Quite like David Knight, I've recently been overwhelmed by the sheer madness of the self declared Christian right in America, but instead of saying anything, I resorted to speaking through pictures. Today, I'll respond to some of these mad propositions, but I'll do it in a light hearted way and not an infuriated one.

It appears that the religious thought of the American right is increasingly dominated by the idea that God haunts His enemies by daemons and that this presents an opening for moral rectification.

To wit, I'll keep it light hearted and not build a case, I'll stop the logical argument right here and start talking.

Joe Rogan said that some people don't have a moral compass and that only Jesus could save them, Julie Green said that God will fill His enemies with fear when we ask Him to, Alex Jones said that God and the devil are archetypes, but that they would have to come from somewhere. I suppose some people succumb to the lure of the devil, but others won't stand the company of daemons and run to Christ. But what are we talking about?

Julie Green talks about district attorneys and school boards. If you have a problem with those, kick them out, don't ask the Lord to make them run away. I don't exactly know whom Joe Rogan and Alex Jones are talking about.

In any case, the Old Testament describes specific situations in such a way that their essential aspects are relayed to help future generations deal with them. It is foolish to try to infer causality from an incomplete record like this. So a mother boiled her son and ate him. This is mentioned, because that is part of the challenge that a siege poses. Are we to infer that God transferred the boy's horror into the dreams of the Hittites, which made them abandon the siege? Should we boil our children, so that district attorneys and school board members have nightmares?

Exegesis isn't safer than following your own moral compass. So, let us talk about the more general question of the roots of human behaviour.

I say we are directed (Ger. gehießen) to follow our preference, the things that come natural to us, our (subjective) belief, the things that we know in our heart of hearts to be true, and our conscience, that is to provide the things we take for granted. Some are more extensively directed than others, but all are directed to some extend.

Secondly, we experiment with our behaviour by assuming arbitrary techniques and subsequently observe whither that gets us. Such techniques may be individual inventions or they may be following a school of thought or they may be certain inborn elementary stratagems.

A close analysis of ancient Greek literature reveals that they used the word δαίμων (daemon) to signify any internal, but superindividual source of specific human behaviour, whereas χαρακτήρ (character) signified the internal superindividual source of general human behaviour, i.e. tendencies.

Thus they called both the source of our directedness and the inborn elementary stratagems daemons and examples for both of this can be found in Plato's The Laws, whereas I, for entirely technical reasons, that is the want for a technical term, use daimon exclusively for the latter, but Socrates' daemon, for instance, is his directedness.

In any case, arbitrarily assumed behaviour may conflict with our directedness and it is our directedness that will cause us emotional turmoil of the horrific kind when our arbitrariness runs afoul of it.

Nota bene: Our moral compass is responsible for our anguish.

Corollary: People without a moral compass would feel no spiritual anguish.

So, Christ is only the rescue of people who already had a well developed moral compass, or maybe an average one, if fate pushed them into some dire decisions.

Most of the inborn stratagems are rather practical, by the way, but some are merely of a comforting nature and in particular those whom we'd consider as purely evil, such as torturing the defenceless for self-aggrandising.

But maybe Joe Rogan didn't mean it like that, maybe he was just expressing that Americans should cut back on their arbitrariness. The problem with that though is that it's a voluntary decision and can't be ordained. You could intentionally seduce people, lead them astray, until their moral compass revolts, but traditionally that is seen as the work of the devil, and really, what good comes from inflicting a wound merely to cause the body to mend it?

Well, under specific circumstances there may be benefits, but this is hardly the straight path to take.

Now, as to God, Anselm of Canterbury said, even the fool would recognise God, and Descartes said, even the fool would recognise a unicorn. Well, a unicorn is a horse with the tooth of the narwhal on its forehead and the imagination of the fool suffices to recreate the image from its parts. Out of which parts is God then constructed? Or could the fool imagine a unicorn, if there were no horses on earth and the next best thing would be a rhinoceros?

I think that Anselm of Canterbury is right in that the fool has an understanding of what is meant by God and since this translates into traits of people, in such a way that these

and these

document the awareness of God's presence just as much as these document the sly stratagems of a chameleon

- and even the fool agrees - then how could such distinctions be made, which eyes are soulful and which aren't, for instance, although that alone is insufficient, if there was no reality behind them to inform them? Well, I gave an answer to this question in the upper part of this post already, that what is behind them is a well developed directedness, but then... a directedness by what? I maintain that if you look at the upper two pictures, not only do you recognise directedness, but the understanding of the nature of the director as well.

Of course, there are more direct ways to become convinced of God's presence, but Anselm of Canterbury's argument is fine.

Well, one more thing, if you want to live in a society that develops, it is best to motivate the people to develop things themselves, better than to restrict research to the upper class as England did in the 19th century and hence lost ground on France and Germany, and in order to do so, you must make the people believe that they are making progress to ever higher heights, but if you tell the people that there are already secret technologies that they can't even imagine, all they want to do is to get those technologies handed to them and no help with developing new technologies they will be. So, this tale of ancient knowledge, back in Plato's day when he exhorted Egypt's ways, saying that they have been singing the same songs and dancing the same dances for 10000 years, and today is a recipe for stagnation and more immediately obedience and confiscation.

I could of course be this loquacious all of the time, but I'll treat it as a Sunday's break from my worries.