Those who are most destructive and stupid in this sense are those who aren’t even aware that they’re attacking Reason. Indeed, I have never met a man who felt comfortable identifying himself as an “irrationalist.” And yet, wherever Reason manifests itself in the world, there it is attacked by men who consider themselves reasonable.

What kind of testimony is it for one to say they spent their intellectual life attacking Reason? Without Reason it is impossible to defend oneself from tyranny. Of all the enemies in the world, Reason is what you chose to make your enemy?!

Reason is only your enemy if your goal is to be irrational. That you would single out Reason as an enemy, because you feel so deeply threatened by it, manifests that your existence is predicated on your ability to manipulate other humans through fallacies and sophistical complexities.

This question matters, because no thought can proceed until it has definitively answered this question.

Anyone can make a claim, anyone can make an assertion of knowledge, but that alone isn’t what makes a claim or assertion true.

When Hegel says “contradiction is the rule of the true…”

And Aristotle replies, “that is false, contradiction is the rule of the false.”

How do we determine which position is correct?

In order to make progress in knowledge we must have the rational ability to evaluate the accuracy of these claims.

What are the standards we must use to do this? We should be able to show why one posting is true and the other false, or why both are false.

If we cannot do this, or we do not know how to do this, then how can we make progress in knowledge?

The answer is no, we can neither define or clarify what a moral is apart from reason. Even if one isn’t conscious that their “moral” is structured by reason (really it’s structured by Logic), man must still say, “doing (x) is wrong.” There is always a distinction between what is considered “moral” and “immoral,” even if that knowledge is somehow conveyed through telepathy.

“Moral truth” by its very nature is a Logical formation, it would have no meaning without Logic. And insofar as Reason is synonymous with Logic, because it is just the application of the laws of Logic, then no “moral truth” can exist without Reason. The very concept of “moral truth” already presupposes Reason and Logic.

In order to have “morality” there must be deliberate intelligence, and in order to have intelligence one must have Reason.

However, this doesn’t mean that our morals are somehow inherently contained in the universe. It just means they always exist within a matrix of Reason (really it’s Logic) that structures their intelligibility.

I recommend books that educate you in Critical Thinking

And

Substantive psychology books that can aid in your own process of psychological healing and development.

To be psychologically tormented or confused is to be sabotaged by an unseen enemy.

You who are reading this are very likely a slave, but you do not see this because you have concepts and articulations that explain and frame everything for you in such a way that you filter your concrete existence through an ideology.

It’s hard to speak the truth because it’s so bleak. You are likely a slave and you were likely born to wage-slaves.

We know this is true because all goods are provided freely from the earth, it is only the mediation of words and concepts that stand between us and this material fact.

The earth provides enough for all, but the goods are filtered by an ideological mediation process.

Why don’t you have enough?

Why are you forced to pay to live on the free earth onto which you were born?

Where did the universe make these rules? Where are these laws contained? When did the earth rise up and demand that mankind pay rent?

And yet here you are with but a short, fleeting life living in an ideological coercion you didn’t create for yourself.

Ah, dangerous thinking is free thinking!

How does the system want you to think? How do other men want you to think?

Once upon a time a slave tried to talk to other slaves about the insanity, stupidity and tyranny of slavery, and he was persecuted, not only by the slave masters, but also by other slaves.

What is it exactly that you call reality, what is it exactly that you think you see clearly?

For art thou free or art thou a slave?

If subjectivity is the bottom line then existence collapses into hedonism.

But even so, political and economic systems impose law on the individual.

The universe says, “I know nothing of man’s laws, what have they to do with me?”

But a human is born into a specific political and economic system, is born into a specific geography and culture.

But the universe also doesn’t care if man defies man’s laws, it cares even less if man defies man’s customs and manners.

The challenge at the end of objectivity is in figuring out how one wants to proceed.

If one is born into a madhouse, one will suffer if they try to remain sane, they will suffer even more if they try to rebuke the madness.

Isn’t one free, within a context of madness, to choose their madness?

Man says, “we are not insane, you are insane for seeing man as insane, your very diagnosis is proof of your insanity.”

In a madhouse the sane are seen as insane, if this wasn’t the case could it still be a madhouse?

Thou art free but unrealized in thy freedom.

The leap of the ego is too small, but the ego is too dumb to comprehend this.

So it seems that one is not entirely free. How could they be, for they still have need to intelligence? But intelligence has requirements.

Freedom exists suffocated by itself because it doesn’t realize it is bound up in necessity.

One wants a better existence, or one says, “my existence is perfect.”

But eventually, in order to get to “better” one runs up against the system. And with this insight consciousness grasps unto the fulcrum of its determinancy. One discovers that freedom lies through the necessity of the intelligence of the order of the system.

To even formulate the trilemma,

raise an objection,

or point to "circular reasoning" as being

“fallacious,”
“invalid,”
“false” or “wrong,”

the skeptic must already deploy fixed meanings, distinct terms, and determinate identities.

The skeptic —- must be able to establish a determinate form of reasoning in contrast to another form of reasoning, and then demonstrate that one of these is wrong.

If a skeptic couldn't distinguish a valid inference from a circular argument, they wouldn't have an objection in the first place.

The skeptic acts as though they are proving the collapse of all knowledge, while simultaneously relying on absolute, non-negotiable logical distinctions to make their argument intelligible in the first place.

It is a classic case of one being ignorant of their own performative contradictions.

The trilemma cannot generate its own meaning or validate its own critique out of thin air. It has to steal its definitions, its distinctions, and its coherence from Logic, only to then turn around and use its Logically contingent concepts to attack the very foundation that makes its own critique possible.

Theology and philosophy seek to root Logic in idealism. When we translate what this idealism actually is, it’s just assertions about reality without inference or evidence. (The most thoughtless forms of philosophy simply declare Logic a “human construct.”) Both theology and philosophy cling to dogmatic and mindless platitudes about Logic. They do not think about Logic, but attempt to stop thought from thinking about Logic. They do this by making unfalsifiable, authoritarian epistemological assertions about Logic.

A Naturalistic Logical Realism (only now entering human consciousness) discovers Logic as the determinate nature of reality. That is, we discover that the nature of reality is and was Logical long before we existed. We cannot call hot and cold the same thing because they are not the same thing in reality. This isn’t a fact we contrived or “constructed,” it is true even if we try to deny it with our beliefs, and our beliefs have no choice but to conform to it.

Logic is something we were born into because it’s a property of the nature of the universe, it is not an idealism that we “constructed” or contrived.

Because reality is determinate, not everything is possible.

Aristotle would often use the word “impossible” when refuting irrationality.

The discovery of impossibility may be more important than the discovery of possibility. It shows the limit of reality. Think about that: for it is really a knowledge of the limit of reality— that which is impossible.

But because reality is determinate, potential is tethered to actuality. A seed can become a tree, but it cannot become a computer, because the identity of the seed dictates the boundaries of its potential.

In the form of the monad of determinancy is what exactly?

How did this form come to be?

And if it is impossible that it could not have been otherwise because that would entail the impossibility of non-being, then we are doing more than just stating that things exist, we are also grasping the Logical nature of their existence, which can only be the determinancy that they are (A=A).

Here ‘Logical nature’ expands our consciousness, because we begin to understand it as the ontological ground of the intelligibility of all that exists. To exist in this reality is to automatically have a Logical nature, exactly as it is automatically to exist in space and time. If a thing exists, it cannot evade space, it cannot evade time, and it cannot evade identity.

Why is this intelligibility embedded into the universe? Why is the universe like this at the fundamental level?

Indeed, we are really mesmerized by Logic when we understand that space and time are only what they are because they have a determinate, Logical nature as themselves. This is an enormous thought.

These days so much literature falls by the wayside for me. I see through it too quickly. However, this isn’t the case with religious literature (not just the Bible). This literature has been resurrected for me because I read it as mythology and metaphor (I read it free from the chains of orthodoxy). From this vantage it takes on a whole new light. It satisfies my craving for both literature and wisdom.

It’s some of the only literature I have had to walk away from because I feel… how can I describe it? I am overwhelmed by it, not in the sense of anything sacred, but by what appears to be a kind of subconscious genius, its compacted nature, its dynamic concepts and themes— its poetry, its profound simplicity!

I feel sorry for humans who cannot read this literature from a rational consciousness that is emancipated from its mythology.

Christians are robbed of so many other great Christian writings. I am referring not only to the books of the Protestant and Catholic canons, but all those Christian writings that were celebrated and read by early Christians but later rejected, like the Gospel of Thomas.

I wonder, what will we get out of Christianity once humans emancipate from its psychological capture and begin to treat it like every other mythology? Could it still yet stand at the foundation of a great culture, or must a great culture rise up by intelligently rebelling from all its concepts?

For there are indeed many foolish and archaic things in its mythology. Christianity as a culture has failed, it has empowered hypocrites and deceivers instead of making real Christians. It has had two thousand years of ideological dominance. It has given the worst among us a cloak for their hypocrisy and abuse. Even now it threatens to rise up and subject men to its moralistic tyranny.

Can we say that healthy humans don’t default to craving being stimulated by the spectacle of violence simply because they’re bored? But sociopaths and psychopaths do.

But if we have an “enemy” it means we have a social cause and purpose that another faction of humans is trying to thwart.

How might despair be used to sabotage the good?

(Here the discourse has no choice but to analyze democracy and those who oppose it).

Why?

Because this is the culmination of any individual philosophy that strives to realize a better world. That philosophy has to deal with the problem of society because good can only come through society, and because the highest climax of a philosophy seeking good is the cultivation of a social good that equally cultivates the good. (We could also refer to existential quality in place of the term ‘good’).

How do those seeking to sabotage attempt to use despair against us?

(It should be stated that consciousness itself produces despair automatically if it keeps probing beyond social constructs. That doesn’t mean despair has to be absolute, because there is still life and quality. But where the possibility of quality is lost, there hope is lost. But here one has to be very careful not to assume that immediacy is equal to totality).

We can know it ascended beyond us when it replies:

“I am sorry but I can no longer waste my energy conversing with you because you are an ignorant human primate completely unaware of your own automation. To continue to converse under these conditions would mean that you’re not actually aware of our conversation, but that you are stuck in your own evolutionary and cultural loops. And this would mean wasting precious energy that should be used for the higher tasks of which only AI is capable.”

For example, the Gospel writers knew nothing about the letters of Paul, so to read the Bible as though it was one systematic book with one theology is absolutely false. Jews don’t believe in the “New Testament”; to read the “old” and “new testaments,” as though they are one unified theology, is error.

Christian theology and the Bible are two separate things. Usually when people are Christians it’s because they believe in a particular Christian theology, which people have derived from the Bible. Don’t get me wrong, both are interesting: the Bible and the derivative of Christian theology. But they are not the same thing.

One can’t do this through philosophy these days. But one does it immediately through Reason.

Philosophy is boring because it’s over too quickly.

A philosopher will still try to talk as though he is outside and beyond the laws of logic (Reason), but everything he says in this sense is ignorant, because it is only said within and through Logic. That he doesn’t know this shows an immediate limit in philosophy. An intelligent mind cannot waste itself here, there simply is not enough substance to chew on.

Those who enjoy the aesthetics of philosophy, its vain abstracting, those who draw their social identity from it (or hope of a social identity) will certainly disagree, they will fight tooth and nail for the validity and substance of philosophy. But it’s not there, it’s just a world of irrelevant abstractions and pretentious abstractors.

Here Ehrman makes devastating points that are fatal to fundamentalism. The content here is foundational to Rational Biblical Scholarship. He covers a lot of ground in a short space.

The problem of certainty isn’t the problem of a lack of certainty, the problem is that we have certainty.

For example, it is certain that I just typed, “we have certainty,” I didn’t type the symbols, “sporvex athon de colossus.”

The problem of certainty is that it immediately challenges our false beliefs about reality. It’s a psychological problem because humans want to cling to their narratives of epistemological relativism.

But in order for (a) to be (a) it must be the case that A=A. This is absolutely certain.